MAKING PEACE WITH DYING:
A PROPOSAL FOR PASTORAL SUPPORT
by
Robert L. Evans
St. Norbert College
De Pere, WI
A thesis project submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree
of
Master of Theological Studies
Approved:
_________________
Rev. Dalene Fuller Rogers, M. Div., Thesis Director
__________________
Rev. John Tourangeau, M. Div., Reader
__________________
Joanne Dupont Sandoval, Ph.D., Reader
© 2006 Robert L. Evans. All rights reserved.
The author hereby grants to St. Norbert College permission to reproduce
and distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis
document in whole or in part.
ABSTRACT
There is a need for Roman Catholic Church initiatives today in the
United States to assist people in dealing with issues of mortality and
making peace with the inevitability of their death. Cumulative changes
in demographics, healthcare, culture and Church have combined to create
a poverty in meaning, faith-community and hope among believers with
regard to their individual eschatologies. This poverty can be addressed
through the lessons of the paschal mystery and recovering a living
praxis of faith that involves a component of kenosis
(self-emptying). Elements of a pastoral support program are proposed in
this thesis which is intended to help prepare people for their eventual
death in the context of the Catholic faith tradition.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION . . . . . 4
The Crux of the Problem
My Perspective
CHAPTER 2. FAITH . . . . . . 16
The Nature and Meaning of Faith
Faith in the Context of Death
Death in the Traditional Balance of Christian Formation
The Prophetic Role of the Church
CHAPTER 3. TAKING STOCK . . . . . 40
Changes Today
A Survey of Our Situation
CHAPTER 4. PASCHAL MYSTERY . . . . 68
The Paschal Mystery as “The Way”
Recovering Faith Community, Meaning and Hope in the Paschal Mystery
Summary
CHAPTER 5. A PROPOSAL . . . . . 86
Anticipating the Inherent Unmarketability of the Way of Christ
A Proposal for Death Ministry
WORKS CITED . . . . . . . 108
3
The Crux of the Problem
I wish to speak of a poverty in
this document, a poverty that has been building for generations in our
Christian, Western culture with hardly notice or mention beyond the
episodic observation by a theologian or philosopher. This is not about
budgets, or social programs or the 401K plans that do seem to capture
much of popular attention and conversation in our North American
nation. But it is a poverty that affects everyone importantly and taps
deep into the very soul of our human condition with its attendant
dilemmas. This is a poverty not of money but of meaning,
faith-community and hope; meaning being the most crucial factor since I
believe the need for meaning is the strongest adult instinct in our
species. It is a distinctly Christian form of poverty in death
ministry, but tightly coupled and shaped by the culture and era.
The deficit is even more remarkable in context of the apparent
abundance that marks our world today. Never before in the history of
humankind has there existed the amount and diversity of resources
available, both in material and intellectual forms, to address problems
that confront persons or simply make life more comfortable and
enjoyable, provided they are lucky enough to have the access. Ernest
Becker described our intellectual situation as “choking on truth,” that
we have so much information it has become difficult to compile it all
and connect the dots meaningfully.1 If our lives in this
age are compared against those of all of our human predecessors, one realizes how
blessed we are with a wealth of advantages; in fact, it surprises one as the blessings begin to be counted.
Even the most archetypal, central and inescapable dilemma of self-aware
humankind--the certainty of personal death--has seen an accumulation of
methods and knowledge to temporarily resist this most formidable of all
adversaries. We now have better understanding, technologies and means
to delay or counter (though not defeat) its power in forms unimaginable
even less than a century ago. In this respect, our position is on
virgin ground unreached by any of our homo-sapien ancestors in the
thousands of preceding years of civilized existence.
In other respects however, despite these overwhelming advantages, there
are warning signs that we have lost ground and actually are less
capable than past humanity. Specifically, I believe we are less
prepared for death, an event in everyone’s life that still remains as
much an existential, spiritual and physical problem for us as it did
for our predecessors. This is not to deny that today there is much
available concerning the pragmatic planning needs for death such as
estate and funeral planning, what kind of information to prepare and
how to get this delivered to the family in a timely manner, what kinds
of medical intervention a person desires for one’s self at the end.
While such practicality is necessary and good, it leaves important
facets and the deeper issues of facing mortality unaddressed. So, even
more specifically, what I want to address is the poverty I discern in
modern Christianity’s response to the pastoral demands with regard to
what Monica Hellwig terms “individual eschatology.” She warns:
Many good Christians no longer know what to think about death, judgement,
The Nature and Meaning of Faith
The theme that I have
chosen for this paper is death, but at its fundamental level this is
really a discussion of faith, faith in the Christian context as a tool
for dealing with death. There are many ways that people attempt to cope
with death, but I believe faith is the most consistently meaningful and
successful way. The human species is hardwired for the need for meaning
and death is our biggest existential and spiritual puzzler, so it is no
surprise that dealing with this dilemma is at the core of all great
religions, whether ancient or relatively recent, though they come up
with radically different approaches.
Having said this, an immediate difficulty is defining what faith
actually is and how it functions in our lives. A comprehensive
definition of faith is beyond the scope of this paper, but there are a
couple of significant deviations I wish to consider that have driven
popular culture into the poverty mentioned earlier. The fact that
heritage Christian faith even incorporates an understanding of death
(other than the death of Jesus) into its theology might surprise a lot
of people today because of the shifts in modern understanding. More
often than not, the message of Jesus is often now popularly cast as
simply establishing right from wrong, good from bad; Jesus is seen as
the ultimate spokesman and model for orthodoxy, drawing us the
quintessential road map of correctness leading to salvation. This is
reflected in the current popularity of the phrase,
“What-would-Jesus-do?” In this paradigm one wants to gain solid
membership in the “good” camp, mostly by claiming relationship with
Jesus and doing “good” things, and
16
steer clear of those people and actions that are “bad.” This is not to
say that orthodoxy is not a component of faith, nor that there are not
distinctions between right and wrong. However, there are clues that
this simplistic definition of faith is discordant with the Gospels. For
example, they record that Jesus often caught criticism for hanging out
with the “wrong” crowd. This definition of faith would appear to miss
something more fundamental and, taking the long view, deviates from
traditional understanding.
