Occasionally a fleeting image on the internet grabs you.  With me it’s usually elephants or old barns.  I love old barns.  But a baby’s face flashed by today, and for some reason I had to spent ten minutes finding it again – then wished I hadn’t, because it turned out to be a photograph of a baby girl about to be killed.  Somehow born alive and intact after an abortion in these United States, and despite the law mandating resuscitation, the ominous rubber-gloved hands were already on her.  Horrified that there was no way I could reach across time and distance and snatch her away from those people, I hung my head.

But that isn’t the whole story.  Not even close.  Instead, the story was that I knew that face from before.  I had seen it as a photograph years before.

Hours later, I found that other image buried in a computer file I hadn’t looked at in years.  And recoiled in horror from the face of my granddaughter being held in her mother’s arms minutes after birth.  The face of a girl grown within the beautiful young woman who ate Christmas Eve dinner next to me just a few nights ago.

Because it was the same face.

The baby girl who was held so that she could live and enrich, as she already has, so many lives.  Compare it, I dare, you to the face being reached for today by those ugly fingers.  I know one lies there looking up still soaked in the hardening amniotic slime she would die in, and the other is washed, powdered, dressed, and gently turned to the light – but it’s the same face!

Of some little sister who would never be surrounded by a dad and mom, grandparents, and a brother and sister who would fight to the death to keep her safe.  Never have a Christmas morning, a first day of school, cut pussy willows in February snow with her grandfather, never once – ever laugh.  But only die nameless, and I grieve.  But then I seize upon the thought that I can name her.  So I call her Esther after my mother.  An act that brings a sudden satisfaction in faith.  Because if I can name Esther I can pray for her, ask her in heaven to pray for me.  Hope that in that better world, she can seek out her namesake and take her hand.  Know she is loved.

But I’m also a man, weak and in despair at my powerlessness.  Somehow I want to let those people who killed her know that Esther wasn’t without friends, wasn’t without a family after all.  But I don’t even know where or when she died, let alone who was wearing those ugly monkey-paw rubber gloves.  And so the only solace I can attain is from the fact that there is a power who does even everything up, and eventually his angels will handle their souls and take whatever vengeance is determined is just.  A terrible fate awaits those despicable murderers; they can no more avoid it than they can their own deaths.

This we have been taught, and so it shall be.

Is that enough?  It’s all there is for the moment.  But no, it’s not enough.

Because I will be judged too, and in truth, I had an obligation to have done better by her.