Sharing Life — Abortion, Stem Cells, Euthanasia, Intelligent Design, Reproduction Technology

What is a “high achieving” person? As a member of the legal profession for nearly 30 years, I have witnessed a dramatic shift in the opportunities of women to enter the profession. Perhaps 5 or 10% of law school classes were female in the mid-seventies when I attended. Now the ratio is 50:50. The numbers of judges, including the two occupying the Supreme Court, has increased as well. Women occupy 43% of the associate and senior positions in law firms, and 17% per of the partner positions. While a disparity suggesting gender discrimination exists, the numbers reflect real progress in the equality of opportunity.

During this same time, families have disintegrated, with divorce in CA exceeding 50% of all marriages, and abortions occurring in 1 of 4 pregnancies. The economy, and the drive to “have more” of the “American Dream”, have produced stressed out couples, both working to pay the bills, while children are shuttled to day care and act as “latch key” kids until exhausted parents get home.

Men are asked to be more nurturing and less providing and protective, in the interest of gender equality. Women are asked to work long, grueling hours while their infant children are cared for by nannies or low paid child care center employees. Guilt and separation anxiety become the order of the day.

An article on the Front Page of the New York Times this month states some research findings that anger “high achieving” women of the 70s who have paid the price for their status in the business world today. This article, entitled: “Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood” by Louise Story, collected the responses of young women at Ivy League colleges who stated they were unprepared to sacrifice motherhood and child nurturing in order to pursue high-pressure careers. They concluded that “having it all” was just not realistic or good for children and families.

A legal newspaper I read, the Los Angeles Daily Journal, covered the responses of “40 and 50 something” female attorneys to the N.Y. Times article by Story. These “women’s liberation” women did what they were driven to do, and did it at whatever cost it required: they were determined to be both “supermoms” and “super lawyers”. Now, a younger generation questions their sacrifice. They are naturally defensive. These women point out that large firms hiring top notch women lawyers have created liberal maternity leave policies and flexible hours, permitting the development of both a family and a career. These older women fear these new attitudes will undermine the hard won successes of women in the last decades.

So, who is correct? Is the issue as simplistic as the choice between the docile and demur mother & “little housewife” of the 40s and 50s or the supercharged executive “mom” of the 21st Century? I find it ironic that the persons most arguing for individual freedom of choice become most reactive when increasing numbers of very bright young women decide to exercise that choice differently than an earlier generation. These older women seem to be in denial of the social and relational carnage of the past 3 decades.

The politicians routinely resurrect their calls for “family values” each election cycle, yet where are the family friendly policies that are needed to support the family? Where are the funds and social programs that give mothers and fathers greater flexibility to adjust their hours for their children, and where are the corporate policies that provide “on site” day care so that parents may be in touch with their children throughout the day. Where are the liberal maternity and paternity leave policies that permit parents to be with their newborns during the critical first year of bonding and development? Where are the financial incentives and training needed to bring accessible, top quality child care to desperate parents? Where are the Churches that need to speak out for the protection and integrity of family relationships? Where is the “women’s movement” in seeking the right of mothers to stay with their newborn children during the time needed for mother-child bonding and nurturing?

Until a “high achieving” person is defined in our culture to include the quality of parenting and nurturing, we will not be the “high achieving” nation we are called to be. Until then, each couple will have to “travel to the beat of their own drummer’ to paraphrase Thoreau. A generation of young women appears to be defining differently and for themselves just what is “the good life”.

This weekend I will be attending a “mens’ retreat”. The idea of “retreat” is different in the Protestant tradition, I’ve discovered. When I was a practicing Catholic, a “retreat” usually meant a contemplative experience punctuated by a monologue of teaching by a Jesuit priest acting as Retreat Director. We spent 3 days in silence, once a year, in a remote location. Even meals were taken in silence.

My last 12 years have been spent at Protestant “men’s retreats”. These events by comparison have a rambunctious quality, a sort of feverish intensity to reach God by praise and song.