Most current biblical academia has agreed upon the kingdom as the
central message of Jesus in his ministry. Nearly everything he said and
did was connected to fulfillment of this kingdom or bringing it to
people’s attention. Albert Nolan writes that, by the time of Jesus,
suffering, persecution and death had long been a part of the Jewish
mythology in their faith stance, and had been modeled and proclaimed by
their prophets. The message of Jesus was different. “Jesus had a new
teaching and, in terms of that new teaching, suffering and death were
closely associated with the coming of the kingdom.”6
Thus it would appear his understanding of faith contains another
functional component; membership and practice in a correct orthodoxy is
not enough and there are a plethora of scriptural examples where Jesus
makes just that case (e.g., Mark 2:23-28, Matt. 15:1-20, Luke 18:9-14).
Jesus is instructing about and urging us toward more than this. We run
the risk of repeating the mistake of the rich man of the Gospels who
thinks he has the bases covered by doing all the correct things, in his
case “keeping the commandments” (Matt. 19:17). He was not able to
understand nor accept the kenosis that Jesus holds out as an essential component of faith, kenosis
(or the self-emptying) in his case as giving up his apparent wealth.
Today, much of comfortable Western Christianity ignores the kenotic component of faith.
The Gospel evangelist Luke has Jesus wondering out loud if “the Son of
man” would find any faith on earth (Luke 18:8). This passage is in the
context of practicing prayer as one component of faith, though we
understand that it is not saying God will measure faith simply by the
amount of praying he finds. Also, there is a purpose--a function--being
held out for the praying; praying is not just for praying’s sake or as the
proportional measure of faith. The prayer here is purposeful: for
maintaining a consistent relationship with and reliance upon God. Other
scriptural examples can be found which demonstrate that Jesus intended
his teachings to be prescriptive. There is purpose behind them to aid
us in navigating our lives faithfully, with coherent meaning and toward
the beneficence that God intends (Isa. 55), not simply a recipe for
correctness. “In the last analysis faith is not a way of speaking or a
way of thinking, it is a way of living and can only be adequately
articulated in a living praxis.”7
Despite the possible denial by or disbelief of our contemporaries, the
question whether Jesus would still find faith today is appropriate,
even in our predominantly religious nation.8
Father Rolheiser believes the movement away from traditional faith has
a long trajectory. “When Nietzsche’s madman smashes his lantern and
shouts: ‘God is dead and we are his murders!’ the murdering process he
is referring to is one which has taken place gradually, almost
imperceptibly, through many centuries.”9
Just as the few sample quotes presented in Chapter 1 imply, there is
something apparently missing. Is faith as we define and understand it
consistent with the one Jesus talked about? A faith that is not
balanced, that chooses some of the message while discarding other
portions of it, can lead to some very unhealthy consequences.
We
seem to have found ourselves in an era of nominal Christianity, whereby
persons identify themselves as Christians by name and observe a subset
of the precepts in the faith, while neglecting others, even though for
perfectly human and understandable reasons. Technically, we are all
nominal Christians at times and to some degree when we fall short of
the call given by Jesus Christ. What is different today is the degree
by which so much popular religion misses the full message of Christ and
so has a narrow vision of God. “Rather God is experienced and related
to as a religion, a church, a moral philosophy, a guide for private
virtue, an imperative for justice, or as a nostalgia for proper
propriety.”10
Nominal Christianity is faith’s version of the Potemkin village: little
substance behind the facade. Because of the functional component of
faith as a way of living, this selective type of faith has its
consequences in how it disables us.
In his book The Heart of Christianity,
Marcus Borg has a chapter with an interesting comparison of the modern
understanding of faith with the pre-modern expression. He states that
faith is made up of head and heart components and today the former
overwhelmingly predominates the latter. The need for literalistic truth
is a fairly recent development, most likely a response to the
Enlightenment, and the rise of sciences, which stress the successful
understanding and use of accurate facts. That facts have become the
currency of belief displacing metaphorical and mythical truth is
corroborated by May. “There can be no stronger proof of the
impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular-though
profoundly mistaken-definition of myth as falsehood.”11
The pre-modern sense of faith was strongly tied to believing, not so
much as intellectual assent to factual truth, but as a commitment to a
truth that involved one’s passion. Borg recovers the ancient ties of
the word believe to belove. Faith has a relational component. “Given
the premodern meaning of ‘believe,’ to believe in God is to belove God.”12
Keeping this relational element in mind, and appreciating the committed
nature that a faith as beloving God creates, one can at least begin to
catch a faint glimpse how the martyrs were able to accept and face
death for that faith. They were able to find ultimate meaning that was
more important than the event of their deaths. By comparison, it is
reasonable to say that today’s version of faith is emotionally
disconnected from its source, except for superficial and episodic
manifestations.
Given that the general state of Christian faith
today falls short of that which Jesus preached, what difference does it
make in our lives? What purpose does faith have in the day to day
events, and especially when a crisis occurs? The sad events of
Hurricane Katrina’s impact upon New Orleans provides a graphic analogy
with nominal Christianity, that assists in describing the situation I
see our population facing as the storm clouds of personal death
approach. News coverage and personal accounts gave us a striking
example of the awful consequences when protective structures, such as
the waterway levees, no longer have the strength to act as they should.
For whatever reason, be it poor design or maintenance, those barriers
had eroded and then failed under the forces exposing the people to
catastrophe which, for a while, they had to negotiate on their own.
Before the storm appeared, most of these people thought the structures
they saw were up to the job, and their authorities assured them they
were.
Unfortunately, this can be an appropriate analogy for the situation I
see in our American spirituality, though I want to focus later on the
effects simply with regard to death and dying. The Church, and its
repository of faith, has long had protective functions for its people,
the ultimate of course being salvation. Christ did not incarnate simply
to reiterate orthodoxy nor to undergo the passion, death and
resurrection as an isolated redemptive act--functional but removed in
personal relevance from all the people in the world. The protective
nature in Christian faith derives from God’s intention and message held
in the incarnation, passion and resurrection as lived by Christ. This
intention holds personal relevance for each of us, now, and the lessons
from Jesus Christ still tie directly to how we live our lives and
understand our mythology. A proper grounding in, and practice of, our
faith helps us to negotiate our daily lives meaningfully, connected to
our God, no matter what disturbing events may come our way, though this
does not mean that sorrow is not involved. This way of Christ is a
route to the mind of St. Paul with regard to how he handled his fate,
including hardships and death. Traditional Christian faith grounds our
lives in essential meaning.
