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Two Moments

by Christian Huebner 

 

Sometimes two seemingly unrelated moments catch us by surprise. That was the case for me this week.

The first moment was outside of the new Planned Parenthood supercenter off of Interstate 45, the largest such facility in the Western Hemisphere, according to pro-life press. A group from my church gathered on Saturday to pray on the sidewalks outside of the blue-green glass tower. The gated parking lot was patrolled by several middle-aged florescent-vested volunteers in lawn chairs. They saw us approach in our cars – I’m guessing they’d been trained in what exactly prayer groups were allowed and not allowed to do – and utterly ignored us. Understandable, I thought. They were not going to go out of their way to welcome us. They probably had a suspicion about our motives; perhaps they even feared one of us might be a potential danger from the lunatic fringe.

We prayed our rosary, asked for the conversion of hearts, and prepared to go. As we were packing up, I noticed we had a few leftover bottles of water – it was a sweltering day. In a flash of not-so-brilliant inspiration, I decided to offer them to the vested volunteers.

I’ll admit, it was partially a stunt. I mean, really, how cheesy can you get. Nor did the deed demand any true sacrifice on my part; I hadn’t even purchased the water. Still, I thought some token love-your-enemies sign couldn’t be all bad, no matter how flawed the motives.

I didn’t expect to be treated with open arms. Maybe in my mind, I thought of us as foot soldiers on opposite sides of the lines, both loyal to our cause and our commander, but neither bearing specific malice toward the other.

I was wrong. As I approached, I noticed the volunteers averting their gaze. Then I asked if they wanted these leftover bottles of water. They didn’t – wouldn’t – say a single word to me. Wouldn’t look at me. One of them, without looking, shook her head tautly.

It was a brutal moment, worsened because I hadn’t been braced for the blow. And the blow was this: they wouldn’t recognize my existence. They wouldn’t recognize my humanity. The idea, the belief, the sign that I was associated with was enough to forfeit my right to be regarded as real.

It hurt. It hurt because I didn’t want them to agree with me, I didn’t want them to like what I was doing, I just wanted them to acknowledge that I was another human being – like them – trying to do the best he could with the time he had. But they wouldn’t give me even that. They’d closed themselves off to it, assumed I was a lost cause acting in bad faith, a waste of time.

A few days later came the second moment.

I was walking through downtown Houston around noontime. A lanky, dark woman with tight jeans and a t-shirt loitered ahead of me on the walk. Her stomach was bulging. She had a smile, a kind of cocky, devil-may-care smile that I found infuriating rather than pleasant.

I knew what she was doing. Two months earlier, she’d asked me to help a pregnant woman feed herself and I’d told her to follow me into the nearby Burger King. She went straight up to the counter and ordered the most expensive bacon deluxe double whopper meal on the menu. After I’d paid, she’d thanked me like she was a celebrity who’d just granted my request for an autograph.

This time as I approached her, I only looked her in the eye briefly. There was a soup kitchen and shelter nearby – why wasn’t she there for lunch? She seemed put together enough to have a home somewhere, so why was she begging at all? Her presence was grating to me, awkward, a nuisance. I wished she hadn’t been there.

And is that so different from what I found at Planned Parenthood? Neither of us saw Who was in front of us.

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(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)