Seeing the Wholeness of the Body of Christ

Our little pro-life club, Homeschoolers4Life, is blessed to have a great spiritual advisor. One of our member's dad was recently ordained a deacon and, though his schedule is terribly full, he volunteered to help our club.

During our 2008 March for Life trip, Deacon Jerry lead us in the Liturgy of the Hours each morning and evening. He also began each leg of our trip with a prayer and a blessing. These things truly made our trip complete.

Deacon Jerry wrote two reflections on the 2008 March for Life and so I will post one here today and the other tomorrow. I think you will find them quite moving:

One of the images that always amazed me as a youth was how scientists were able to make a movie of blood pulsing through a vein. In the image I hold in my memory you can see the cells advance, then stop, then advance, then stop. With each pulse the vein swells, then narrows again.

When I usually think of the Body of Christ, I have had a very different image. Picture a paper torn on the ground and scattered by the wind. Though we see parts of a whole, the whole isn't visible. We know that the parts belong together and form something, but cannot see that something in this other form. With each baptized Christian I encounter, I know they are a part of the Body of Christ, but the wholeness of Christ remains invisible beyond the Eucharist.

The March For Life changed that view of the Body of Christ. There we were, hundreds of thousands of people, gently bumping into each other as the march started, stopped, then started again. At times the path would narrow and we would slow. At other times the crowd hastened its pace and pushed forward into wider lanes. In that densely packed and huge crowd I could see His body. Though I couldn't see the whole crowd, from the large part I could see it was clearly a visible, single corpus. Unlike scraps of paper in the wind, there was a spiritual wholeness in that crowd that was physically visible.

Thank you Lord for showing your body to us in the faithful who marched!