By analogy then, there are structures in Christianity that act as
bulwarks to protect people against erosive and destructive forces.
These structures are built on the foundation of Jesus Christ and the
Gospels, and held together by the interpretive wisdom and teachings
constructed over many years. Yet, remembering the warnings by Hellwig,
May and Marty in the previous chapter, there is a significant body of
data showing these structures have been weakened by neglect,
misunderstanding or disuse. They no longer provide the protection
needed in a rapidly changing world and must be afforded attention so
they can be rebuilt properly and appropriate to the kinds of forces
present. In this chapter, I will review the eroded nature of the
popular understanding of faith and offer some general correctives.
Faith in the Context of Death
Returning to my original
theme, the question arises--what does faith have to do with our ability
to face death? Additionally, with all the significant challenges facing
the Church in the United States today, why would the dearth of
theological support for individual eschatology present a problem of any
relative urgency. In a word, the answer to both is meaning.
Scientific studies have often pointed to the significance of death in
the human condition, though there are two sides to this coin. The first
is its motivational power. “Here we introduce one of the great
rediscoveries of modern thought: that of all things that move man, one
of the principal ones is his terror of death.”13
Ernest Becker, a social scientist, drove this point home is his notable
text, which not only speaks of this event’s significance, but also how
the underlying fear can be understood as the prime, though submerged,
motivation for the dysfunction, strife and hatred that mars the
historical track of humanity. He theorized that a deep, subconscious
fear of death drives mans' motivations; thus we move to what he called
“the heroic”--we attempt to find immortality either literally (which is
impossible) or through meaning. If faith does not provide this
function, man will automatically find another entity that will. In a
companion text, Becker wrote:
Man still gropes for transcendence, but now this is not necessarily nature and
God, but the SS or the CIA; the only thing that remains constant is that the
individual still gives himself with the same humble trembling as the primitive to
this totemic ancestor. The stake is identical–immortality power–and the unit of
motivation is still the single individual and his fears and hopes.14
As our society becomes more secular, religion thus acting less in
this role of connecting to the heroic, it turns to other mythic forces.
Thus, increasing militarism and patriotism in our society might be the
canary-in-the-mine signaling a diminution of mythic power in our modern
distortion of religions and could account for the abundance of flag
lapel pins. Again, I wish to stress that according to these studies,
this meaning-mechanism occurs below our conscious notice. Also,
religion and other ideologies are not necessarily mutually exclusive,
but the danger lies in which source we choose, and ultimately place our
faith in, for achieving the heroic.
The second side of the coin is the psychological need to avoid facing
the personal reality of death. Most persons can deal with it in short
exposures and superficially, but few can attend to their end directly
and deeply, if at all, without the supporting structure of meaning.
These studies also consider the mechanisms and reasons that such a
basic existential and universal problem in the human conditions remains
ostensibly out of our sight and daily awareness, or as Becker
poetically described, “the deeper reason that Montaigne’s peasant isn’t
troubled until the very end, when the Angel of Death, who has always
been sitting on his shoulder, extends his wing.”15
Becker observed that Freud came to the conclusion that our unconscious
does not know death, thus on a basic level we are programmed, in a
sense, to deny death despite the apparent power it has over our lives.
There is evidence of cultural differences in how this plays out among
different nations, but this denial seems particularly strong in our
country. Arnold Toynbee is quoted as saying that “death is un-American.”16
The essential Christian message, the Gospels of Jesus Christ, would
seem to agree that death is a primary issue of our human existence and
how we give meaning to that existence. While the climax of all four
gospel texts is the resurrection, the centerpiece is the passion
narrative. With respect to addressing the human condition, one could
thus say that the Church should see the work around dealing with death
as one of its main tasks. Obviously, this work is not only
counter-cultural, but militates against the comfortable grain of human
nature.
Refocusing on the Good News as passion narrative rather than resurrection is antagonistic to the human need to avoid death.17 We would prefer to repress and ignore the undesirable as Becker notes:
man cuts out for himself a manageable world: he throws himself into action
uncritically, unthinkingly. He accepts the cultural programming that turns his
nose where he is supposed to look; he doesn’t bite the world off in one piece as
a giant would, but in small manageable pieces, as a beaver does.18
We have recently heard the term of “dumbing down” characterizing some
trends in education and general society. In similar fashion, what
Becker is describing as an avoidance of our death issues could be
considered an ongoing repression, which we all do so as not to go
crazy, as a “numbing down.” Small wonder that churches themselves avoid
talking about the hard messages inherent in the Gospel since it goes
against not only the pastor’s, but also the congregation’s personal
programming to avoid the topic and as an institution it does not want
to scare off or offend the faithful.
Jesus suffered a similar dilemma with his flock in John 6:52-66: “When
many of his disciples heard it, they said, ‘This teaching is difficult;
who can accept it’?” The narrative in this pericope may be about Jewish
taboos around flesh and blood, but the meta-narrative is about death,
not only a challenge to accept Jesus’ impending death as observers, but
to go so far in the commitment as to symbolically ingest it. The idea
of getting that close to death was repugnant to many of his followers
and they left.
Despite our natural avoidance of dying and death, they are topics that
must be engaged. Faith in this context acts as a relief valve, helping
people with their individual eschatological questions rather than
letting this pressure build and find outlets in destructive ways. Faith
can provide the meaning for how death fits into their lives, but only
if it is intelligible and connects their setting with the unchanging
truths of the Gospel. Without this formation however, and especially in
these days of complexity and fast decisions, it can be excruciatingly
difficult and soul-rending for persons to deal with the issues of death
lacking the proper context of faith as a meaningful backdrop.
