To be read out at all Masses for
Day for Life
Sunday 6 July 2003
My dear brothers and sisters in the diocese,
About ten years ago an aunt of mine was very ill, so ill in fact that one day she thought she was dying. So that night before she went to bed she set her alarm clock for 4.00 in the morning. When we asked her why she did that, she said that she wanted to wake up early to find out if she was still alive. I've spent ten years wondering whether I understand that or not. By the way, she is still alive and proudly tells people that she's in her eighty ninth year.
Knowing that you're alive is actually the first thing you know. I don't mean it's the first thing you learn, because it takes some time for a child to become that aware of its own existence. But certainly when we wake in the morning, the first thing we are aware of is that we are alive. And the whole process of reacting with our surroundings is a process also of affirming our life and existence. That's what Descartes meant when he said, "I think, therefore I am".
This self-awareness is only given to human beings. It's an aspect of our intelligence, that part of us that reflects the life of God within us, that part of us that is able to make choices and allow us to interact with one another and with the world around us.
Awareness of my own life brings with a special awareness of the gift of life itself. It is something which we hang on to with some of our strongest instincts. As Bill Bryson says at the end of chapter 22 of his new book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, "Life wants to be." Then he adds another important observation: "Life doesn't always want to be much."
His conclusion that "Life wants to be" is based on observation of lichen in Antarctica. It is, he says, among the least ambitious of organisms, taking possible fifty years to grow to the size of a shirt button, but doing it just because it can. Life just wants to be, and it doesn't want to be much.
We can't really say the same of ourselves - that we don't want much from life. We are encouraged by the society we live in to get as much out of life as we can and so become "fulfilled". This is impossible without an appropriate "life style", and this is expensive. But what's the true cost?
By now you may have seen the publication, Stay True to Life, prepared by Archbishop Peter Smith on behalf of the Bishops' Conference for the Day for Life on Sunday 6 July. It is worth looking at, if not reading carefully. It points to a few major expenses in the search for a life-style that is acceptable today. The right to have children, not only when we want, but how we want and of a suitable quality, means that a high price is paid. Abortion gets rid of thousands of 'unsuitable' lives every year. "Designer babies" do the same as frozen embryos are farmed for someone effectively shopping for a child. Other ways to improve our life-styles mean experimentation carried out on human embryos. The cost of a better life is indeed high, especially when other lives are the currency.
One of the important point he makes is that 'Life' issues are not confined to the topics we might traditionally associate with the theme, i.e. abortion, euthanasia, embryo research and perhaps contraception. It is worth bearing in mind, for instance, that miscarriage and still-births may affect more women in the congregation than abortion might, and they are things that affect not just women but whole families.
Stay True to Life focuses on children and it would be natural enough for us to focus on our own children, their welfare, safety and health. We tend to think of child poverty, then, as something that affects children in other countries. But this country has the second highest rate of child poverty among industrialised nations, and the second highest growth rate in the last 20 years. Can you begin to think what effect real poverty will have on a child's self-esteem and health? Why does that child not have an opportunity for a decent future? How can we claim to be a wealthy and sophisticated society when we have under-nourished and poorly clothed children on our streets?
But what is it like for children in countries where there is no primary health care, and no access to clean water? These things are quite unimaginable on a day-to-day basis, and yet this is how many of the world's children live. And how has the AIDS pandemic in Africa affected a whole generation of children there. South Africa now has the largest number of people living with HIV/AIDS in the world. In one province, one women in three test positive for HIV. And many of the countries affected by AIDS have also been affected by war: children are among the highest casualties of modern warfare, but not always in the way we think. CAFOD's partners rescued more than 3.000 former child soldiers in Sierra Leone last year. These are children who are effectively used simply as weapons. Children are also used extensively, of course, as cheap labour, often to produce the clothes and shoes we may be wearing at this very moment.
We might feel just helpless in the face of such a mountain of suffering and injustice, but it does come close to home. EU agricultural policy gives subsidies of 11 billion each year to dairy farmers: that means about 1.40 per cow per day. This is more than the income of half the world's population. Cows in Europe are better off than most people in the rest of the world. That steak is more expensive than you think. And it's nice to have flowers on the table. The cut flowers in the supermarket may encourage us to think that agriculture in Kenya is flourishing. But not only will the grower spend 10% of his income in buying water, but that precious water could have gone onto subsistence crops to feed his family. And how much damage has been done to the local environment to provide fields for those flowers?
Life on earth is a single cloth woven of many threads, but it is a single cloth. It is all joined together. We may think that fighting against abortion is better than fighting for the environment, but it is the same reality of life that is being fought for. The future of a yet-unborn farmer in Kenya, fisherman in Indonesia or tin-mine worker in Bolivia is no less important than a child we want to be born into our own homes. Both of those issues are important: it is just that one seems closer to home.
There are many ways in which we are not helpless. We can examine our own life styles and reflect on how drinking one brand of coffee rather than another might affect some else's life-style. Looking for fairly traded goods in the supermarket is a small effort to make, but it may help to change global trading practices. Find out more from CAFOD's website on www.cafod.org.uk
Celebrate this day, because you have the first and greatest of God's gift, that of life itself - "I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full." But think about ways of giving other people cause to rejoice too.
With my prayers, especially for those hanging on to life.
Rt. Rev. Kieran Conry
Bishop of Arundel and Brighton
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