The March for Life is about so much more than we ever notice. Especially this brutal January.
I’ve been going to the March for Life since I was in college. After a few years of getting lost in the crowd, my new tradition is to run or Uber ahead to the Supreme Court, spend some time with the demonstrators and pray-ers outside (this is usually where there is any kind of small two-sides clash), and then meet the march on its way up the Hill, getting a sense of the size and composition. And, oh my goodness. It is overwhelming. I run into friends and colleagues and readers. I see people from North Dakota, Nebraska, and Sydney, Australia. (There was a group taking notes in hopes of replicating it down under.) It’s a grand reunion and meet-up of people not only protesting the Supreme Court’s 46-year-old Roe v. Wade decision but celebrating life.
The March itself, and so many of the events around it, are simply and powerfully countercultural. Consider the Mass the night before. There were 500 seminarians there — that is, young men studying and being formed to be Catholic priests. That’s remarkable. What I wish I could capture, and ever more so in recent days, are the faces. The gazes of hope and joy. Even as some of these young people — so many are high-school and college students — and their chaperones are exhausted, but most everyone is. But once you catch a glance of someone, so often, you see love. Love of life. Love of fellow men. Love of innocence. Love of a confidence that God has you here for a purpose.
“Let us always meet each other with smile, for the smile is the beginning of love,” Mother Teresa of Calcultta is known to have said. This is practiced at the March for Life. It’s contagious and when I leave and I always try to carry it with me. Of course, try it in New York and you get mixed reactions. Usually a double-take from a person who assumes you know them and they’ve forgotten. Which, actually, is part of the point. You remind a person he is noticed. Going deeper, it is a reminder that he is known. At this time when there seems to be an epidemic of loneliness, isn’t this the very least we could do for one another?
The March for Life this year may have gone largely unnoticed, as it often does, despite 100,000 people participating this year, had it not been for that infamous viral video of a group of Kentucky Catholic-school students and a man with a drum. The whole beginning of the story seemed to turn on the look on the boy’s face. When people went on to see more of the video footage, the story got much more complicated. As so often is the case with life. So much has been said, and so much will continue to be said. I keep thinking of the onslaught on those kids and the community. And what I keep thinking about are the repercussions for all of us beyond quick reactions on social media. We make assumptions all the time about people we shouldn’t. Maybe this will be the time we make a renewed commitment to humility?
VIEW PHOTOS: March for Life 2019
With the faces of so many I saw at the March for Life this year in mind, and as I review some of the photos I posted on Twitter and elsewhere along the way that Friday morning and afternoon, the main question I keep reflecting on is: How do we look at people? It’s a question for the young, but, goodness, is it a question for the not so young. Etched in my memory are scenes now and again of daily Mass-goers who stare disapprovingly at best at the young mom trying to pray with her crying baby. The whole community needs to model how to pray with love and to treat even the youngest and least convenient with equal acceptance. (I write that with an especially heavy heart, as New York State has just stripped away legal protection for babies who survive abortions.) On Twitter, one person with a “checkmark” (the new indicator of elite status; confession: I have one) expressed his desire to see the boy at the center of viral video clip punched. We’re talking about a child! We’re talking about an elder, even if he reportedly tried to interrupt Catholic Mass at the church where the annual pilgrimage vigil was held, this year with those 500 seminarians.
Whoever it is, we’re talking about a person. Can we look with love? With a smile? Or even with just a pause of humility? We have no idea where they are coming from, what they intend. I don’t know if that young man was smirking — or experiencing every emotion under the sun. There’s a lot to be encouraged by in the faces of Catholic and other kids in D.C. for the March for Life this year and every year. Elders with agendas could afford to observe them with humility. Learning about faith, hope, and love from so many of those smiles may just be a baby step toward changing everything.
This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.