Death in the Traditional Balance of Christian Formation
In his book Denial of the Soul,
M. Scott Peck observes, “In the latter years of his life, Freud came to
believe that almost everything about human behavior could ultimately be
reduced to two opposing forces: Eros and Thanatos.”19 Expressing more than just love, eros
is also the complete range of life-urges or, as Peck quotes Dylan
Thomas, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”20 Thanatos
is the opposite side of that coin, not merely death, but all those
self-defeating and injurious forces we struggle against. Within the
great wisdom--or myth if you allow--of Christianity there echoes a
similar dyad in the configuration of life and death. The two major
seasons of our liturgical calendar are Advent (an anticipatory
celebration of a beginning life) and Lent (an anticipatory marking of
life’s end) that together constitute a narrative for framing and
explaining the human condition and humanity’s relationship with God.
For most of its existence, the wisdom of the Church has been to hold
these two seminal realities (life versus death) together in an
appreciative and complementary balance, rather than favoring one and
neglecting the other.
There is a wonderful poem by T. S. Elliot,
written in 1922, “The Journey of the Magi,” that captures this
connectedness in the philosophical reminisces of one of the wise men
that ends with this reflection:
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down -
This set down.
This: were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
Here the focus sharpens further as I believe that our societal
expression of Christianity has somehow lost this balance and has been
weakened by its neglect, or avoidance, of the thanatos
element within its tradition. That such an avoidance could occur
clandestinely is understandable because the Church exists within, and
its membership is made up of, the surrounding culture. Thus, lacking
sufficient vigilance or awareness, contemporary trends can bleed into
Church thinking and practice if they are not noticed and intentionally
responded to--akin to the moral narrative of a frog sitting passively
in heating water.
In the larger arena, our fellow citizens, whether
secular or not, spend nearly all of their energy, either innocently or
without reflection, embracing eros with all of its desires and accumulation, while doing everything to avoid the kenosis and death embodied in thanatos.
The avoidance extends so far as to resist talking about death or loss
in polite society, or attempting to recast and exploit death as a form
of entertainment. There are some exceptions, though out of the
mainstream and only by a minority willing to engage in critical
thinking. Here, there have been islands of activity in discussions
around the issues of death such as how our culture denies or fears it,
how to define it, how to handle it, how to grieve it. Even so, if the
Church neglects to protect its traditional domain and provide
counter-responsive ministry, it cannot expect the secular world to pick
up the slack and attend to death in a meaningful way, or in the same
way, as the theology of the Church had. The world is neither equipped
nor interested in bringing God and religion into the equation and
cannot find utility or sense in death, especially in our
consumer-driven world, because death defeats continuing consumption.
Thus, there seems to be a parallel dynamic in the Western Church. Its focus and activities favors the realm of eros but with much less attention paid to thanatos,
with the exception of naming the “culture of death” that weaves through
popular culture. Yet if there is even a smidgeon of truth in Freud’s
diagnosis that eros and thanatos are balancing
counterweights in human behavior, should there not be more assertive
pastoral engagement in addressing the issues of thanatos. Think
to yourself, how much pastoral energy or thought is going into this
second realm of human behavior? Even if one disagrees with the stark
duality that Freud supposes, it would be rash to dismiss the concept
entirely as we see, and others have documented, many examples of its
truth personified in our news and in the people we meet. And yet if
there is some truth in this concept, how is it that we have come to a
place where our attention is focused almost exclusively on the eros and what cost do we incur as a community by neglecting the thanatos?
Perhaps another way to roughly characterize and gauge the imbalance is
by way of a comparison of soul versus spirit, using my own
nontraditional definitions. To clarify, I do not mean the specific
entities so much as the qualitative expressions of a person and their
personality, as two forms of lived spirituality. This is tricky
semantic ground and I do not wish to get lost in theological
technicalities here as there are many different ideas about what these
are and how they function.21
Before I begin this short analysis let me state I am not arguing one
aspect is superior or preferable to the other, but that both are needed
in active expression in our lives.
In general it seems to me, from
reading through various sources, that there is agreement that the two
aspects of spirit and soul differ in distinction and feel. For
instance, when one speaks of doing “soul-work,” there is an understood
nuance of an earthiness and sobriety connected to the activity. My
understanding of the difference in distinction is this: soul operates
in the every day, is the earthy element of a person’s essence and also
incorporates the sober regions of pain, loss and death. I think of St.
John of the Cross as a representative. Soul’s movement and language is
typically descendant. Soulwork takes into account human limitations.
In contrast, spirit is lofty, strives for the heavens,
beyond-the-ordinary and the exhilarating. I think of Norman Vincent
Peale as a representative. Spirit is often associated with the dynamic
expressions and activity of a person, using the gifts and inspirations
provided by God; thus our popular saying “That’s the spirit!” Spirit’s
movement and language is typically ascendant. Spiritwork celebrates the
human potential.
In this less-than-precise offering of the dyad-configuration of soul and spirit, a parallel dynamic to that of eros and thanatos
emerges. Again, a healthy posture contains a balanced participation of
both spirit and soul in one’s life, but it is believable (and I feel
empirical) that we have favored the spirit in our modern religion and
society to the negligence of soul. Thomas Moore, strikingly, begins his
book Care of the Soul, “The great malady of the twentieth
century, implicated in all of our troubles and affecting us
individually and socially is ‘loss of soul’.”22
It would seem that he also finds an imbalance in contemporary life,
though his definition of soul is somewhat different. Spiritwork is what
we want whereas soulwork is what we need, yet for a balanced life of
faith, both must be present.
Rolheiser speaks of two “functions” of
the soul that must be kept in balance. One function is to imbue our
life with energy, and so has a principle of “chaos” to it, while the
other function is to keep our lives integrated, having a principle of
“order.” “In a manner of speaking, the soul has a principle of chaos
and a principle of order within it and its health depends upon giving
each its due.”23
There are undoubtably many ways to characterize this kind of dyad and I
do not mean to equate the preceding three as completely
interchangeable. For my purposes I will use the language of soulwork
versus spiritwork for the remainder of this paper.
