The Last Amen

She returned to me on Friday. She looked less agitated than she had a few days before. I put down my work, composed myself for a serious exchange, and turned to face her.

"I can't make up my mind," she said.

I nodded. "I can only imagine how hard it must be."

"I want to know something," she said. "Did you always hold your current opinions?"

"About abortion, you mean? No, I didn't. They started to change about twenty years ago."

"Why?" she said.

I thought about it for a moment.

"If I were to say that it was a conclusion logically arrived at, I'd be lying to you. I think my current convictions are logically defensible, but only on the strength of a premise a lot of people reject."

She frowned. "What premise?"

"That conception produces a unique human being with a right to life."

"Oh." She smirked. "That's really the issue, isn't it?"

"Of course. People don't get worked up over demonstrable facts. They quarrel over things that can't be proved or disproved. When was the last time you saw a public demonstration about the Sun rising in the East?"

Her mouth fell open. I got that little thrill that says you've opened a new avenue of thought for someone else.

"Well," she said, "what about clones?"

I chuckled. "Let's wait until someone succeeds in cloning a human being to tackle that one."

"Okay," she said. "But I still can't make up my mind. Wait." She held up a hand. "You said you didn't arrive at your opinions that way."

I nodded.

"Well? How did you get there?"

I shrugged. "Conscience. The still, small voice."

"Oh." She sat back, looking satisfied. "Religion."

I shook my head. "No, conscience. Everyone has one. Perhaps our ability to hear them differs. But I imagine that you're thinking that my Catholicism has more to do with it."

"Doesn't it?" she said.

"Only in this sense," I said. "When I came to believe that abortion is morally wrong was when I first became qualified to become a Catholic. The order is important."

"Oh." She grimaced. "I'm not religious."

I did not reply.

Presently she said, "What's the point of it, anyway?"

"Of religion, or being a Catholic?"

"Either or both."

"That's a very long conversation, dear. If you're really interested, we should have it outside of work. Care to join me for lunch? My treat."

"Uh, not today. Next week sometime, maybe?"

I smiled. "Just let me know."

---

We are not given to know all the ripples our words and deeds might produce. In this as in all things, God is good. What man could bear to live with the knowledge that his lightest utterances would disrupt the entire future of Man? It's for the best that we deem ourselves, and our effects, finite. I wouldn't want to be able to see too far ahead; it would distract me from what I must do today.

But in reflecting on the above exchange, and the one before it, it occurs to me that the one and only predictable thing in life is its end: we shall all die. At the Particular Judgment, when I must answer to God for my deeds in life, a verdict will be rendered from which there is no appeal. It will be clear to me from the absolute self-knowledge conferred by one's entrance to eternity that it could be no other way, and all I will be able to say is So it is.

May God bless and keep you all.