Tens of thousands participated in the Walk for Life West Coast yesterday, January 20, in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Weather has been cold and drizzly here in the SF area, but they came out to remember the lives of the unborn, especially in California, a state that recently approved abortion on demand throughout the term. It is said that since Roe v. Wade was overturned in June 2022, and the question sent to the states to decide, 32,000 babies have been saved. Wake up, California.
And yet the numbers of children lost in this holocaust since the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision on January 22, 1973 have totaled over 100 million, averaging 2 million a year over fifty years.
At least we have slowed it down. Yet being a Californian and paying taxes posits a moral quandary.
There are many moral quandaries for those with instructed consciences, those who see it is our obligation to care for one another. And thus my current novel-in-progress, The Music of the Mountain, explores the agony of those mothers who aborted their babies and must justify their “choice” throughout their lives, denying the advances of science, ultrasounds, and genetic mapping. It is a tragic place to be, and many women simply went along with the culture and the law, thinking it must be okay.
Each person must examine their own lives through the educated lens of science today. If that casts judgment, then we must be honest about the suffering. How else can we prevent this from happening in the State of California and other states with these horrific laws on the books.
This week of January also recalls the WWII Jewish Holocaust on January 27, the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in 1945. This year’s remembrance will be held at 1 p.m. on Friday, January 26, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, an event that may be watched later on YouTube.
My current novel involves tunnels, books, and saving Western Civilization on Angel Mountain (Mt. Diablo). Is it too late? Our country and the Western world seem to be freefalling fast. And so each of us must witness to the sanctity of life, regardless of race, gender, handicap, and date of conception. We must choose leaders that are not afraid of this fight for life, for we are marked in our time with a cross on our foreheads. The one hundred million unborn must not be forgotten; the six million lost in the concentration camps must not be forgotten; those lost in the October 7 savage slaughter of innocents in Israel must not be forgotten; the 100 million lost under Stalin and Mao must not be forgotten.
And so I try to feature a Jewish Holocaust story in my novels to help us remember, as well as a pro-life story. In my current novel, we read of the Viennese occupation by Hitler and how some escaped and some did not. Probably one of the most celebrated and wealthy capitals in Europe at the time, Vienna was home to a blind decadence that governed elite society. This couldn’t happen here, and to us, they said.
We too, in America, suffer a blind decadence. We do not see the dangers of open borders or the slaughter of the unborn. We turn a blind eye to a weak military that cannot defend America, and a leadership that is blind as well. What is the truth? What are lies?
I often suggest to friends and family that we must choose authorities we trust, weigh all reports, see all sides, and come to our own conclusions as to what is true or not true. Vote for policies not personalities. Vote for those who can get the job done – the job of keeping us safe and free, the job of supporting those individuals and institutions who are not blinded, but can see what is at stake. And most important of all, support fair and free elections.
And so we celebrated today this third Sunday in Epiphanytide, that season of seeing who the Christ Child was and is and means to us today. Easter is early this year, so we move now into Pre-Lent, the “Gesima” Sundays, the three weeks before Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, when we repent the evil we have allowed to fester in our wounded land.
We give thanks for the thousands that supported the Walk for Life West Coast and in other cities across the land. We give thanks for the witnesses to life at any stage. We add our voice to the song they are singing, so that a mighty chorus swells into millions of voices, singing that song of the Angels, Ye Watchers and Ye Hoy Ones/ Bright seraphs, cherubim, and thrones/ Raise the glad strain, Allelulia!/ Cry out, dominions, princedoms, powers,/ Virtues, archangels, angels’ choirs, Alelulia! (Hymn 599).
There is a great movement in our land, an awakening. Perhaps we shall correct our course, find our way, point to the one who is the Way, the Truth, and the Light. With the People of Israel, Christians just might forge a stronger foundation for America, the land of the free, the beacon to the world, the hope of the poor and the captive as Emma Lazarus wrote many years ago, words that found a home on the Statue of Liberty in New York’s harbor:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Christine Sunderland
Christine Sunderland 