Both experiences have their merits, and each brings me a step closer to God in the journey of a lifetime. I still have a foot in the contemplative tradition, and I find God sometimes most readily in the small space of a silent attention. But the Holy Spirit can just as readily appear to the sound of drums and and a thousand male voices offering their hearts in song. It seems to me God is always ready to meet us by the mile if we will reach for Him by the inch. He will assume the trappings of whatever occasion we present Him, so great is His love. All He asks is a heart eager to embrace the truth of scripture, and to surrender to His authority and primacy in our lives.

Life has this quality of intensity and withdrawal about it too. We sometimes are insistent and aggressive in our search for God, and sometimes we are passive and receptive. The irony is that in all this searching and reaching, God finds us rather than we finding God. It is as T.S. Eliot wrote:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

ATTRIBUTION: T. S. ELIOT, “Little Gidding,” last stanza, Collected Poems, 1909–1962, p. 208 (1963).

The Christian life is adventuresome. One of the themes of Christianity at its roots is radical departure from the ways of the “world”. This word “world” is archaic and is used like a term of art by practicing Christians. The word simply means a way of living that is independent, even disdainful of God. The material world itself is good, and Christians enjoy it and even marvel at it like all other people.

What is this “radical departure”? One way to think of this idea is that this world is an airport. We have landed here, we enjoy the visit, and we are learning things here while we wait for the next flight out. We don’t act like persons who live at the airport, and because we are focused on the eventual departure taking us home, we are “radically” different than the culture of the airport.

Here is a way of thinking of the Christian adventure. Life is meant to be lived as an opportunity. We awaken each day with an awareness that awakening is itself a gift, and our foremost healthy attitude is to be simply grateful. We also are aware that having been blessed by life, we are to use life in some way. That is, the gift is so precious that we feel a sense of urgency to live wisely and well. Conversely, we avoid wasting our lives.

But here is the catch: We cannot enter into the opportunities of life without accepting the risks of life. The reasons that Christianity has not burned like a passionate fire in a cold and dark world is that the lure of opportunity without risk has made Christianity anemic and well, “worldly”.

This morning, as I reflected on how I would bring more “adventure” into my relationship with my girlfriend, Judy, I reflected on how often she stated she enjoyed the “adventure” of some activity or trip we shared. I realized, looking back on those times, that her feminine soul was desiring that I lead us in more “adventures”. I realized that she looked to me to be proactive and enthusiastic about planning those adventures with her.

As a result of those thoughts, I expanded my thinking to cover adventure generally, and the result of that thinking is this posting, and the following areas of life where I will seek more Godly adventure:

Service
Prayer
Intellect
Romance
Income
Travel

Each of these is an area of life in which a movement from the safe to the unknown and even dangerous is invited. Taking a chance on life is part of the Christian practice. Playing it “safe” means living as expected, without risk of criticism or standing apart from a commonly accepted practice based on principle.

For Christians, our model is Christ himself. He was filled with the S-P-I-R-I-T of adventure. He loved and lived passionately, with a sense of his ultimate mission, the nobility and purpose of his work, and a total commitment to Perfection. In this sense, He was a true Romantic. He took his message to all areas and cultures, all levels of status and education and work, around him. He traveled and mingled outside his comfort zone of little Nazereth. His ideas were startling to the authorities of the time, and his intellect sharp and penetrating in its challenge to the usual assumptions of his day. He lived life from a confident place of abundance, and his “income” was the kind and amount which was right for him, and the adventure he pursued. Perhaps the greatest aspect of Christ’s adventuresome S-P-I-R-I-T was his attitude and practice of service. He was the very Son of God, God Incarnate, yet he taught that he came into the world not to be served, but to serve. He explicitly taught that if he, the “Master” was acting as a “servant”, then those who were his disciples were to follow his example of service. What does this mean in practical terms? Find a new and creative way to serve your spouse, your children, you employer or employees, your friends, and even those who are strangers in need. All are to be served. In this service you show true leadership.

Life operates by principles we did not create and we do not control. Not only that, but we are part of a world with forces and conditions that determine us, rather than we determining them.

