Gift of life

Yesterday I wrote about blessings but that was very limited. That was intended merely to create an awareness of some of the blessings we have but oftentimes we are unaware of them or we simply ignore them or perhaps we do not consider them as blessings but a burden.

The greatest blessing we receive is the gift of life and each day as we wake up this gift is renewed. How do you respond to this daily gift of life? A friend once called it a “lease of life” because he said that we are not owners of life but lessees or stewards. If we are lessees or stewards, without paying for it then we have the obligation to nurture it.

Last Sunday, I listened to the new Archbishop of Manila, Archbishop Chito Tagle, who spoke of the gift of life. He said that life is the greatest blessing of God and that we should treasure it and to contemplate or meditate on it. Life is a miracle of God’s gift.

One cannot treasure something if he is not aware of the value of what he has. Human nature is such that when we know or are aware of the value of the thing we treasure, we keep and protect it. As Christ said, where our treasure is that is where our heart is also.

The theme of the Archbishop about the gift of life is timely because we are faced with a formidable enemy – the proponents and advocates of the culture of death. These are people who do not value life because they either refuse or ignore the truth that life is a gift of God to them and to others.  For if they do, would they not treasure and protect it?  

We have time and again insisted that life is God’s gift and a blessing but there are people who refuse to accept this fact because it obstructs their libertarian impulses and intentions. As some people could easily kill for a few thousand pesos or for promises of a post, so too the proponents of the culture death are willing to dispose of life as they would their diapers and old clothes.

I was watching a movie where a child who felt neglected asked “what was I before I was born?” The proponents of the RH bill have a ready answer – a piece of meat, an outgrowth, a non-person – so it can be disposed of at pleasure and convenience.

This is abortion which legally is prohibited in this country but practiced just the same. What is insidious is the effort of the proponents of the RH bill to deny the gift of life from developing and being born, of denying this gift from others through their propaganda that a child is a burden, a bother and not a blessing and therefore should be rejected or curtailed.

Those who preach that the child is a burden and that more children only bring poverty and misery into this world should ponder on the words of Thomas Jefferson, third President of the United States. He said that "the giver of life (gave) it for happiness and not for wretchedness.”

Through all these years, the prophets of doom in a world with billions of people in miserable state had always been proven wrong as new inventions provide mankind with all the things it needed – food, clothing shelter, education, convenience, etc. Save for greed, there is enough for all.

This reminds me again of the report in 1965 about the United States dumping into the ocean millions of tons of wheat because of oversupply that depressed prices by a cent per pound while thousands were dying, literally dying on the streets in India due to hunger.

Even now as I write there is news that volunteer workers concluded that the famine in Africa is not the result of lack of resources but of greed.

Indeed greed propels this campaign to reject God’s gift of life and once this gift is born, greed stymies or prevent its development and then greed uses the fruits of its avarice to justify the killing of life.

If we accept that life is God’s gift then we must not only value, nurture and protect this gift but also to help others because they too are God’s chosen, chosen to receive this wonderful gift.

No gift is perfect but would God give an imperfect gift? Life is only imperfect because we think it to be so, but God has a purpose for the kind of gift He gives. It is for us, what Archbishop Tagle said “to contemplate” on this gift and to discern what this gift means to us.

American poet Carl Sandburg has a great idea about why God continues to give us this gift. He said, “A baby is God’s opinion that life should go on.”*

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