It would be easy
to dismiss the imbalance in emphasis between soul and spirit as an
interesting but mostly irrelevant feature of the modern age, with no
real consequences. I argue otherwise and have considered a number of
examples of true import and lessons to us all. One of the earliest
biblical narratives, that of the tower of Babel, speaks about man’s
arrogance and presumption in relation to God (“let us make a name for
ourselves,” Gen. 11:4), but it is also an expression of spirit
unrestrained by soul. The people in this story are impressed and proud
of their abilities and so use them to literally attempt to ascend to
God’s level through their own handiwork.
For our own era, a stark recurrence of this lesson can be seen in the
ascendancy and fall, with tragic consequences for everybody, of Nazi
Germany. The Germans of the 1930's, who had suffered defeat and
humiliation for years, found their spirit in their increasing
technological and organizational abilities they are so well-known for.
They were not crazy or bad to applaud this spirit and their newfound
capabilities, especially in light of their hunger for something other
than failure. Unfortunately, they were so hungry for success that they
missed the miasma hidden in the imbalance of spirit versus soul; in the
lack of respect for thanatos.
That imbalance turned a potentially healthy expression of spirit into a
monster of pride and death unrestrained by the expression of soul.
Certainly Adolf Hitler was the focal point and manipulator of this
dynamic, but the people of this society co-opted in this dynamic to
deadly ends.
It is also worth noting that this happened in a nation as educated, creative and Christian as
Germany is, perhaps acting as a lesson on the weakness of nominal
Christianity. I think it is no coincidence that the best known of their
religious critics was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who is legendary for his
gritty and challenging work that speaks of attending to the soul. In
his book The Cost of Discipleship, he points out a stark corrective path that draws on the soul, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”24
Of course the Nazi regime instinctively knew the threat this
re-balancing would be to their project and so had to eliminate his
influence by imprisonment and eventually hanging.
Because of sin,
an integral part of the human condition, we are all at threat of
repeating this kind of story when we let, or choose to have, spirit
overshadow soul. The imbalance is not benign, especially not in today’s
nuclear-capable world. It is exceedingly ironic that to save this
world, to save our existence and lives and souls, we must deliberately
walk the path of the grave. If one believes in the central lesson of
the Christian narrative however, that is the only conclusion one can
reach.
Doing soulwork means bringing in the self-reflective and penitential
strains of spirituality, those movements that human nature tends to
avoid when possible. Perhaps the following quote best captures the
mechanism whereby doing soulwork keeps self-destructive impulses in
check.
Thoughts that dwell on the individual’s past infidelities toward a loving God
effect a movement away from self-love to a passionate love of God. This leads
to the existential awareness of man’s own weakness and propensity toward evil,
and hence to the consideration of the possibility of an eternity separated from
God.25
For this mechanism to work, a person must have the humility and
awareness to know God as greater, and more real, than themselves. Soul
keeps the ultimate pointer of love redirected toward God, the beloved
focus of faith, balancing the temptation of unchecked-spirit to twist
the pointer in the direction of one’s self.
But the work of soul, as the path through kenosis,
is a hard sell in today’s culture. Not only because we are so used to
the successes and luxuries of modern living, but also because this
avoidance has always been a part of human nature. It is true that there
are hardships and losses in everyone’s life, even the most comfortable
of us, but these may occur as accidental events. What is different
about the soulwork I am speaking of is this is the intentional practice
of a discipline that fits into an understanding of what it means to
deliberately take up one’s cross. Supporting this practice is a
theology and a sense of meaning, and the work that leads the person
through spiritual growth and salvation as Jesus promised. Outside the
context of faith, the language of descent is scarcely intelligible to a
normally striving human being.
We have a scriptural example of the clash between basic human nature and this
hard message of the way of Christ. I see this as the reason Jesus makes
his statement about foxes and birds having their homes but the Son of
man with nowhere to lay his head (Matt. 8:20, Luke 9:58). This
quotation occurs in the context of great crowds beginning to collect
around him and naturally some believe he will lead them to seeing a
triumphal, ascendant course in his ministry--the path of the spirit.
The traditional Jewish concept of Messiah was of the person who would
re-establish the Davidic dynasty. Jesus counters instead with this
statement so that they know his path is not one of worldly glory,
dominion and ascendancy. He discourages their labeling him as Messiah.
Instead, his way is one of suffering and rejection--death--it is a
story of descent and submission quite unlike the path they had in mind.
This is the path of the soul.
The lesson here is that even in Jesus’ time, we have an example of
human nature desiring the ascent of spirit and hoping to avoid the
descent of soul. As this example shows, faith can be defined as many
things, but it is not necessarily the faith that God understands,
especially when grounded solely in human objectives. We have to look to
Jesus Christ for his instruction of what faith all encompasses (from
the point of view of God) and we do not have the luxury of picking and
choosing among the parts. Faith is a package deal; all parts must be
operative in order for it to be coherent and life-giving as intended by
God.
While there are other aspects of this imbalance, my intent is simply to
look at this dynamic in terms of how it manifests today in relation to
preparing for dying and death. Yet as a last word, Becker observes that
the ability to hold both spirit and soul in balanced concert is no easy
task, one he judges as “loaded with ambiguity impossible to resolve.”
So Becker poses this question, “How does one lean on God and give over
everything to Him and still stand on his own feet as a passionate human
being?”26
The premise I will follow is that the seeds of the answer lie in
following “the way” as mapped out by Jesus Christ. Following this way
holds tremendous challenge and promise together in a paradoxical
fashion, like a unmapped path that can only be understood in its course
by a commitment to walk it.
The Prophetic Role of the Church
I see an urgent need for
the Church to provide the support and meaning that people require in
facing their mortality, and this work is a legitimate concern of
pastoral ministry. “We have today few specialists of the soul to advise
us when we succumb to moods and emotional pain, or when as a nation we
find ourselves confronting a host of evils.”27
There has been theological activity around this topic but it has not
resulted in many tools directly applicable to the average person
struggling with mortality. Monica Hellwig maps out the center of this
need.
