This may seem a strange starting point for someone usually identified with the Right to Life movement, but it recently occurred to me, after all these years of talking about the right to life, that there really is no right to life at least from one perspective.

That perspective is the story of creation from the Book of Genesis. It is in our relationship with God the Creator. Vis-A? -vis God, after all, there is no right to life. Life is a gift of God, pure and simple: a privilege, a favor, a blessing, a grace, unmerited, unexpected, unearned. I have no claim to life which I can assert against God.

That said, I do indeed hold that there is a right to life that I may assert regarding others. If someone comes at me with a knife and threatens to kill me, I most certainly have a right to life that I can assert. I also believe that from the first moments of its life, a child in the womb has a right to life, to assert against anyone who would take its life. But I want to focus on the gift that life is, and not on any right, because focusing on the gift leads to wonder and to awe and to reverence.

Back some years ago, the media insisted on calling people like me “anti-abortion,” and we insisted that we should not be labeled in that way, but should be called “pro-life,” not “anti-abortion.” Some have seemed more anti-abortion than pro-life, but this is a matter not so much of what we oppose as a matter of what we value, what we cherish, what we celebrate.

God in infinite love has called me and all creation into being. This is an amazing fact and the basis for the dignity of every life. God, in an outpouring of love, brought forth all that there is. All that is was known by God before it came to be. All that is was intended by God as part of his plan for creation. All that is was loved by God from all eternity. And God remains present to every created thing maintaining it in existence. If God were to forget us for a moment, we would cease to exist. Reverence for God calls for reverence for all that he has made.

Now, I do not want to get lost in philosophical abstractions, but for three centuries, one question has repeatedly echoed in the minds of philosophers: “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

Martin Heidegger, Jim Bolt wrote in 1994, declared this question to be the deepest and most far-reaching of all questions. Each of us, he claimed, is “grazed…by its hidden power” at least once in our lives, whether we realize it or not: “Why is there anything at all instead of nothing?” another philosopher has said, is not to pose a real question. It is to rhapsodize – to express awe, astonishment, bewilderment before the cosmos.

If that is the way it is with the question of mere existence of even inanimate things as rocks and air and water, then that wonder is multiplied infinitely more when you ask the question, why is there life?

Look at our solar system, generally so cold and lifeless and yet here we find abundance life from the coldest depths of the sea, where no light ever shines, to the hottest and driest deserts. And not life which is monotonously the same, but life in wondrous complexity, diversity and beauty. Why?

Just as existence itself was not inevitable, so life is such an unexpected thing. Life is, in a certain sense, a marvelous oddity, and an amazing exception. It flies in the face of the odds. Richard Fortney, the senior paleontologist of the Natural History Museum in London, has written: “If life is just a matter of chance, then the dice were loaded in its favor.”

By any normal standard, there should be no life. But by some startling miracle, here we are and not just us, all living things that share in the wonder and gift of life. I am reminded of the line from the poet Walt Whitman: “Mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.”

The miracle of life and reverence for all of life is a challenge to our age, which has become fascinated by death. Thomas Lynch, in his book, “The Undertaking,” is certainly correct when he says:

“Maybe we have the ability to kill, to make things dead, even ourselves, but we haven’t the right. And when we exercise that ability, in the name of God [or national defense] (as we have done in war), or of Justice (as we have done with capital punishment), or of Choice (as we have with abortion), we should have the good sense to recognize it for what it isn’t: [it isn’t] enlightenment, civilization, progress, mercy. It is, rather, a shame, a sadness, a peril from which no congress’s legislation, no churchman’s dispensation, no public opinion or conventional wisdom can ever deliver us. For if we live in a world where birth is suspect, where the value of life is relative, and death is welcomed and well regarded, we live in a world vastly more shameful, abundantly sadder, and ever more perilous than all the primitive generations of our species before us who were sufficiently civilized to fill with wonder at the birth of new life, dance with the living, and weep for the dead.”

I think we must do much more than merely protest against a Culture of Death. We must rally in wonder and awe, deepest reverence and gratitude for the marvel life is.