It has been a year since my wife and I lost our first child in miscarriage. Miscarriage is a strange event. One is often left wondering if there is something he could have done differently, some signs he missed, some action, in particular, he should have let well enough alone.
The universal human Fall has brought so much suffering, and the knowledge that a certain guilt lies upon us for even these losses brings us to our knees at the cross in sorrowful love, in pain and in thanksgiving.
And yet the burden is not less heavy. The imagined moments, the forecast memories that by all accounts we should have had the opportunity of making -- these flit like shadows toward a deepening twilight. A small boy runs through autumn leaves in an amber sweater. He shouts and cries, falls, rises giggling. The wind blows, a falling sheet of leaves, and he is gone.
My child is gone. His microscopic corpse is buried in a field beneath Christ crucified at a Benedictine abbey. There lies a stone far larger than the tiny casket handmade by monks.
All things are rent with bursting purpose, ruthless purpose tearing us apart. Purpose that seeks each of us out and cuts to the marrow, savagely bruising, scarring all barriers of emotion and flesh. My child honored with expense, with veneration, his life welcomed, shared, memorialized, his little body given a bed on which to wait, a place within the earth, a home. My own body always seeming less viable, less real, a shell I inhabit because I, unlike he, have been blessed with the curse of living.
I have been given the chance to waste the purpose with which my life is infused.
I have been honored with the dignity of accepting or rejecting the meaning of my child's death, his treasured remains, before the onslaught of the world.
I may choose.
I may become a German father, sitting in the deadening silence beside the tomb of my son while the dust of burned Jews bedecks the brick walls and gray rooftops of Auschwitz, of Dachau.
I have determined that I will not be this man. I will sound the horror of a thousand tiny humans dismembered and shipped to a landfill, folded into a mass grave of filth and disease, a pit of blood and poison -- children, beloved children of some kinder parent. The mangled bodies of unoffending innocents. Of this evil I will never cease to speak. I will wail and call from the rooftops into a lonely night of cold neglect until the sharpness of the air tears my throat and the sound of choking blood drowns out my words.
It is true that I am full of dire messages.
It is true that I never cease to think, to plan, to pray for the sudden and final end to this culture of hell, this draining of the very lifeblood of essential humanity. And in all of this my focus centers on abortion, the beloved of Moloch.
Never the less so because of my son. Never the less so because the life and joy that seems stolen from me, never to return, is the same life and joy that sinister faces shrouded in white rip from the wombs of miserable women, crushing their last hope in the murder of their children.
This offense, this desecration of the tomb of my son, I will no longer suffer.
I will inspire fear in every abortionist's heart of gris, heart of merde. For when we fail to form the front of our battle with the great determination of a banner uplifted for the right, we, too, desecrate the tombs of our unborn children, of our children so greatly loved, eagerly expected, lost. We surrender the purpose of their lives into obscurity! We debase their humanity.
When we fail to make the sacrifices discerned by our well-developed intellects as just, we submit to the malaise we decry in our modernist-progressivist contemporaries. We are not here to wait for the Second Coming. We are here, pricked, to slouch toward Bethlehem and be born.
Charles is my strong warrior, my tiny intercessor. I will not refuse him the dignity accorded to others merely because of their age. Many will accomplish less in a lifetime than he.
But in all of this, I appeal to you, dear friends. If you cannot find in yourself the passionate intensity which, for vision, is necessary, pray for the intercession of my Charles, my great heart, Carolus Magnus.
And speak to me. I am his ill-suited successor. I am the old one who lingers on in the shadows of this earth as night falls, and, who, with the wisdom of death, welcomes with joy the glory of his destruction.
I will, if nothing else, like a gadfly prick you until, unnumbered as the simbelmynë, we defend the tomb of the unborn.
