Was That Thunder ?: A Memoir Of Pro-life Rescue, 1988-1997 - Paperback

by James H. Trott (Author)

This memoir opens on the author's ambivalence. He wonders about writing an account of the nine years during which he had more than sixty arrests at abortion clinics in six states. He talks about his own and others' motives as well as the conflicts he felt as the "pro-life rescue movement" led him into a wide range of new experiences. His comrades, a ragtag passel of evangelicals and Catholics, with a few Jews, liberals and athiests, seemed sometimes comical, sometimes heroic. The activist community (involving forty or fifty thousand Americans) was unlike any he had known in Montana, at Harvard University, or in the US Army. He recalls how they blocked clinic entrances over and over despite police warnings and frequent arrests. Their ambitious hope was for the whole church to join them in "peaceful and prayerful" civil disobedience, although in the end relatively few did. Despite severe legislation amd law suits aimed at them, the "rescuers" had a great impact on politics and perspectives. Moreover, they frequently achieved their stated goal of saving lives. The author came to see the American church and its history with new lenses. He came to see abortion as child sacrifice offered to pagan idols. He grew doubtful whether the church indeed served God and Savior as it claimed. Yet he found his own heart humbled in a manner he formerly thought appropriate only to those the movement opposed. As the church finds itself marginalized by legal institutions once viewed as ordained by God, perhaps this will prove a prophetic book. As more Christians begin to experience legal penalties because of their faith, the way of repentance central to the rescue movement may call us all. Perhaps the voices of the babies are a kind of thunder.

Author Biography

James H. (for Howard) Trott, has published five volumes of his own poetry and is co-editor with his wife, Roseann, of A Sacrifice of Praise: An Anthology of Christian Poetry in English from Caedmon to the Mid-Twentieth Century. (2nd edition, 2006) In addition to his poetry, he has published a novel about the Salem witch trials, A Gallows Set Upon a Hill, and Trott All Day: a compendium of anecdotes about other persons named Trott. The author was raised in Montana, son of an artist/wheat farmer from New England, and an intellectual farm-girl. Though a small-town westerner, he attended Harvard College, which he generally disparages except in that he met his wife there. His study was chiefly older forms of English literature and language. His gurus included William Alfred, Albert Gelpi, "Chaucer" Whiting, and Theodore Morrison. During three years in the US Army, Trott and his wife learned Japanese, and spent nearly two years in Japan, where their first of six children was born. Returning and settling in Philadelphia, Trott was successively a seminary student, an auto mechanic, and a roofer. The last of these evolved into general carpentry which was his occupation for the next three decades. From a liberal Methodist upbringing, Trott's spiritual journey moved through what he calls his conversion at nineteen amidst charismatic Christians, to becoming a conservative Presbyterian bewildered by the challenges of an urban church, in which he was for many years an elder. His hobbies include woodturning, song writing and mushroom hunting. He has been involved for several years in short term Christian missions, teaching Bible and wood-working, in Belize, Central America. Retired from a career as a carpenter and residential contractor, Trott continues to write. He lives with his wife and dog in Philadelphia, occasionally overrun by hoards of the intelligent and beautiful grandchildren.