LAKE CHARLES -- The Most Reverend Glen John Provost,  Bishop of Lake Charles, was the celebrant and homilist for a Vigil for Nascent Life held at First Vespers on the evening of Nov. 27 in Our Lady Queen of Heaven Church.

“For at the moment the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy.”  Luke 1:44

We are gathered this evening in Our Lady Queen of Heaven Church in Lake Charles at the request of the Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI.  We are pleased to answer his call to join the Catholic faithful and bishops of the world in praying for “nascent life.” 

If we research what “nascent” means, the dictionary tells us that the word refers to “beginning to exist” or “developing.”  I would suggest that our Holy Father is calling our attention to human life at the first moments of existence because we live in a world that shows increasing disrespect for and violence towards the very beginnings of human life.  I think that the Holy Father is suggesting that we can strive for world peace and work for an end to human exploitation—all very noble and worthy tasks—but if we do not appreciate and respect life at its beginning, then we have missed something.  If we do not respect and reverence human life at its beginnings, then we risk losing respect and reverence for human life in all its stages.

Tonight we find ourselves at a new beginning.  The First Sunday of Advent is the beginning of a new Church year.  It is also the beginning of our preparations for the celebration of Christmas, the birthday of the Incarnate Word of God.  How appropriate at this moment of liturgical beginnings that our thoughts and reflections should turn to the beginning of our salvation which is so vitally linked to human life.   No more profound a mystery could call our attention to “nascent life” than the mystery of the Word of God taking flesh in the womb of the Virgin Mary.  God entered history and did so by becoming man.  He reached out in love and in so doing increased the dignity of the creature He already loved.  He participated in “nascent life” and “advanced in wisdom and age and favor before God and man” (Luke 2:52). 

I love the passage in the Gospel of St. Luke that describes the visit Mary gave her cousin Elizabeth, when both were expectant mothers.  Elizabeth says to Mary, “… at the moment the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy” (Luke 1:44).  The “nascent life” of St. John the Baptist is reacting with joy because salvation is near in the “nascent life” in Mary’s womb.  It is a passage of supreme beauty that points to a truth spoken of in no less a document than Gaudium et spes from the Second Vatican Council:

All should be persuaded that human life and the task of transmitting it are not realities bound up with this world alone.  Hence they cannot be     measured or perceived only in terms of it, but always have a bearing on the eternal destiny of men (#51).   

As Pope Benedict XVI spoke of “nascent life” in his homily for this occasion, “It is not an accumulation of biological material, but a new living being, dynamic and marvelously ordered, a new individual of the human species.”

“Nascent life” points to a deeper mystery.  That mystery is one of potency, marvelous to behold, filled with possibilities, and pointing to eternity.  If we can look at a child who has just learned to read or play a musical instrument and wonder what he or she can accomplish in the future, then can we not wonder even more at the mystery present in the “nascent life” of that child?  What is present here?  It cannot be just “biological material” but someone “dynamic and marvelously ordered.”  A “nascent” Beethoven or Mozart, a Shakespeare or Michelangelo, a Blessed Teresa of Calcutta or Blessed John Henry Newman—or the “nascent” life of the dearest person in the world to us—a parent, a child, a friend, a spouse.  Who would not have wanted them to exist?  Who would look upon them as merely tissue?  What kind of world is it that reduces the human being, even in his or her most vulnerable form, from his or her first beginnings, to an object of experiment and destruction?  It is a world that has lost its capacity to wonder and consequently its capacity for the sacred.

To love “nascent life” is to see the marvelous works of God possible in everything He creates.  “Nascent life” speaks of transcendence, human beauty reflecting Divine craftsmanship.  In all the Scriptures, Psalm 8 says it best:

    When I see your heavens, the work of your fingers,
             the moon and stars that you set in place —
    What are humans that you are mindful of them,
             mere mortals that you care for them?
    Yet you have made them little less than a god,
             crowned them with glory and honor.
    You have given them rule over the works of your hands,
             put all things at their feet.