What has been written about individual eschatology in the last several decades
has been very cautious about trying to decipher the symbols of hope. That has
left one area of concern–that is, the consideration of death itself and of the
process of dying. . . . The basic question, as all these authors see it, is how we
are to make sense of life in the face of death and what the Gospel of Jesus as the
Christ tells us about death and about the meaning of human life in face of
death.28
Perhaps, because of the immediacy and power of the Gospel message
in their day, the martyrs we revere from the early Church had a better
sense of loss and death as meaningful components of life and not
something to be avoided at all costs. Today, though we might still
revere the martyrs, it is very difficult for us to truly identify with
their thinking and perspective, given the huge differences in our
formative experiences and understanding. Few of us have the balanced
formation necessary to faithfully walk in their shoes. It seems some of
the early Christians, such as Perpetua, were able to call upon this
resource to embrace the ideal mind of St. Paul. She was put to death in
a North African Roman coliseum in 203 C.E., not a theologian or a
Church leader, but a young mother with a family who was able to make
sense of her fate and mark it down in writing for future generations to
read--a testimony of her faith in God through Jesus Christ.
The martyrs’ sober embrace of death illustrates one of the traditional
strengths of Christianity, a strength not to be found elsewhere since
it is so counter-cultural and seemingly counter-intuitive. It makes
sense that this wisdom of the Church would be disdained by popular
society. We were warned by Christ that the more the Church modeled
popular society, rather than standing on its own belief and
perspective, the more compromised it would become. The Church had to
stick to its beliefs, no matter how counter-cultural or discordant it
is with the “world”. If our contemporary Church underplays the soulwork
component in formation for its people, they are disarmed for one of the
most significant event in their lives, one event that the world only
makes worse in its complexity and secularity. People die without the
empowering that religion could give them to face death from a faithful
and meaning-filled stance. As a result, suffering and spiritual
distress are common companions at the deathbed.
Yet to begin talking about the difficult work necessary for a vibrant
and balanced spirituality, Moltmann says the Church will put itself at
odds with popular culture and the consumer society. “To fit itself for
this task, Christianity must abandon particular environmental
forms–those that the Church has assumed because its adherents are also
citizens in a particular society. . . . Christianity must become the
salt of the earth, a fiery salt in the wounds of the earth.”29 Becker also warns of the sociological problem this prophetic role creates in displacing other ideologies.
And the crisis of society is, of course, the crisis of organized religion too:
religion is no longer valid as a hero system, and so the youth scorn it. If
traditional culture is discredited as heroics, then the church that supports that
culture automatically discredits itself. If the church on the other hand, chooses
to insist on its own special heroics, it might find that in crucial ways it must
work against the culture to recruit youth to be anti-heroes to the ways of life of
the society they live in. This is the dilemma of religion in our time.30
There may be opportunities to learn from others how to do this
successfully in the modern world. Pope John Paul II had said that the
Church needed to learn how to breathe with two lungs, referring to the
Western and Eastern bodies. What strikes me about his statement is with
respect to the tradition of pathos in the Eastern Orthodox practices, a
strong element of the soulwork that I have been attempting to describe.
Perhaps his call was a prophetic expression of the need for more
balance of soul and spirit. The qualitative difference of the two
spheres of Christianity is characterized by Father Richard Rohr as the
appreciation of “big mind” in the Eastern Church, versus the “small
mind” of its Western counterpart. Rohr says, “Big mind sees the whole,
a panoramic awareness; . . . Small mind wants to explain and analyze.”31
A part of the difference I infer here is the inclusion of the affective
and sensual that is integrated into the paradigm of big mind, whereas
small mind focuses on the intellectual and analytical.
Father
George Maloney has written a book that introduces Eastern Christian
spirituality of the fourth to eighth centuries. One of his chapters is
entitled “Weep: There is No Other Way!” in which he explains the
central part that compunction (the weeping for one’s sins) plays in
Eastern spirituality. He quotes a fourth century Abbot Poemen:
One of the brethren asked Abba Poemen, saying, “Father, what shall I do in the
matter of my sins?” The old man said: “Whoever wishes to blot out his offenses
can do so by means of weeping; for weeping is the path which the Scriptures
have taught us, and the Fathers have also wept continually, and there is no other
path except that of tears.”32
The emotive role of spirituality is a concept that has little
familiarity in the arena of Western Christianity, but this example
displays how there may be value in exploring the late Pope’s lead in
this direction. Likewise, there may be lessons to be learned in other
quarters, such as in the conversation with the Jewish faith and
re-evangelization of Europe that Pope Benedict XVI has called for.
Another problem is being able to show people the value of the “narrow
gate,” the hard work of attending to the soul in a world that rejects
this notion (Matt 7:13-14). Practitioners of Christianity have to
understand that soulwork is a pathway to something greater, that one
does not stay in this place of suffering. The passage through the
desert is not endless, but leads elsewhere. Fr. Maloney makes this
point, “per crucem, ad lucem
(through the cross, to light). Compunction was the dying process and
joy was the resurrection of all of one’s powers into a new life that
produced a hundredfold in peace and joy.”33
This message needs to be made intelligible to the average believer, so
that it explains why it remains a part of the way. A strikingly
parallel explanation was penned by Anne Lindbergh, some 60 years after
her firstborn son had been kidnapped and murdered.
What I am saying is not simply the old Puritan truism that “suffering
teaches.” I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught,
all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added
mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness, and the willingness to
remain vulnerable. All these and other factors combined, if the circumstances
are right, can teach and can lead to rebirth.34
There has to be something more in the Church’s response to death
than just administration of anointing in the last hours of someone’s
life. Some form of outreach and formation that recovers and instructs
about kenosis
(and about the meaning of death in life, that gets people to practice
their soulwork, that forms supportive community) is needed. These
measures are needed because we live in a changing and complex world
that works at odds to these notions, and because we have a larger
population which are stranded from community and meaning and are
disconnected from their spiritual resources.