For the modern Western mind, this assertion is contrary to the philosophical notion of man as the deciding factor in all events. “Man at the Center” is the idea that we are the arbiters of truth, and the creators of our own destinies. This man-centered focus is prideful and false, but it is such an ingrained idea of modern culture that even Christians hold it thoughtlessly along side the idea of God as the source of all truth and life.

The world operates best according to God’s intended design. Human relations work best when ordered along God’s principles of right behavior. Sin is simply the idea that we can live in the world anyway we want because we can re-write the laws of life and nature. We delude ourselves into thinking we can suspend or ignore the laws of nature. It is as though we thought we could blindfold ourselves, and walk into a strange room, and not bump into other people and the furniture. We will always “run into” some reality we thought we could re-write by our prideful self-determination.

Chuck Colson has recently released a book: “The Good Life”. The book spends 2/3 of its volume addressing the use and limits of reason to understand the world. Yet, Colson, a very thorough and systematic thinker, takes logic and reason as far as it can go. A lawyer, he “makes the case” for the Christian world view as superior to every other. The case proceeds on the basis of logic, and an examination of the evidence for how the world really works. Yet, even the most penetrating logic takes us to a threshold requiring us to admit with humility that we cannot know many things, and that the full nature of God is incomprehensible to us. Living life fully requires faith. “The Good Life” is ultimately about both reason and faith, working together, not in conflict.

Originally, Christianity was referred to as “The Way”. I like this reference because it connotes that there is a “right path”, a manner or method of living that conforms to “the way” the world works. Jesus embodied the “Way” we are to live. He explicitly identified Himself as the Way, the Truth, and the Life. The Way is a path of light, of truth, and of faith. The Way is a direction leading to a destination we cannot yet perfectly see or understand, and for that reason, we walk the path of the “Way” in daily faith, seeing what is within our limited vision, and trusting that the Way will lead us to the eternal life and happiness promised by Jesus and the Scriptures.

A friend provided me with the following article, which I post because it evidences that the real battles of life are spiritual, and the enemy is conducting a frontal attack:

More churches confronting porn addiction

Christian leaders are increasingly acting to address this ‘elephant in the pews.’

By JANE LAMPMAN CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
On a blustery day early this year, 13,000 people showed up at Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Mich., for what became known as “Porn Sunday.” Two young California pastors with a Web site called XXXchurch.com – “the No. 1 Christian porn site” – were in town with a silence-breaking message.
Their frank talk about the struggles many Christians are having with pornography has drawn huge crowds in several churches across the country, and now the Revs. Craig Gross and Mike Foster are planning National Porn Sunday for Oct. 9.
“We were tired of hearing stories about people’s lives being wrecked, and feeling they had nowhere to go in the church to get help,” Gross says. He and Foster hope to engage 200 churches in talking openly about “America’s dirty little secret” and are offering resources to help them initiate healing programs for their congregations.
While some consider the pastors’ efforts controversial, many religious leaders recognize they need help on how to talk about this “elephant in the pews.” Surveys show that 40 million Americans regularly view Internet pornography.
For years, churches were in denial about the scope of the problem, but the toll on marriages, careers and faith communities has grown, Christian leaders say. And it involves not only congregants but pastors.
In a 2001 survey published in Leadership Journal, 37 percent of pastors said pornography was a struggle for them, and 51 percent admitted it was a temptation.
“For 25 years, I would have said that the pro-life issue is the most pressing threat to America morally, but pornography has overtaken it,” says the Rev. Richard Land, a leader in the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest U.S. Protestant denomination. “More people’s lives are being destroyed on a daily basis by addiction to pornography than through abortion.”
Douglas Weiss, a counselor with divinity and psychology degrees, speaks at churches of many denominations on sexuality issues. “Wherever I am … and no matter what the denomination, at least half of the men in the church admit to being sexually addicted,” he says. Based on his experience, “The clergy don’t differ that much from the general population – between a third to half.”
Many men have been trying on their own for years to get free, Weiss adds.
Some denominations encourage local congregations to educate members and to install filtering software in church and home computers. Evangelicals have responded most vigorously.
Focus on the Family, a Colorado-based Evangelical group, was alerted a few years ago when its toll-free clergycare line began lighting up with calls from ministers – and 25 percent were porn-related. “We’ve been working hard to alleviate the addiction, and are seeing some improvement,” says the Rev. H.B. London, vice president of ministry outreach.
Focus on the Family has quietly spent thousands of dollars sending pastors to treatment centers. It also offers churchgoers help through its “Pure Intimacy” program on the Internet, and has set up a global referral network of
Christian counselors.
Those most active on the issue include those who have found healing themselves and are helping others through seminars, support groups, and Web site communities.
Simon Sheh, a psychologist of evangelical faith in Edmonton, Alberta, offers a one-day seminar designed to equip men to safeguard themselves against pornography. Pastors bring church members, fathers bring teen sons. “It’s a family thing, to create a legacy of purity in the family,” he says. Surveys show that the average age of first exposure to Web porn is 11. Most caught up in it say it began in their early teens.
While the seminar uses biblical strategies of taking responsibility for oneself, being honest, and learning how to be godly, Dr. Sheh explains, it also educates about the consequences of addiction and on other issues that most often underlie it.
“Pornography is not just about sex. It is a drug of pain relief,” Sheh says.
Counselors say it is often emotional pain – from childhood abuse, from feeling isolated, rejected or inadequate – compounded by not having someone to talk with about it. What some scientists call the “neurochemistry of sex” also fosters the addiction.
Recognizing those factors helps men deal with the shame of seeking help.
“They often have the perception they are perverts,” Sheh says. “I tell them, ‘God does not make perverts, and God is your physician. He healed me. He can heal you, too.’ ”

