"I Invite You to Meet A Warrior for Life" by Peter Kreeft

I Invite You to Meet A Warrior for Life | Peter Kreeft | The Introduction to The Appalling Strangeness of the Mercy of God: The Story of Ruth Pakaluk: Covert, Mother, Pro-life Activist, edited by Michael Pakaluk

In this book you will meet a truly wonderful person. There are few things in life more precious than that. Even meeting a great fictional character enriches your life. But this one is real.

Since Ruth was a woman who loved God and loved life, this book of her letters and speeches is a book for everyone who loves God and who loves life. But it is especially helpful for mothers, especially stay-at-home mothers, homemakers, people with cancer, parents faced with leaving their children through death, and people who care about abortion.

How to describe it in a few words? All the following adjectives describe Ruth herself as well as her letters and her book.

Utterly honest, human, "homely", and humble. Simple. Direct. Full of the ordinary, but full of a light that shines on or through ordinary life, a light that most of us simply don't see twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

And always cheerful. Surrounded by many small children; infected by cancer; suffering in continual pain for seven years; facing uncertainties about death and then certainties (which is worse?); maligned and misunderstood for converting to Catholicism, for having "too many" children, for being consistently pro-life; working harder for the culture of life while in poor health than most people ever work when in perfect health—yet always cheerful. Like Mother Teresa. Like John Paul II.

They show us that cheerfulness is neither a temporary feeling nor a genetic predisposition but a choice. A matter of free choice-of will, not emotion. This cheerfulness is not a teeth-gritting, "stiff upper lip" cheerfulness but one grounded in truth and in fact, in the certainty of the goodness and wisdom and power of God. (From these three nonnegotiable premises logically follows the astonishing conclusion of Romans 8:28, [1] and the cheerfulness it generates.)

Full of faith, in all its senses: personal trust, personal fidelity, theological orthodoxy, and immediate acceptance of revealed data. Ruth had a brilliant mind, but I'm sure she would have loved the Southern Baptist preacher's famous definition of faith: "If God said it, I believe it and that settles it." Honesty often expresses itself in simplicity, even (especially!) in brilliant minds. (Read Saint Thomas Aquinas.) This simplicity was one of the secrets of her cheerfulness.

Full of hope, especially when things are most hopeless. (That's the whole hard heroism and preciousness of hope.)

Full of charity, of love. The real thing, not imitations. Full of the love of God, which is so immediately translated into love of neighbor that its heavenly origin becomes invisible, like air full of light. Yet also hardheaded, rational, clear. (Why did I say "yet", as if there were some tension? Exactly the opposite: it is all of a piece.) Brilliant, even-in the sense that a light is brilliant, not in the sense that an overly clever scholar is "brilliant". What was her secret? It's no secret. It's all here in print. Just meet her and see.

Read the entire Introduction on Ignatius Insight...