Psalm 72 and “America the Beautiful”

Yesterday in my daily scripture reading I read Psalms 72 , which says it is a “Prayer for Guidance and Support for the King” written by Solomon.

The Psalm made me think of the wonderful hymn, “America the Beautiful“, for a couple of reasons.  First, in verse 8 the Psalm says, “May he have dominion from sea to sea” which is paralleled by the songs “with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.”  Second, the Psalm verse 16 says, ”May there be abundance of grain in the land; may it wave on the tops of the mountains” which is paralleled in the songs “For amber waves of grain.”   Third, verse 3 says “May the mountains yield prosperity for the people, and the hills, in righteousness”  which is paralleled in the songs “Purple mountain majesty.”  I have no idea whether the songs composer, Katherine Lee Bates, had Psalm 72 in mind (or any other Psalm for that matter), but the Psalm verses did remind me of the song verses.

This made me also think about the claims that America is a Christian nation.  For in Psalm 72 we are given a very particular image of what godly leadership consists.   And while the Psalms are Old Testamental, thus pre-Christian, many Christian Patristic writers believed the Psalms represented the mind of Christ.

So how does Psalm 72 envision godly leadership in a godly nation?

 [72:1] Give the king your justice, O God, and your righteousness to a king’s son.

[2] May he judge your people with righteousness, and your poor with justice.

[4] May he defend the cause of the poor of the people, give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor.

 [7] In his days may righteousness flourish and peace abound, until the moon is no more.

[12] For he delivers the needy when they call, the poor and those who have no helper.

[13] He has pity on the weak and the needy, and saves the lives of the needy.

[14] From oppression and violence he redeems their life; and precious is their blood in his sight.   (The Septuagint according to the Orthodox Study Bible reads “He shall redeem their souls from usury and injustice.“)

One thing which is clear in Psalm 72 is that the ruler of a godly nation provides justice to the poor and helps secure that the poor benefit from the righteousness of the nation.   The godly nation – the Christian nation – is to care for and provide for its poor.   The godly ruler takes up the cause of the poor and defends them, has pity for them, and delivers them in time of trouble.

Another thing made clear in the Psalm is the hope that peace will abound for the godly ruler and the godly nation.  The poor often suffer the worst of all citizens in the time of war as they already live on the edge of not being able to support themselves.   If there is such a thing as a peace dividend, it ought to be used to help the poor.

 Finall the godly nation and the godly rulers protect the poor from usury – the demands of interest charged by lenders.  There is a financial burden the godly nation must bear to help its poor. The godly nation is not to just make lending to the poor easy, or even to make lending cheap.   Rather the godly nation relies on generosity from its prospering citizens to provide for the needs of the poor and the disabled.   A godly ruler is one who cares about the poor and insures that they are treated well by the nation and by the people.

Independence Day (2009)

We who have been blessed by living in America owe God our heart felt thanksgiving for the blessings we have received.   Asking God’s blessing for our country also means for believers that we are willing to humble ourselves before God and His will and His judgment.    We are reminded of  St. Maria Skobtsova’s comment written at a time when Fascism was being spread by invasion and war from Germany into her adopted homeland, France.   She saw first hand love of country going awry.   

There can be no doubt but that love for anything that exists is divided into these two types. One may lustfully love one’s motherland, working to make sure that it develops gloriously and victoriously, overcoming and destroying its enemies. Or one can love it in a Christian manner, working to see that the face of Christ’s truth is revealed more and more clearly within it. 

Patriotism, love for one’s country can be a noble good.  But patriotism distorted can be reduce it to  blind nationalism in which one hopes one’s country will triumph whether it is good and righteous or not.  We have had plenty of examples of this in the past 100 years of human history.   As Christians, our love for our country means hoping that our government and people might behave in a more Christ like fashion.   The first step to accomplish this is to strive to be more Christ like in our own personal lives.  Then we begin to determine how by personal example we can show love for our country by loving neighbor as Christ taught us.   To love as Christ loved us is also to express a Christian love for our country. 