This is not a call for the Church to walk away from joy onto a morbid journey,
but a call for balance. The Gospels are still the “Good News” and not
the “Dire Warnings.” I respect St. Paul’s call to not quench the Spirit
(1 Thess. 5:19). This call is not so much turning down the volume on
the joyous, hopeful and uplifting strains of our faith as it is turning
up the volume on the sacrificial, penitential and soulful ones. I
suspect that by attending to the difficult and sadder elements of our
theology, we will be able to better appreciate and celebrate the
happier elements. Rohr quotes Oscar Wilde on the necessity of having
the affective qualities also engaged in our faith, to embrace both pain
and joy. “Oscar Wilde put it perfectly: ‘Only the senses can cure the
soul and only the soul can cure the senses’.”35
The bulk of the work of re-introducing the concept and practice of kenosis
and soulwork must occur in the Church, as a thematic inclusion in the
discussion of faith. It cannot wait until churchgoers find themselves
in a medical crisis, nor at their life’s end for reasons discussed in
the next chapter.
Changes Today
In the first chapter, I spoke of a poverty of
pastoral resources in preparation for death, a poverty of meaning,
faith community and hope. I mentioned my belief that how we address
this will impact the shape, direction and relevancy of Christianity in
the near future. Even if this is too dramatic, circumstances will force
some type of change. For a brief span of time, in post-agrarian
American society when family members no longer died at home, we have
been able to keep the death of those that matter most to us at arms
length and mostly out of sight. In so doing we have hit upon a
temporary fix to the inner tensions Becker described around dealing
with our own mortality. Yet this fix carries a cost and will be
unsustainable in the future.
Less than a half century from now, our replacements will have more than doubled in
numbers. It is hard to see how we can continue to keep the secret, with such
multitudes doing the dying. We will have to give up the notion that death is
catastrophe, or detestable, or avoidable, or even strange. We will need to learn more
about the cycling of life in the rest of the system and about our connection to the
process.36
This is just one trend occurring, but there are many others
ongoing that has radically changed our existence, and how we understand
and respond to it. Part of the learning must include a faith
perspective that is in step with the changing landscape and responsive
to the shifting needs of believers. There are many reasons why the
current nature of our
dying is different compared to that of our predecessors and some of the high points will be
discussed next. Underlying all this change, I see three general themes
weaving through these issues involving potential threats to the
personal integrity and spirit of the human person. By this I mean that
current trends work against traditional bonds of community, rob pivotal
life-events of their meaning, and act corrosively against hope.
Ronald Rolheiser characterizes our age as one of narcissism, pragmatism
and unbridled restlessness, all of which distances us from our God and
clouds our awareness; he specifically warns that these work against our
ability to be contemplative. Rolheiser relates that Thomas Merton was
asked what the leading spiritual disease of our time was and he pointed
to efficiency, “What Merton is pointing out here is that, regarding God
and religion, our problem is not so much badness as it is busyness.”37
This is not only important, but ironic given that the dynamics of
modern medicine and surging healthcare costs are driving efficiency to
the top of the priority list.
In the highly specialized, technological and business model of American hospitals, events are strictly driven by chronos (clock time) with no sense or appreciation at all for kairos (fullness of time, or the right time). Yet spirituality breathes in the realm of kairos, not chronos.
It has become a fact that the last few hours of a person’s life are
often distressingly busy, not only for them but for their attending
family too. Because the patient in this efficient system can be demoted
to a clinical status, and is often in compromised states of
consciousness and communication, it is tempting to assume the busyness
has no impact upon them, but we have no way of really knowing that. For
these reasons, and others, hospitals are usually poor venues for
addressing spiritual needs of the actively dying other than emergency
and sacramental care. This is significant because most of us now die in
medical facilities, a large percentage being in hospitals, though there
is a bright spot in the growing role of hospices which are more
amenable to extended spiritual care.
The main point of this section
is that we live and die differently today. A poem by Joan Neet George
brilliantly captures the sense of the marginalization that modernity
has brought upon the three themes I mentioned earlier.38
Grandmother,
When Your Child Died
Grandmother, when your child died
hot beside you
in your narrow bed,
his labored breathing kept
you restless
and woke you when
it sighed,
and stopped.
You held him through the bitter dawn
and in the morning
dressed him, combed his hair,
your tears welled, but you didn’t weep
until at last he lay
among the wild iris in the sod,
his soul gone inexplicably to God. Amen.
But grandmother, when my child died
sweet Jesus, he died hard.
A motor beside
his sterile cot
groaned, and hissed, and whirred
while he sang his pain-
low notes and high notes
in slow measures
slipping through the drug-cloud.
My tears, redundant,
dropped slow
like glucose or blood
from a bottle.
And when he died
my eyes were dry
and gods wearing white coats
turned away.
A Survey of Our Current Situation: What is our Sitz im Leben?
In the field of Biblical Criticism, scholars have found that insight
into the social context in which scriptures were written is an
important tool for a more complete understanding. In a similar way, I
propose here to consider what the Sitz im Leben is
for persons in the twenty-first century USA, narrowed to a selected set
of issues impacting how we die. A brief sketch in this manner will show
the unique position we find ourselves in and support my contention that
our situation is problematic with respect to the themes of faith
community, meaning and hope.
Our Demographics
At the end of 2005, the National
Center for Health Statistics reported that the average US life
expectancy in 2003 hit a new high of 77.6 years.39
Taking the long view, this is an amazing statistic in regard to the
experience of our predecessors. “It is estimated that the average life
expectancy was perhaps 20 in ancient Greece, 22 in Rome, 33 in England
during the Middle Ages, and around 35 during the early colonization of
North America.”40
Even at the beginning of the 1900's, the average was only about 47
years in North America. An attendee at last December’s fifth White
House Conference on Aging asked, “What is it going to mean when our
whole population in this country looks like Florida does now-when you
have 20% of the people being 65 and older?”41
One can only guess at how these additional 30 to 40 years of life have
affected the faith understanding and practice of contemporary
Christians, but there are some definable consequences otherwise.
The major causes of death have shifted from infectious diseases to
chronic degenerative illnesses. The top two causes in 1900 of influenza
and tuberculosis have been replaced by heart conditions and cancer at
the end of the century. Not only do we die older, but our deaths are
generally after longer periods of deterioration and with chronic
complications, thus more expensive. It has also become more common that
the circle of familiar friends and family of that same generation for a
dying elder have already died, or are absent because of their own
medical conditions. Because chronic and complicated illnesses are
involved, these people usually end up in facilities other than in their
own homes. “80 percent of the 2.2 million people who die in this
country each year die in institutions.”42 This is a reversal of the situation at the beginning of the twentieth century when at least 80 percent of deaths were at home.43
Because dying has become a longer process, with attendant complexities
coupled with this age of inflationary healthcare costs, the financial
resources of the person, and sometimes their families, can be stretched
to the breaking point.
