Personhood - a response to lies embedded in the poems of our culture

I hate the words, “I’ll be honest,” because they insinuate a time when I’m not, yet they feel like the lead-in I can’t find right now. 
So,
I’ll be honest.

There are nights when I troll; and in the rabbit hole in which I invariably find myself, it is waiting.  Despite the neat, color-coded, glossy picture-framed schedule I’ve made for myself, the one that allots two hours a day for writing on any topic that presses itself on my heart, there are nights when I ignore these self-inflicted parameters because all I’m trying to do is find beauty in a world gone dark. 

Some people paint.  I am stilled before the muslin, the colors garish and too loud.  Choices swirling, overwhelmed and childish.  Some compose melodies.  And though I ache to inhabit the music, I can only appreciate from a distance.  Tuneless, with faded skills, I am an Alzheimer’s patient sitting idly at a piano, searching for chords that beckon from just beyond the fog of memory.

Instead, I bleed words.

                Bleed.

So I search poetry slams, clicking one after another, looking for the one that will lift me, one that will unveil beauty.  One that holds the words that will crack open my soul to let the light in.

And there it is.  There it always is.

Personhood.

On the tail of this word dangles a litany of reasons why legislators and men and those-who-haven’t-been-raped are not permitted to comment on this particular topic.  Yet, as a human drawing breath, one who started life as a fetus – like we all do -- and was given the privilege of developing into a reasoning, art-creating, thoughtful person, I am compelled to disagree at every point. 

Because one can’t stack evil against evil in hopes of outweighing the other.  You can’t say the race of human cannot address murder until we’ve legalized gay marriage.  You can’t say that the race of human can’t stop infanticide until we’ve given immigrants full access to well-funded medical care.  You can’t say that the race of human can’t stop killing babies until the child-soldiers and sex-slaves the world ‘round are freed.  You can’t say that the race of human must ignore the genocide in our midst until we have assigned value to every person this side of a cervix. 

You can’t say any of this as a means of delaying the already-concluded argument that ABORTION IS MURDER.  To do so evidences a nihilistic approach to life.  One which is impossible to maintain.  None of these reasons, despite the cheers and applause with which each was met, holds any logical weight.    

                Because from the time the race of human started keeping records, we have killed infants.  We have enslaved children.  We have prostituted women and girls.  We have made boys die for the ideals of old men.  We have violated every kindness ever shown to us.  The race of human is historically corrupt.  I am willing to wager my life that even before the race of human started keeping records we were corrupted, killing and enslaving and raping our fellows; it’s merely that we have no hard evidence to prove my claim. 

We are a bent and fallen race.  We are hosts of evil.  We are the wrong we find in the world.

Yet it was not meant to be so.  We were designed to be the good in the world.  We were designed to be the beauty, to be the incubators of life, of hope, of joy in a cosmos full of light and music and color. 

We can be again.  We have been given this chance through death.  Through bloodshed.  Through willful murder. 

It is through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Only Son of the Living God, that the race of human can be restored to beauty.  To life.  To love.  We can become the hosts of light and poetry and hope that we were originally intended to be.  If only we believe.  If only we recognize the evil in ourselves and flee from it.  If only we cry out, “God, forgive me!”  And then live thusly.

This means loving every other human on this spinning rock.  This means sacrificially giving of yourself for the sake of another human – one you might not understand, might not even like.  This means being the love and light that you desire to see in the world. 

And this can only be done through the power of the Holy Spirit, by the sacrifice of the Son, for the glory of the Father. 

So that every member of the human race, regardless of the proximity to the cervix that served as the gateway to life and death, is deemed a PERSON.

Because that is how GOD sees every single member of the race of human.  Regardless of whether we as a culture do or not.