 We each should offer thanksgiving to God this 4th of July for all of the ways we have benefitted by living in our country.  This doesn’t mean disparaging any other peoples or nations on earth.   We have plenty to be thankful for as Americans whatever the good fortunes of other nations may be.     If you want to offer a hymn to God as an Orthodox Christian in thanksgiving for our country and our freedom to practice our faith without government interference, here is one from the New Skete Monastery:       (Tone 2)    

For your glory and their happiness, O Lord,

You created all the peoples of the earth,

and with undaunted faith in your perfect goodness,

the founders of this country won liberty for themselves and for us. 

By Your Grace, let us always use our freedom to do Your will, 

and through the Theotokos, grant our people lasting peace.

Quoting Jesus

One surprising mystery to me is how rarely any of the first disciples quote Jesus in the Acts of the Apostles (it occurs only twice).   This is made more surprising by the fact the Evangelist Luke is thought to be the author of the Acts of the Apostles; it is part two of his Gospel.  So one might think that Luke would have the apostles quoting Jesus on occasion if for no other reason than to closely tie together the two parts of his written work. 

One teaching of Jesus directly applicable to issues raised in the Acts of the Apostles is Matthew 15:1-20 (paralleled in Mark 7:1-23.  NB there is no parallel in Luke’s Gospel).  In this passage Jesus has an extensive conversation with Pharisees and scribes regarding ritual washing before eating (perhaps a 1^st Century discussion about kashrut).  Jesus declares that eating with unwashed hands cannot defile you, since food passes through the digestive system, while defilement involves an unclean heart  - so it is what comes from the heart that defiles you, not what goes to your stomach.  This is one of several disagreements Jesus has with the Pharisees about keeping Torah in which He declares Himself to be Lord not only of the Sabbath but of the Torah and thus more important than the Torah.   Christians have understood from these teachings that more than strict obedience to Law, the purpose of the Torah was to train us to love God and love neighbor which is God’s real goal for His people.  Mere submission to the law can be done without submitting one’s heart to God, and God is far more interested in what  is in our hearts (or comes out of our hearts) than what we put in our mouths.

This discussion of Matthew 15/Mark 7 comes to mind when reading Acts 10:9-17 /11:1-18, the vision of St. Peter which leads him to accept Gentiles into the Christian fellowship.  Yet Peter never mentions the teaching of Jesus regarding being clean or unclean as a result of what one eats.  (Interestingly 11: 16 is the only time Peter quotes Jesus in Acts, but not about food or being unclean.  He quotes Jesus talking about John the Baptist.  The only other person to quote Jesus in Acts is St. Paul in 20:35.  In this verse Paul quotes Jesus but offers a quote not found in the canonical Gospels). 

Another point in Acts at which the Matt 15/Mark 7 words of Jesus seem relevant is the discussion regarding circumcision in Acts 15 where the main question is whether Gentile converts to Christianity must first become Torah-observant Jews before they can be accepted as Christians.  Both St. Peter the leader of the Apostles and St. James the brother of the Lord speak to the issue to the 1st recorded council of  Apostles and presbyters but neither even once quotes Jesus in their speeches or calls to mind anything Jesus said.  Certainly the decision of the Apostolic/presbyteral is in agreement with what Jesus taught in Matthew 15, but it is interesting no one is recorded asquoting or even referencing Jesus in their deliberations.

I assume the reason that the Apostles do not quote Jesus in the public kerygma is  they knew quoting Jesus would not have any impact on their hearers since Jesus was at that point an unknown at best but also an executed convict, hardly the type of person to be quoting if you want to impress the public.  Outside of the immediate followers of Jesus, Christ had no respect in either the Jewish or Roman world.  Quoting Him would have had no positive impact on the hearers of the Gospel.   To the Jewish listeners the Apostles quote the Jewish Scriptures which were authoritative to the Jews.   Not until much later in history when Christianity has significant numbers of converts who are interested in what Jesus would have to say do we find the teachers of Christianity quoting Jesus.  By then Jesus was a person of authority to believers and what He said was of authentic importance.