Pornography statistics

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$ 12 billion: U.S. pornography industry annual revenue.
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$2.5 billion: Internet pornography revenue.
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12 percent of all Web sites are pornographic.
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25 percent of daily search-engine requests related to pornography.
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40 million American adults regularly visit pornographic Web sites.
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20 percent of men and 13 percent of women admit accessing porn at work. Source: TopTenReviews Inc.

As a lawyer on the receiving end of a cultural avalanche of lawyer jokes, I take particular pride in the scriptural description of Jesus, the Christ, as our advocate before God.

1 John 2:1 - My little children, I am writing this to you so that you may not sin; but if any one does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous;

OK, I may have over-claimed the parallel, but too many lawyer jokes can do that to you. What is this reference to Jesus as Advocate? The basic idea is that God the Father is a completely just God, who can, because of his Complete Holiness, have no part in sin. The dilemma of mercy for sinners is that if God simply allowed sin in a world He intended for perfection and “goodness”, then He would be acting contrary to his character as Holy.

How could justice be accomplished without the destruction of a rebellious human race? No imperfect human could “make the case” or “pay the penalty” sufficiently to satisfy a completely just God. The remarkable love of God is this: that He Himself paid the penalty that humans could not pay. The crux of Christianity is that the Christ is the fulfillment of a New Testament (covenant) with people living by faith in God’s redeeming love. The New Covenant is this: that God has reconciled Himself to us, and restored us to our original intended goodness through the life, death, and victorious resurrection of the God-man, Jesus. Therefore, Jesus in effect stands before the Father as our advocate to “maker our case” that we are “justified” before God. The case we could not make, Jesus, the Son of God, makes for us.

Well, then why do we continue sinning, and why is the world by all appearances turning darker in sin rather than renewed in the Light? Are we really in a state of “restored goodness”? The answer is that God works by a process of change, rather by immediate transformations. God works. Yes, God does labor through His Spirit working in us to continue a process of change initiated by our acceptance of eternal life though our faith in the “New Convenant”, that is, faith in the work of Jesus completed by his suffering and death.

Now, read 1 John again:

1 John 2:1 - My little children, I am writing this to you so that you may not sin; but if any one does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous;

John is basically acknowledging that we are a work in progress, and that sin is inevitable as the process continues, but that we surely will be sinning less as the process continues. Because the process is the work of the Holy Spirit living in us, Jesus, the Son of God, bascially makes the case that even in our sinning we are not condemned, and we do not have to live a life of guilt or self condemnation. This, even Freud would agree, is good news.

