What I hope to show in this short paper, in a few different ways, is that in the long run, reality breaks through in our culture.

In the western Christian tradition of thinking about reality, articulated by Augustine before the end of the 4^th century and carried forward brilliantly by Aquinas and Hooker and many others, an equivalence is seen between what’s good and what’s real. Evil, at the end of the day, is a hole in reality. Evil is essentially unreal, although, as the brilliant 20^th century Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe put it, a hole in a bridge is an absence that can have serious effect on you if you fall through it. Which is to say, the harms of evil are strongly felt. But nonetheless, in the end, evil is just nothing, and to be evil is to choose nothingness, to opt against reality.

To claim that every human being is a creature made by God with a special dignity—a dignity to which the Scriptures refer when they speak of men and women being created in the image of God; to claim that this is true no matter how small and seemingly insignificant a human being is; to claim that this will continue to be true no matter how superannuated, or addled, or debilitated a human being might become: these are claims grounded in reality. If they are true, that’s how things really are.

So when we are talking about the prolife “message” breaking through in our culture, what we are talking about is reality breaking through in various cultural products. One cultural product is law, and the great virtue of the Dobbs decision is that in it reality broke through. From the beginning Roe v. Wade had been recognized as based on lies and false ideas; instead of being grounded in reality, it was an exercise (as Justice White said in dissent) of “raw judicial power.” Yet among the productions of culture law is hardly the only, and often hardly the most important. Culture is expansive, including memes and songs, the way we eat and the food we eat, our manner of dress and our manner of addressing one another; it includes dance and film and story and music and words, legends, novels, fiction.

I think prolife sensitivities and convictions can and do break through in the works of our culture not because the creators of these works are trying to be prolife but rather because they are trying to be good at what they do. We should expect to find, in all sorts of writing and story-telling, affirmations and celebrations of the dignity of human beings, unborn or seen as unimportant or judged useless by others. We should open to and hopeful of finding this from any author or playwright or film director because this is what is true. Although faith may help, you don’t have to be Christian to be able to grasp human truth. You can be in error or confused about lots of things and still be able to grasp something profoundly true about human beings.

I think reality is breaking through in all sorts of places.

Exhibit A. The film Juno came out while I was a priest here in New York City. In coffee hour after church one day, a man of the left came to me and asked if I had seen it. When I allowed that I had he told me he thought it was a great film. Now I knew this man was in favor of abortion rights. And as I recall no character in the film argued against abortion rights. But Juno is the story of a girl who becomes pregnant and gives her child up for adoption. Along the way she visits an abortion clinic, and that scene contains the most negative depiction of an abortion clinic I have ever found. The desk clerk is indifferent; the waiting room shabby; the entire atmosphere grimy. Juno leaves it and feels as if she has escaped something ugly. Which, in truth, she has.

Exhibit B. Kazuo Ishiguro has won the Nobel Prize for fiction, and some of his books have become notable films, one of them being Remains of the Day. His later novel Never Let Me Go is set in an alternative present in which many deadly diseases have been eliminated. The means of elimination is the availability of replacement organs from a population of human clones who have been brought into existence simply for this purpose. The novel is in the voice of Kathy, one of the clones, who tells the story of her childhood and adolescence and early adulthood. The rest of society doesn’t want to acknowledge these clones exist: they have to be fed and housed and they have feelings and thoughts and yet society cannot recognize them as people because society’s ongoing existence depends on the organs they provide, and once they make their final “donation,” society abandons them as lifeless meat on a stainless steel operating table (an image particularly powerful in the film version).

Never Let Me Go sneaks up on the reader (or viewer) and gets us to rethink what it means to instrumentalize other human beings for our own ends, which may be quite noble ends such as eliminating disease.

Exhibit C. I am convinced that to be fully human is to be able to live by friendship. Friendship is the heart of being human, and the highest human art is to be able to make and foster friendships. And friendship is breaking through, right now, in our culture big time. Post-covid, we are facing the dangers and the vices encouraged by social media, and people are starting to rethink and resist. People are lonely and they are starting to venture out and risk friendships in the real world. An Episcopal seminary in Wisconsin, the venerable Nashotah House, has a new dean who is committed to in-person, residential seminary life. It is in living in proximity to others—and in a seminary that means actual living, dormitory or apartment, and having some meals together, and classes together, and daily Morning and Evening Prayer together and daily Mass—I say, in living in proximity to others we learn that real people are more important and more surprising than our ideas about people.