Some historians have said that since Jesus left no writings we know virtually nothing about him – we only know what the apostles attempted to do in His Name and what they said about Jesus.  Thus some historians claim the Apostles  are the real founders of Christianity for they shape the message about Jesus.    However, what one has to note is that in Acts from the very beginning of the Apostolic preaching  the person of Jesus looms large and certainly is the focus of their message.  It is obvious that Jesus impacted the apostles in a very profound way and it is HIM they proclaim.  He is the Gospel.  His teachings, works, message and signs are significant only in that they present Him to us – they are merely the witness, evidence or proof to support the Apostolic proclamation of Jesus.   More than His teachings and miracles, it is Jesus Himself whom the Apostles present to the world.  He is more important than His teachings, more important than the temple or the Torah.  The Apostles understood this about Jesus from their experience of the risen Lord reinforced by the Holy Spirit coming down upon them at Pentecost.  The Church’s later reflection on the person of Jesus as Lord, the only begotten Son of God, true God of true God, 2^nd Person of the Holy Trinity, of one essence with the Father, and God incarnate is not in fact a late Hellenistic development, but is simply taking the Apostolic focus, kerygma and evangelion  (Gospel) seriously.  The Apostles proclaimed Jesus Christ, not just a message about him nor just His message.   The person of Jesus – who Jesus is – is the central truth of the Apostolic Christian proclamation.  The message of the Church does not change over time, it deepens as the followers of Christ reflect on the implication of who Jesus is.

Is Art about “I” or “We”?

One of the effects of the 18^th Century Enlightenment on Western civilization was a shift in the understanding of and emphasis on the human as individual.  Prior to the Enlightenment there was a common understanding that humans shared a human nature and a human experience which ties all of humanity together.  People were understood as always being in their social context – their family, their clan, tribe, nation, church, religion.   For example Tertullian said, “One Christian is no Christian”,  meaning to be a Christian is to be in community/the church.  With the Enlightenment there arises a focus on the autonomous individual and there is a conscious effort to “free” the individual from the confines of societal context;  the individual becomes accepted as the smallest social unit which soon gives birth to individual human rights and the authority of the individual over society.  

The thinking of the Enlightenment about the autonomous individual was then filtered through the romantic age in which the perceptions and feelings of each individual came to be seen as the only true way of experiencing the world.  In this thinking artistic expression came to be seen not as the way in which society (=humanity) conveys its shared values to its membership in abstract ways (for example the way in which the American flag impacts many Americans – the flag abstractly represents all that many Americans value about their nation).  Rather in the romantic period thinking art becomes the purely personal and abstract expression of the inner (emotional) life of individuals.  

David Smith, author of MONEY FOR ART: THE TANGLED WEB OF ART AND POLITICS IN AMERICAN DEMOCRACY, was interviewed in Volume 96 of the MARS HILL AUDIO JOURNAL , where he discussed how the changing way that art was understood, especially by artists, has politicized the National Endowment for the Arts to a degree that the original political founders of the endowment did not anticipate or understand.

Traditionally, according to Smith, art was understood as drawing people together for it gave us a shared way of looking at the world and ourselves.   The very thing which differentiates humans from all other life forms on earth is the ability of humans to communicate meaningfully in abstract forms.   This shared understanding and ability to communicate abstractly defines what it is to be human and prevents humanity from devolving into 6 billion absolute isolated and alienated individuals.   Art was seen as a way of helping us to become more human by giving us an interconnection and interdependency with our fellow humans and with humanity throughout history.  Smith argues that in a modern democracy shaped by the values of the Enlightenment it is important for people not to be reduced to solely self-centered individuals; it is necessary to remind people that we all belong to a greater whole – that we are social and relational beings from the time we are conceived.   As independent as we like to be, no one is an autonomous island but always exists related to some other humans. 

President Eisenhower for example had an innate distrust of materialism according to Smith and worried that America’s prosperity would drag the American soul down into an atheistic and inhuman materialism (the very thing communism was accused of doing).  

The National Endowment for the Arts was perceived by the political leaders as helping to uplift Americans out of a purely materialistic way of life to appreciate beauty, social achievement and to help humanity aspire to a great and better world.  The NEA was to help “provide what the arts only can give society.” 

What happened among artists though was a growing belief that the arts in fact exist outside of society and thus the arts can critique society but cannot be critiqued by society.  This is largely an ideal of the Enlightenment where the enlightened individual no longer is dependent in anyway of the tutelage of society but alone determines right and wrong, good and evil, and what is beauty.  Artistic self expression was thus independent of societal norms and values.   The artists then looked to the NEA to fund their individualistic expression not for the betterment of society but for the benefit of the artists themselves (to fund them to pursue their individualistic efforts of self expression).   The irony of course, as Smith points out, is that for the artists to be able to critique society their art has to be social in some sense – it has to be understood as protest or critique, and not just personal abstraction with no meaning to anyone else. 