So, a jaded and “sophisticated” world would declare Christians to be “crazy” for these beliefs. In truth, Christians are the most mentally healthy persons on earth because free of neurotic guilt and self-condemnation, even as they daily “fall short” of their ultimate perfection in eternity.

* P

Babies and Children learn by encouragement, not punishment. Animal trainers know this too. If you want a particular behavior, reward it. Rather than punish negative behavior, ignore it until you elicit a desired behavior, and then reward that behavior. By consistently rewarding the desired behavior, animal trainers “train” the animal to perform a routine.

God states explicitly in Scripture that His way of handling sin in the Follower’s life is based on the same idea that we are being drawn to be like Him step by day, day by day, by the rewards of His love, rather than by the heavy hand of His condemnation. Three verses help understand God’s approach to maturing us in our spirits:

2 Timothy 3:16 - All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.

Romans 8:1 - There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

1 John 3:19-22 — By this we shall know that we are of the truth, and reassure our hearts before him 20 whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. 21 Beloved, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God; 22 and we receive from him whatever we ask, because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him.

So, we see from these scriptures that we are God’s Children in Training, and that God does not condemn us, even if our misinformed, neurotic hearts attack us with guilt. God obviously hates sin, but he understands that even His Followers continue to sin because we are yet weak and immature in our spirits. God’s Spirit in us is working to transform our tendency to sin to a tendency of right living. This process takes place daily in the GAP between who we are and who God intends for us to be. We live patiently in the Gap without self-condemnation, because God loves us exactly where we are and as we are.

Living in the “GAP” between our ideal and our actual behaviors can be either a path to heaven or a dead end feeling of hell. That “gap” is a place of creative tension or destructive impulse. Why? Because in the gap we experience the existential dilemma of freedom with responsibility or resignation and irresponsibility.

Many skeptics and atheists look upon Christians as soft-headed, and as escapists who look to religion as the “opiate of the masses”. Marx of course could make such a sweeping generalization without looking into the specific life of a devoted follower of the Promised One. The Christ was a hard headed realist struggling with the hardships of a world constantly challenging His human limits. He met human suffering and injustice head-on, and paid a daily high price to oppose it.

Living in the “gap” requires spiritual and emotional maturity. Why should a Christian fare better in the gap than non-believers? The answer is that Jesus, as the incarnate God, entered into the Gap also, and demonstrated that we will find God in the gap if we seek Him earnestly. This gap between our current state of sin and our promised state of perfection is closed in a daily process of change through the Spirit of God. Through and in the Spirit of God, we find in the “G”-”A”-”P” :

“G”uidance

“A”biding Presence

“P”rovision.

When we live in the ambiguity and imperfection of the gap, we can take heart that God fully understands that we are not yet perfected, and that mistakes (sins) will continue to be part of our human experience. God does not condemn believers, and believers are not to condemn themselves. Rather, we fail, we acknowledge failure, we seek forgiveness where our failure is by our choice or neglect, and we turn again and again toward God for acceptance and mercy. Believers then rely on the mercy of God expressed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. They feel no neurotic, recurrent guilt. They are not oppressed within the reality of the “gap”. They take hope and strength in knowing God is working a transformation within them that daily is completing the “perfection” process that we cannot achieve on our own.

Therefore we can be free of self-condemnation and feelings of inferiority, even as we continuously fail to be the people we would like to be. God isn’t finished with us yet.

Christians assert that God chose to live among us as a human to communicate His love, and to restore us to full life. Why would that be necessary? We don’t have to look at the world long to see how broken it and we are. We are unique among the animals in seeing our failings and being aware of them. We live in the “gap” between our actual state and our deep awareness that we are drawn to be fulfilled and perfect. God entered into the “gap” as one of us, and bridged the gap between us and Him. This place of being less than we know we are created to be is the place where we most rely on God. God does not condemn us because we are in this gap. He meets us there, and guides us in a daily process toward closing the gap—a process that does not end with our physical deaths.