Writer Heather King's life has always been an open book, but one chapter needed exploration. Kerry Trotter spoke to King recently about her new work "Poor Baby: A Child of the '60s Looks Back on Abortion" and the harrowing journey it recalls.
At a time where so much of what is religious has become almost inextricably tied with the political, where social issues hinge more on legislation than any alteration in one’s moral code, when differing beliefs can sever relationships, Author Heather King tackles a most heated topic but manages to step clear away from the fray, and somehow, emerge with a clear message.
In her newest work, “Poor Baby: A Child of the '60s Looks Back on Abortion,” a self-reflective journey hovering somewhere between essay and autobiography, King tells the story of her three abortions and the decades of pain, anxiety and, ultimately, forgiveness that followed.
And also, a revelation surprising to her: she could be a mother to the children she aborted.
“I had suffered in silence as so many women do,” King, 59, said recently in a telephone interview. “It’s a story about death and resurrection. It’s a story about Christ.”
Suffering, she writes, is the “most radical, most incendiary, most taboo subject” in which we can engage, and nothing can alienate a person more than suggesting that our relationship to suffering can illuminate the meaning of life. Suffering is, for so many, born of sin but then reconciled through God, and King’s experience with it is no different. Her desire to grasp the truth meant getting right back into the muck, the mire of it all and coming out the other end...
Today is the Feast of St. Matthew, a sinful tax collector who was called by Christ to conversion and discipleship. Father Steve offers his homily for this Feast below, relating the call of Matthew to the mission of the Church... and our role within it.
Today the Church remembers the witness of the apostle and evangelist Matthew, whose call by Christ is succinctly and dramatically portrayed for us in today’s Gospel.
Matthew identifies himself as a tax collector, which means that he was a collaborator with the regimes of Herod and Caesar who ruled the land of Israel. Tax collectors were not simply viewed as civil servants, but as traitors to not only the people of Israel, but God. This means that the call of Matthew comes to him as a total surprise.