The question raised by Smith is whether art is about “I” or “we” – is it merely a personal expression or does it in fact have some broader social context and construct?   Is art merely the personal expression of an individual or can it in fact be judged by society as to whether it benefits society or conveys meaning or is detrimental to the ideals and values of the society to which the artists belongs?

British philosopher John Macmurray wrote a book PERSONS IN RELATIONSHIP in which he says the very thing that makes us human, that gives us personhood is our relationships.  One cannot speak of a completely isolated individual to mean a full human being, for to be human is to be in relationships.  Thus, says Metropolitan Kallistos Ware  the basic human word is not “I” but “we.”    Art in this thinking is that which captures our common human experience and gives full expression to our shared humanity.  Art helps us to move beyond the limits of self and both to share in our common humanity and to aspire to something greater than humanity itself.

The Animated Life

I found the op ed piece in today’s NEW YORK TIMES, The Animated Life, to be fascinating.   It includes a video made by Jeff Scher,  ”a painter who makes experimental films and an experimental filmmaker who paints.”   The video is about walking on a crowded city street.  Scher writes:

“The street etiquette of

avoiding eye contact

lets us go about our business without

the distraction of interaction.” (emphasis mine)

The “distraction of interaction”  -   Our lives are full of people we don’t really want to interact with.   We sometimes act as if all these people are in fact preventing us from becoming the good or great person we imagine ourselves to be.  “I would be such a good Christian if it weren’t for all those people.”   Or as one doctor is described in Dostoyevsky’s  THE BROTHERS KARAMZOV:  he loved humanity, it was people he hated.

Christians like to use the metaphor of walking with Christ as a sign of their own discipleship.   Do we however ignore Christian etiquette – say that of the Good Samaritan – in order to avoid the “distraction of  interaction”?   Do we not know that it is precisely when we walk the streets that we are walking with Christ?

Love can only be practiced when we choose to do so.   Love is not a reaction to people, but a chose action toward them.

McKenzie, Blessed by God

  McKenzie has made sufficient progress to be allowed to move into the Cincinnati Ronald McDonald House where she resides with her foster parents.   McKenzie, her foster parents, Jean and Chuck, thank all of you for your continued prayers.  “McKenzie has been blessed indeed.”

Money: A Good Servant but a Bad Master

3rd Sunday After Pentecost   2009        Gospel:  Matthew 6:22-33

The Lord Jesus said:  “No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.”  (Matthew 6:24)

Though the Lord Jesus clearly taught us that we cannot love “God and….”, many have tried.   God and money.   God and pleasure.   God and self.   God and political power.   God and selfishness.  God and ego.   God and self indulgence.   God and greed.  God and gawd.   This of course is not the same as saying we cannot serve God through success, or wealth, or prosperity, or politics.   We are to love God first and above all and to pursue His Kingdom and His righteousness.   We can use the things God bestows on us for His glory.   To put it in another way, “Money is a good servant, but a bad master”  (attributed to Francis Bacon in the 17th Century).  

Life is full of choices, and the choices we make matter.   Americans love prosperity, God and money.

Bishop Nikolai Velimirović in commenting on the words of our Lord from Matthew 6:24, wrote about the impossibility of loving “God and….”

Can two wheels of a wagon move forward and two backward? Can a man look eastwards with one eye and westwards with the other? (Abba Isaiah says: “As on eye cannot look heavenwards and the other earthwards, so the mind cannot combine cares for the things of heaven with those of the earth.”) Or can one foot walk to the right, and the other the left? They cannot. It is therefore also impossible to go to meet God and to remain in the world’s embrace. A man cannot serve God and sin, for he will either hate God and love sin, or vice versa: love God and hate sin. In order to emphasize this truth the more clearly, the Lord repeats it in other words: “or else he will hold to the one and despise the other”. If a man holds to God, he cannot also hold to God’s enemy. And love for this world is hatred for God. God seeks our whole heart, and to this end He offers us all His help and all His gifts. “For the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to shew Himself strong in behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward Him” (II Chronicles 16:9): perfect, whole, pure; emptied of faith in the world, and filled with faith, hope and love for God the living and immortal.

The Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul

A blessed Feast of the Glorious Leaders of the Apostles, Peter and Paul.

Today our parish celebrates our heavenly Patron, St. Paul the Apostle as we also conclude the Year of St. Paul which celebrated the 2000th birthday of one of the men chosen by Christ our God to lead His Church.    Just yesterday the Vatican announced that the scientific studies on the relics in the sarcophagus of St. Paul are indeed those of someone who died in the 1st or 2nd Centuries, lending credence to the notion that the relics are indeed those of the Apostle to the Nations.

Though Sts Peter and Paul are considered the founders of Christianity, the foundation of the Church is Jesus Christ.  In other metaphorical language the Church is the Body of Christ, and the Apostles like all Christians are members of that body.

Some  have accused St. Paul of having changed Christianity – among those critics of St. Paul are Muslims and modern historians.  

To say St. Paul “changed” Christianity would mean that Christianity already had a monolithic and established form which he then altered.  It almost assumes that the Christian message fell from heaven in a printed book which left the disciples with nothing to do but follow its instructions.     I don’t think that is true to history at all.   The nascent Christianity was only beginning to coalesce as Church.   The Apostles were working out their own salvation, taking up their own crosses daily, endeavoring to follow Christ, and preaching the Gospel – they were actively engaging the world while in their hearts engaging the Word.   In this sense Paul wasn’t changing Christianity at all, he was however founding it – establishing what it was to become by helping to form its structures.  This in fact is what Christ our Lord entrusted His chosen apostles to accomplish.   Our English words edify and edifice have the same root words in them.  St. Paul was edifying people which also was establishing and building up the edifice of the Church.  Paul was doing what Christ called him to do. 

 The original Apostles were at first so afraid of the Jews as to keep themselves hidden away from public view.  Pentecost  (Acts 2) changed all of that and for the first time Peter publicly proclaimed the Christian Gospel. The story in the Acts of the Apostles shows some miraculous and sudden growth of Christianity, but it was sporadic and not organized or energized.  The first Christians were still trying to figure out what it meant as Jews that the Messiah had come.   It is Paul who truly grasps the universal significance of the Gospel and the coming of the Messiah.  It is he who pushes ahead taking the Gospel to the non-Jews, creating the “crisis” about whether to become Christian you had to become a Torah keeping  Jew.  This crisis causes the original Apostles to consider the issue and realize that it was not necessary to become a Jew to embrace the Gospel (Acts 15).  In this sense St. Paul was involved with helping to form Christianity.  However, though he sparked the debate about the requirement of keeping the Law, it was the Apostolic community still based in the Jerusalem who decided that this indeed was the message of Christ and the direction for the Church.

Biblical scholar, Stanley Porter in his Hearing the Old Testament in the New Testament says of St. Paul: 

The divine mystery that was revealed to Paul in Christ opens for him new ways of reading and listening to the ancient texts of the Jewish people. His belief in Christ is both an experience and a conviction that, in his eyes, allows him to comprehend the “true” meaning of the religion of his people and their sacred texts. Christ and Scripture are closely connected for Paul; and, I would argue, it is impossible to speak about his reading of Scripture apart from his Christology. Christ is the presupposition for his encounter with Scripture. It is the revelation of Christ that shapes his understanding of God’s people and God’s purposes. For Paul, as for many other interpreters of Scripture in his own day and beyond, the Scriptures yield their “true” meaning to those who are guided and transformed by the Spirit. 

Relics of St. Paul Confirmed

The Vatican is reporting that a scientific analysis of the bone fragments in what was believed to be St. Paul’s sarcophagus has confirmed they are the bones of someone who died in the first or second century.  Pope Benedict announced that the scientific tests confirm what pilgrims have believed for centuries to be true.

You can read the story at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/28/AR2009062801356.html

The article reports that a little over a week ago the discovery of the oldest known icon of St. Paul, of which we can hope the Vatican will release a photograph.  The icon was designed to be used in prayer and is not just art said the Vatican.  The icon fresco dates from the end of the 4th Century, dating it near the time of the 2nd Ecumenical Council.

The announcments from the Vatican come as the proclaimed Year of St. Paul is brought to a close on the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, June 29.   The Year of St. Paul proclaimed by the Pope and the Greek Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch marks the 2000th anniversary of the birth of St. Paul.

