What's close to home?

I was putting up political signs during the federal election with two other people. One man who was much older said when you have legalized abortion you open up a spiritual door. I think he called it a portal. What comes through that door is shockingly beyond what your own mind can depict, and shockingly closer to home than is comfortable.

Of course, this was not a huge epiphany for me, as my thoughts had been precisely the same, and still are. But forgetfulness is part of our life. Combined with the ceaseless silent motion of time (which has the property of not just eradicating things, but of distilling them into their true form and adding them up into the present), our subjective rationalizing of circumstances takes on perverse proportions. But then a geyser or two spews into the open the underlying filth of our society, in the said distilled form that tends to shock or cause some kind of visceral reaction - or, maybe nothing. 32 students being gunned down by another student is a geyser (I hate to say 'a mild one' in relation to what may yet hit us). 345 being arrested by the FBI in a five-day round-up of pimps who force children into prostitution is another. (And again, my feeling is this is just a tip of the iceberg). And then we go back to our routines. The concern here is not that we simply go back to our routine upon witnessing the vast decay and crime around, but the concern is with the pendulum swing with which we go back to our routine, or our occupations. The louder the shout gets, the more substantially we push cotton into our ears.

Continuity and conscience. The continuity is in seeing the objective history and our place in it; salvific history. The conscience is seeing the objective history's immediate, concrete ramifications in our own personal life, right close to home, and our culpability in it. And forming our conscience, which inevitably takes the shape of standing 'our ground' where it costs something. That may sound all grim, but it is a kind of praying; a prayer of truth. A prayer for truth.

Go into the inner room and shut the door to the world and there speak to your Father who hears and sees the thoughts of the heart, and Whose word pierces bone and marrow. The truth is not a negative, not a mere subtracting of illusions, but it is in itself a positive, a splendourous place where we can abide - though of course, no one who abides there ever looks askance or with a hush-hush at the horrific and the ugly, especially when that ugly truth hits right close to home: inside ourselves.

Is a world with profuse, promoted, legalized abortion a world worth being too comfortable in? When do we bear witness to the perversion that is our accepted rationalization? It starts with one's own conscience.