Was That Thunder ?

This memoir opens on the author's ambivalence. He wonders about writing an account of the nine years during which he had more than sixty arrests at abortion clinics in six states. He talks about his own and others' motives as well as the conflicts he felt as the "pro-life rescue movement" led him into a wide range of new experiences. His comrades, a ragtag passel of evangelicals and Catholics, with a few Jews, liberals and athiests, seemed sometimes comical, sometimes heroic. The activist community (involving forty or fifty thousand Americans) was unlike any he had known in Montana, at Harvard University, or in the US Army. He recalls how they blocked clinic entrances over and over despite police warnings and frequent arrests. Their ambitious hope was for the whole church to join them in "peaceful and prayerful" civil disobedience, although in the end relatively few did. Despite severe legislation amd law suits aimed at them, the "rescuers" had a great impact on politics and perspectives. Moreover, they frequently achieved their stated goal of saving lives. The author came to see the American church and its history with new lenses. He came to see abortion as child sacrifice offered to pagan idols. He grew doubtful whether the church indeed served God and Savior as it claimed. Yet he found his own heart humbled in a manner he formerly thought appropriate only to those the movement opposed. As the church finds itself marginalized by legal institutions once viewed as ordained by God, perhaps this will prove a prophetic book. As more Christians begin to experience legal penalties because of their faith, the way of repentance central to the rescue movement may call us all. Perhaps the voices of the babies are a kind of thunder.