Ending the Limitations of Slavery

As I continue reading through Doris Kearns Goodwin’s TEAM OF RIVALS: THE POLITICAL GENIUS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN I really am stuck by what a totally amazing thing it is that the citizens of the United States elected an African-American as president in 2008.  

Goodwin’s book explores the many tumultuous issues surrounding slavery that were churning in the mid-19th Century in America.  What is also very clear is that even the abolitionists had no good plan for what to do with the millions of slaves once they were free.   The Northern states were adopting “Black Laws” – laws which sharply curtailed the rights and freedoms of blacks in those states.  Illinois itself had adopted a law making it illegal to bring into the state anyone whose was even one-quarter black.  No wonder the Southern States in which more than one third of the population was slave were alarmed at what the abolition of slaves would mean for them.

Lincoln and his cabinet and the Republican Party’s anti-slavery ideas mostly wanted to limit slavery to the South, not abolish it everywhere in America.  They were not abolitionists and in their own speeches distanced themselves from the abolitionists.  When Stephen Douglas warned white America that voting for Lincoln meant submitting themselves to black voters and judges, Lincoln denied that he was advocating such a thing. 

Slavery was abhorrent to Lincoln and his Republican cohorts, but they were only advocating that blacks be treated as humans, not as citizens.   Basically the main argument was being fought between the pro-slavery people who framed the argument in terms of state rights (and thus could appeal to the War for Independence and Constitution as the basis of their convictions) and the anti-slavery folk who were pushing for human rights for blacks not the rights of full citizenship for them.  The anti-slavery Republicans wanted “all men” to be treated as “equals” meaning as human beings, but that didn’t mean to them that blacks should be given full citizenship or seen as equal to the whites in terms of voting or political power. 

Stephen Douglas said to cheering crowds:

“the signers of the Declaration of Independence had no reference to negroes at all when they declared all men to be created equal.  They did not mean negro, nor the savage Indians, nor the Fejee Islanders, nor any other barbarous race.  They were speaking of white men… I hold that this government was established.. for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and and should be administered  by white men, and none others.”

What truly amazes me is that in America, the land of the free, just 90 years before I was born slavery was still practiced.  When I was born, there were people still alive who had been born when slavery existed.  When my parents were born there would still have been alive former slaves.  The slavery issue is not something from the distant past of America but has had its repercussions right down to the present.

One black American I know always told his children, “you can be anything you want in America, except for President of the United States.”  Though he is a pro-life, Republican voting conservative, he told me that the election of Barack Obama has truly shattered the shackles of slavery for all people of color in this country.   That is something for conservative Americans and Republicans to think about.   It is not the policies of Obama they need to embrace, but they need to consider he does represent symbolically the end to the limits slavery imposed on every black American.   Argue against his policies, but give recognition to the fact that he does represent what the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, sweated and “slaved” over to save these United States from tyrannizing over anyone.

As we approach our Independence Day holidays, we can be humbled by the land of the free’s willingness to enslave a people.   The strength and wealth of America was built upon denying freedom to millions.   We also can be amazed at the American ability to end adversity and overcome adversaries by spreading freedom to all.   Freedom comes with a price, freedom is invaluable, and it is worth giving freedom to every American.

Giving the black man freedom, electing a black man as president, doesn’t mean that we will have greater oneness of opinion, but we have been strengthened as a nation by the competitiveness and cross pollination of ideas which comes with giving full recognition to our ideal “that all men are created equal.”   The united part of the United States is formed into a more perfect union by granting freedom and citizenship to all.

And I will say that I think the example of the debate and the issues which swirled around slavery give us an example and a hope for recognizing the humanity of and citizenship to the children in our country conceived and yet unborn.   It was a painful and hard fought battle to recognize black Americans as humans let alone as citizens.  I think we will awaken to the truth that all are created equal, and that each child conceived deserves to be treated as a human being deserving the rights and protection which our Constitution guarantees for all citizens.   Abortion is no more a right than is owning a slave.   One day we may come to recognize this self evident truth that we do not limit citizenship nor humanity to landowners, to the educated, to whites, or to males.  Neither should we limit them to those children conceived and living in their mother’s wombs.