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Some clichés are impossible to avoid because they are born of tradition, and thus I hope you will forgive me if I use my first column of 2014 to engage in a little reflection. A frantically busy year has gone by, after all, and the New Year (from the narrow vantage point of the present, anyhow) promises to surpass the last.

I spent the last night of 2013 in church with my family, where we heard a solemn message of self-examination and looking forward. At the end of the service, our church has a tradition in which the pastor reads off the names of those who passed away during the year behind us, followed by that oft-repeated phrase of King James Version genealogies: “And he died… And she died.”

For some reason, the phrasing carries more solemnity than the softer phrasing we tend to use, such as passed on or passed away. Perhaps it is the consonants bookending the word, but it seems more abrupt, more sudden, more final. Less gentle. These people, all of them having lived to a relatively old age, were gone, and their absence brings to mind those short, powerful lines:

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As you are now, so once was I,
As I am now, so you will be,
Prepare for death and follow me.

As we in the pro-life movement prepare for a year ahead, we think back on the some 100,000 lives that were violently snuffed out in the name of the new lethal liberties claimed by the aging feminists decades ago. Their names were not read out for solemn remembrance, because their presence was barely a whisper in the present before they were violently whisked off the scene by those who specialize in eliminating the results of casual coitus. Even if these Nameless did have names, we couldn’t say “and he died” (or, more likely, “and she died.”) Because they did not merely “die.” They were killed. We must remember them, yes. But one does not have a Remembrance Day for the victims of an atrocity that is still ongoing. In 2014, the struggle for the lives of the Nameless continues. The words of Alfred Tennyson, written to ring in a New Year many years ago come to mind:

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light;
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die. 

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true. 

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more,
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

We hope you will join us.

Reprinted with permission from Unmaskingchoice.ca