Films and novels of great popularity often have friendship of some sort at their heart. This is true of the Harry Potter books. And it is true of The Lord of the Rings which shows, I believe, the affinity of animal welfare and human life.

What I have I mentioned so far are probably easy places for many of us to go—film, Ishiguro, Tolkien, and so on. But reality is breaking through even in strange pleases. Here is one (at least it was strange to me). The author is young, female, a writer for and contributing editor of the solidly left-wing literary broadsheet The London Review of Books. Her name is Patricia Lockwood.

Her first and so far only novel is called No One Is Talking About This. It’s in the voice of a woman who spends every day in “the portal,” which is how she speaks of the online world. Lockwood gently and humorously shows us many ironies of life in the portal, for instance, that something which started out as a place for people could be themselves became a place of vigilant group-think.

Then in the middle of the book, her sister is pregnant. This is wonderful news until, along the way, the child is found to have a scrambled brain. At 20 weeks’ gestation, this child’s head is as big as one at 30 weeks. She notes that no one ever used the word abortion, but she wants to whisk her sister away to place where she could have one and save her life. That doesn’t happen. Instead her sister somehow makes it to 35 weeks, labor is induced, and the child is born.

Genetic sequencing has identified the needle in the haystack, the thing that’s out of place. It’s what’s commonly called Proteus Syndrome; think “Elephant Man.” This baby was the first case identified in utero. No one expects her to live through birth. She does. No one expects her to be able to go home. She does. The book becomes the most realistic and honest and compassionate picture of loving a disabled child (never called disabled; everything about her reveals a normalness that we don’t often see) and the child lives just past six months.

Before the baby was born, they wondered what sort of mind she would have, if any. But: “All the worries about what a mind was fell away as soon as the baby was placed in her arms. A mind was merely something trying to make it in the world. The baby, like a soft pink machete, swung and chopped her way through the living leaves. A path was a path was a path was a path. A path was a person and a path was a mind, walk, chop, walk, chop.” Two pages later: “She found herself so excited by the baby that she could hardly stand it. She was doing so well. She was stupendous. In every reaching cell of her she was a genius . . . Her eyes traveled and traveled though she could not see—would not be able to see, it was immediately clear, there were drops of wild dragon-scale fluorescence where her irises ought to be. So? So what?”

She loved to read her stories. “What did a story mean to the baby? It meant a soft voice, reassurance that everything outside her still went on, still would go on. That the blood of continuity still pumped, that the day ran in its riverbed. Her blue eyes rolled when the voice of the story came, and sometimes she shook with what must have been excitement, trying in her tininess to be as large as what pressed in on her. In the dome of her head, the mercury of all things was trying to tremble together.” Followed by: “‘Seizures,’ the doctor said, and administered phenobarbital, and she stared at him over her nose like a seagull, because if he wanted her to name a hundred saints and desert mystics who were epileptic, she could do it, starting with the letter A.”

She muses while looking at the baby that they could be in a world in which “nothing was wrong or could ever go wrong, that they were on a planet together where this is simply what a baby was….” She asks herself, “What did we have a right to expect from this life? What were the terms of the contract?” The family would say to each other, “She only knows what it is to be herself”; the baby doesn’t know or worry about what “a brain and body ought to be able to do.” The neurologist, when they first met, “had said gently that maybe the baby would one day be able to count to three,” to which she responded inwardly with great anger: “who needed to count to three? Look what counting to three had gotten us. I’m warning you.”

The baby was different, yes, but there is something they see and learn from her difference. Her strong movements, kicking and punching and windmilling and climbing “the air like a staircase” she, the aunt, now sees as “movements . . . designed for a new and unimagined landscape.” The baby was teaching them “how to blast off and leave—how we would fly, touch down, pick flowers in other places.” But not yet. They didn’t want her to die yet.

This is a book about reality breaking through. In part, it’s about breaking out of the “portal” into the real stuff of life that does not, cannot, exist in the portal. It’s also a book in which we see the beauty, the sanctity, of a baby that lives only a few months past birth, who requires continual care and attention, a human being whom others would see as a burden, but who is loved and who somehow points to the mystery that is beyond us all.