"We are travellers…not yet in our native land" – St. Augustine
What a remarkable illustration of self-inflicted poverty! It is possible to hold a treasure in your hand but be ignorant of it and go for the wrapping instead. This proximity to truth and distance from its worth is repeated innumerable times in our lives. In Chesterton’s words, we hold the dust and let the gold go free.
– Ravi Zacharias, Jesus among other Gods
Following on from yesterday’s post, recent discussions on Facebook have reminded me of how the abortion debate often turns around the question of language.
A few months ago I had posted an article about abortion and one of my friends wrote this response:
“You’re going to have a hard time convincing someone zygote development at 4 weeks is a fetus… When we talk in terms of a 6 week fetus it’s probably closer to bundles of cells than it is to a fetus…”
My friend’s response shows why it’s important to have a good grasp of biology when speaking about the unborn. What do we mean when we use words like “zygote”, “embryo” and “fetus”?
“Zygote”, “embryo” and “fetus” are all simply labels which describe the developmental stage of the human child, much like “infant”, “toddler” or “teenager”. A zygote is a diploid cell which is the result of fertilization of an egg by a sperm. After about twenty-four hours, cell division begins and we move from the zygote phase of development to the embryonic. After eight weeks, we move from the embryonic to the fetal.
Hopefully it’s now clear as to why I’d never try to convince someone that “zygote development at 4 weeks is a fetus”…because it’s not! It would be as nonsensical as talking about an eight-year-old toddler or a twenty-year-old teenager.
Developmental Cheat Sheet
Zygote: Human development within the first 24 hours
Embryo: After 24 hours of life, when cell division has begun. It remains in this stage for the first eight weeks.
Fetus: A development stage following eight weeks of life up until birth.
Infant: Up to twelve months after birth
Toddler: 1-3 years after birth
Adolescent: The time after birth when conversation is exchanged for incoherent grunts and parents are treated as a cross between an ATM and a taxi service.
Regardless of the name we use to describe someone’s age, all humans deserve to be protected.
Today’s song is “Good, good Father” by Housefires:
“Being human is a cultural event. No one is human by themselves and no one becomes human without the help of those around them… To learn to be a human is to live in a tradition… We must learn and be formed by the Tradition of the Spirit in the ethos of Christ’s self-sacrificing way of life.“ – Source
We are born into the family of humans inhabiting a great story of love and redemption. God himself came and lived amongst us and by uniting with our nature conquered death through his Holy Resurrection. The Christian life is one of transformation. When you were baptized and Chrismated, you were united to Christ and transformed into a new person. God is present to us in the Sacred Mysteries where we celebrate this new life with those past, present and future. It is a beautiful gift to live within a tradition as rich as the one we have all been blessed to receive. We will attempt to explore in some small ways how you too can better understand and live this tradition. Within it is a great storehouse of wisdom to draw upon so that we may live a rich life regardless of the assaults and challenges we face.
“Everything you do, all your work, can contribute towards your salvation. It depends on you, on the way you do it. History is replete with monks who became great saints while working in the kitchen or washing sheets. The way of salvation consists in working without passion, in prayer.” – Elder Sophrony of Essex
We desire perfect love, perfect truth, perfect justice, perfect unity, perfect beauty. Fr. Robert Spitzer, SJ created a system enumerating 4 levels of happiness to help guide us in discerning our actions and thoughts in light of these truths.
Level 1 – Happiness derived from material objects and the pleasures they can provide. This is the most basic level of happiness, and it can come from eating fine chocolate, driving a sports car, a cool swim on a hot day, or other forms of physical gratification. Level 1 happiness is good but limited. The pleasure it provides is immediate but short-lived and intermittent. It is also shallow; it requires no reflection, and it doesn’t extend beyond the self in any meaningful way.
Level 2 – Happiness derived from personal achievement and ego gratification. You feel Level 2 happiness when people praise you; when they acknowledge your popularity and authority; when you win in sports or advance in your career. Level 2 happiness is usually comparative because the ego measures success in terms of advantage over others. You’re happy when you’re seen as smarter, more attractive, or more important than others, and you’re unhappy when you lose the comparison game. Level 2 happiness is short-term and tenuous. You can be happy that you won today, and then anxious you might lose tomorrow. Level 2 is not inherently bad because we all need success, self-esteem, and respect to accomplish good things in life. But when Level 2 happiness – self-promotion – becomes your only goal, it leads to selfabsorption, jealousy, fear of failure, contempt, isolation, and cynicism.
Level 3 – Happiness derived from doing good for others and making the world a better place. Level 3 happiness is more enduring because it is directed toward the human desire for love, truth, goodness, beauty, and unity. It is capable of inspiring great achievements because it unites people in pursuit of the common good, whereas Level 2 happiness divides people. Level 3 is empathetic, not self-absorbed, and it looks for the good in others, not their flaws. It sees life as an opportunity and an adventure, not an endless series of problems to overcome. Because people have limits, Level 3 happiness also has its limits. None of us are perfect, so we can’t find perfect fulfillment in other people.
Level 4 – Ultimate, perfect happiness. When others fall short of our ideals, or we fall short ourselves, we’re disappointed. This disappointment points to a universal human longing for transcendence and perfection. We don’t merely desire love, truth, goodness, beauty, and unity; we want all of these things in their ultimate, perfect, never-ending form. All people have this desire for ultimacy, which psychologists call a desire for transcendence – a sense of connection to the larger universe. Some express this desire through spirituality and religious faith. Others express the same longing through philosophy, through art, or through scientific efforts to solve the mysteries of life and the universe.
What path will you choose? What can we know? What should we know? When challenged, how will you respond? Why do you believe? Why are you a Christian? What does Christ mean to you today? What should you know, think or believe? We will attempt to answer some of these in ways which are comprehensible and actionable.
In January there was the annual “March For Life” in Washington DC. Unfortunately, I couldn’t go this year, but thanks to Facebook, I got to defend life in a different way, through Facebook. Many of my pro-life friends posted about the March on Facebook, and these posts were not without their detractors…
As I browsed my newsfeed, one objection which was made repeatedly was some variation of the following:
“The fetus is a potential life”
Is this true? How might we respond to this statement?
Read more
I’m reading a few books at the moment, but the one I’d like to mention today is Orthodox Christianity, Marriage & Contraception by Anthony Stehlin. I’m only about a third of the way through it so far, but I really wanted to do a short post concerning something mentioned in the first chapter….
A few months ago I decided to join an Eastern Orthodox online forum to try and soak up some more eastern knowledge. I actually found the group incredibly hostile to Catholics (especially Eastern Catholics), but that’s a post for another time.
Members of the group stated again and again that teaching in Eastern Orthodoxy has never changed, something which they contrasted to the supposed deviations of Catholicism. In response to this, I asked the group about the Eastern Orthodox position concerning contraception…