On Friday night I attended the Annunciation Maternity Home benefit banquet. It was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. I mingled with other diocesan staff and joked around with the Catholic Longhorns for Life, said hi to the mothers in residence at the home, and even played around with one of their particularly rambunctious future-athlete toddlers.
But the highlight of my evening was the same as everyone else’s: Gianna Jessen, that rare and embarrassing case of someone who was aborted, and lived to tell about it later in life.
"I don't die easily"
What immediately hits you though when she walks up to the microphone and starts to do what she was obviously born to do, is that she is more than a walking pro-life bumper sticker. She is a person, an enormously gifted and refreshingly humorous one. She began by quipping, “Hi my name’s Gianna. Gianna is an Italian name and I’ve recently discovered I’m Irish.” She then sang three songs for the audience, the first of which was her own rendition of “Soon and Very Soon.” She didn’t just sing it either. She belted it out like she was at the Grand Ole Opry. (She is, after all, from Tennessee.)
After nailing the song, she said with a big smile to the audience, “I think whatever you do, you oughta do it with all your heart.” Gianna Jessen has done a lot, and in just that way. In addition to singing and traveling around the country to tell her story and encourage pro-life ministers, she also is learning about the real estate business, and various vibrant physical pursuits like running marathons. Marathons. Here is a lady who got cerebral palsy from lack of oxygen to her brain during the abortion procedure. She calls it “the gift of cerebral palsy.” When the alternative is death, whatever limitations or hardships we face in life become gifts, because they presuppose the fact that we are alive to have them.
One also gets the immediate impression that Gianna Jessen is an enormously happy and optimistic person. She is acutely aware of the evils that exist in the world, in a way that very, very few people possibly can be. Yet throughout her talk she smiled in a most sincere way that betrayed an impenetrable Christian joy, and several times she simply started laughing uncontrollably.
She recounted the story of what happened to her seven and a half months after her conception. Without shedding a tear or missing a beat she told us how the saline abortion chosen by her mother in 1977 entailed injecting a saline solution into her mother’s uterus so that it would enter the baby’s system, burning her outside and in, until twenty-four hours later the mother would deliver a dead baby.
But as Gianna said with a mischievous smile, “Apparently I don’t die easily.” Indeed what is so inspiring about Gianna and what so many people can benefit from regardless of their background is her determination not just to avoid death but to actually live. She was not supposed to be able to sit up, or crawl, or stand or walk, and certainly not run 26-mile marathons. But she has done all of that. Why? Because she does not die easily. Her survival of the abortion and her life since are a testament to the theological virtue of hope.
Reflection of humanity
The beauty of people like Gianna—and there are several of them walking around, people who were not “meant to be” in the eyes of the world but who by God’s grace survived the world’s attempt on their lives—is that they serve as mirrors reflecting humanity back to itself. When you think about it, Gianna is but an extreme example of every person’s life, and every person’s vocation. There is no reason Gianna should necessarily have come into this world. In fact the odds were profoundly against it, except for the force of God’s providence. If one thing had gone differently in the events leading up to her birth, she could very well have been killed like the millions of other children in this country who have been. Yet here she is today walking among us, and that is a great gift and a great mystery.
Nothing less is true of any of us. There is no reason any of us should necessarily be alive and walking around today. Human life is contingent—it depends on the correct alignment of so many circumstances and if even one of them is lost or even altered, we fade away unnoticed like the unborn. Think about how many generations came before you, and what if one couple three hundred years ago had not met or not married? You would not be here. The odds were profoundly against all of us, except for the force of God’s providence. In less philosophical terms, human life is frail. All of us know this. At any moment a human life can be destroyed with the flip of a switch, the cutting of a tube, the pull of a trigger. It is not to be taken lightly or for granted that any of us are alive and walking about. It is a great gift and a great mystery. That is why we are all called, like Gianna, to “not die easily.”
Many are Gianna Jessen’s weaknesses and difficulties. But she does not take them as a sign that her life is not worth living, because she has a piece of evidence to the contrary that trumps any hardship she might face, and that is: the fact that she is alive to begin with. She recognizes that the only reason she is alive is because God chose for whatever reason not to call her home yet. So with us. The only reason we are alive is because God wills us to be. And if he wants us to live, then he wants us to live with all our hearts, to know that life is worth living, not in spite of our hardships but because of them. Gianna lives her life in the face of all her challenges, in spite of the frailty of her life, in spite of the fact that in the eyes of some she was never meant to be. And that’s all she has to do to be a shining light of the Gospel of Life.
If pro-lifers are to be witnesses to the Gospel of Life, their witness must extend beyond their activism. A cornerstone of the spirituality of St Josemaria Escriva, the founder of the much-maligned Opus Dei, was the call to witness to God’s glory in regular activities. In performing each task to the best of our ability, and making it a sacrifice to God. In speaking with charity to and appreciating the humanity of everyone with whom we come into contact, even those who disagree with us. In hanging out with friends. In going to work. In playing sports. In meeting the suffering and the sinful (including ourselves) of the world where they are and inviting them to something better. Inviting them not to die so easily. That is how we refuse to die easily. That is the fullness of life.
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