I’m a little slow to respond on this one, I know. But sometimes I just need some time to grieve and process just everything that has happened. As many of you know the Supreme Court has taken away a woman’s right to choose by reversing Roe vs. Wade. In my attempt to respond to this ruling, I want you to know that I’m responding on a personal level. This is me talking, not the Bible, not God, not my denomination (if you want to know where the PNW United Methodist Church stands on Roe vs. Wade click here).
Just me, as a caring and loving friend, family member, and pastor.
So why am I so troubled? Maybe it’s because, even though I am not a woman, I am called to hold the people I serve in my heart. As a pastor, I’m called to walk beside folk when they have to make gut-wrenching and complex decisions about their health. I’m called to pick up the phone when someone calls in the middle of the night crying and in pain at being raped by someone who thought they had a right to another person’s sacred body without asking for permission. Unfortunately, most of these conversations have been years later when someone finally trusts me enough to share sincerely a story of deep pain and agony. I’m called to listen as they continually wrestle about a life-or-death decision concerning the most sacred part of who they are, their bodies and souls. Decisions that no one would ever want to make. But decisions they have had to have the guts to make.
Let me say this as strongly as I can. The people in my life that I have known who have had to make the decision to have an abortion did so in circumstances I can not even begin to comprehend, and it has been a holy privilege to hold their stories in my heart. In each of their stories are situations I never once felt I could place myself, as a male, and make the decision they had to make. And in every decision I made to stand with them in their anguish, never once did I think I was somehow doing more harm or harboring a criminal. In every story I have held concerning this issue, the sacred part of the story has always been that woman’s right to have autonomous choice over what is hers. The sacred right to own what God has given each of them.
And maybe that’s what I want to say the most clearly today. That this issue is not as much about abortion as it is about a woman’s right to have and to hold what God has given her as pure, unbounded gift: her body.
This weekend Cyndy and I went on a date night to the movie “Elvis.” What an incredible movie. I thought I kind of knew this story better than most, but, alas, I was wrong! I knew, for instance that Elvis spent some time in the military. I didn’t know, however, that the reason he spent time in the military was to escape going to jail! And do you know why they wanted to put him in jail? Well, get this: because he moved his hips too much when he sang. He danced “too black” for the white males who were in power. And so, they sent Elvis to war for expressing the song and dance of his God-given soul. I won’t tell you how this movie ends, but we already know how the life of this national treasure ends. And one cannot help but believe that these suppressive events and others like it contributed to his death.
The answer to abortion is not more rules and legislations poured on by the powerful. It is my belief that the process through this crisis is the longer process of working with all our hearts to create a society where people have autonomy not over their guns, but over what God has truly given them. When women are given the power to hold what is theirs. When we teach our children how to respect what is theirs and what is someone else’s. When keep becoming a society where equality between women and men, between white and black and brown, between straight and LGBTQ+, is held in holy and sacred respect. Then, it is my utter hope and belief, that less and less women will need to make that choice.
As for me, right now I just keep working for a world that gives and doesn’t take a way, for a world that liberates instead of subjugates, and as I do that, I just keep trying to hold on to those who are broken and angry in the process. If you’re one of them, I vow to walk with you.
Your friend and pastor, just trying to care, Brook