The structure and operation of the American
family has also changed significantly since the early 1900's. According
to the Census Bureau’s online data, the most common household of seven
or more people in 1900 has shrunk to 2 people by 2000, and the relative
proportion of large families has dropped significantly.44
Single-person households are now becoming an increasing trend.
According to an Associated Press article, based on the 2000 census,
27.2 million Americans lived alone, making up 26 percent of all
households while the traditional married couple with their natural
children were only 22 percent of all households.45
A temporary trend is that more of today’s elderly are relatively
affluent with personal savings, pensions and the support of social
security, so they are more likely to live alone than within their
children’s families and often in separate parts of the country.
However, the generations following them are facing much bleaker
prospects in these economic resources and cost of healthcare. In terms
of stability, and while it may be only a temporary trend, families are
much more nomadic today, moving more often for their careers in a
workplace driven more by global economics.
These are all factors
which make it harder for people to form large, stable networks of long
term community. Instead, the circle of family and friends one has is
generally smaller and often these people are separated by some
geographical distance. It is a rarity for families living in a
neighborhood to have the experience of those from simpler times--to
have known each other all their lives and been long connected within
one local faith community. The ideal fraternity of strong bonds of
community and worship has diminished so that when trouble erupts, and
the crisis is looming, many persons find they have few others they can
look to for help.
More and more today the scenario for an elderly person who has begun
the decline into a chronic degenerative illness is this: one of their
family members will travel there to take care of emergency issues and
then follow up getting them admitted into some form of assisted living
facility. Visits by family and friends become infrequent and spotty,
depending upon the convenience and timing the support persons are
experiencing. The elder’s compromised health means loss of regular, or
all, contact with their faith community for the last few months. The
illness progresses to an acute stage whereby they require being moved
to an acute care facility, usually in a hospital. This phase may have
several bouts of moving back and forth from acute care to long-term
care, taxing the time and resources of their family. Because of medical
expenses, there is an added layer of grief, fear and guilt since the
patient worries about being a burden and the family anguishes over the
choices of procedures and payments; it is rare that they will discuss
these openly among themselves. Eventually, one last move into the acute
care facility occurs as the person exhausts their reserves of will and
energy, dying in the hospital; or hospice if the physicians have taken
the notice and initiative for this option. Thus the often-stated wish
for being able to die at home, quickly and without pain while
surrounded by loved ones, is usually frustrated. Apart from the hospice
setting, and only when it operates ideally, the trends are all moving
in the opposite direction.
Our Healthcare
The breadth and scope of changes in
medical technology and healthcare systems has been enormous in the last
century and show no sign of slowing down. I have selected only a few of
the issues in this topic; those that seem most unique to our age,
problematic where dying and death are concerned and best illustrate the
challenge to keeping a voice of faith in the medical process.
One could characterize this era of healthcare as a struggle between the
themes of healing versus curing. While this thematic tension directly
affects the recipients of care and their families, it is the clinical
personnel (and especially our physicians) who are on the front-lines of
this battle. At this point, the influences of economics and efficiency
has shifted the priority to curing. The physician, Dr. Eric Cassell,
says these tensions and the associated repercussions are a new
phenomenon, “entirely creatures of current medical science, i.e., they
were not possible even a few decades ago.”46
This rapid shift is especially troubling since medicine also has only
recently obtained the ability to keep people marginally alive, only in
a physiological sense, not necessarily a functional or cognitive sense,
“we have seen how modern science can create a living body shell whose
self is gone.”47
The problem here is medical science can use these newfound abilities in
this period of evolving priorities, from healing to curing, without the
aid of precedent or perspective to fully understand all of the possible
implications.
It may be that this dynamic of uncertainty is the
main force behind the rise of assisted-suicide and euthanasia in the
United States. M. Scott Peck was motivated by the concern that these
options will become codified in the near future (and then forgotten as
an issue) to write his book on this topic Denial of the Soul.
In his opinion, they are symptoms of “the spotty, unpredictable quality
of medical care” and the “rampant secularism” in our country. His text
speaks about the despair created by this climate of rapid change in
medicine (and belief) that forces people to take desperate measures.
“Given the impotence–the lack of control–attendant upon such
unpredictability, it is no wonder to me that many would want the power
of management offered by the right to physician-assisted suicide.”48 I would recommend this text as a good overview of the current state of affairs in U.S. healthcare.
The Self Experienced as Patient
Over the eight years
of my experience in providing pastoral support to persons in hospitals,
hospices and convalescent care wards, I have been graced to hear some
of the fears (and hopes, too) expressed by people facing death.
Everybody is a little different, and their journeys and experiences
vary, but there is some pattern to the expressions. What is most often
voiced is the desire to die quickly, not to linger and suffer and with
somebody present who cares. Prayer is sometimes wanted too, but the
need for physical accompaniment and acknowledgment of them as a valued
self seems crucial. When they express fear of death, it most often
comes in the fear of dis-solution, not only of the self no longer
existing, but all the characteristics, abilities, events that fit
together into who they are and the reasons for their life dissolving
into meaninglessness.
It is not without some irony, therefore, that the medical system adds
to the experience of dis-solution in how it operates, “the very
mechanics of reason on which physicians have depended for generations .
. . may lead away from an understanding of dying.”49
This is because modern science, and thus Western medicine, works by
breaking systems down intellectually into component parts. Clinical
staff have been trained in this analytical thinking method (which
Cassell says is necessarily reductionist, particular, atomist) but by
its very nature it works against the existential needs and fears of the
patient. “One cannot arrive at human values by analytic thought.”50
No doubt the staff, who are caring humans, experiences the tension
between identifying with the patient as a person versus a constellation
of medical problems and treatments. Even so, their training toward the
analytic cannot help but be communicated by words and action to the
patient, who has unintentionally been demoted in status to their
condition. It is not uncommon to overhear some person described as “the
lymphoma in room 3" or something similar.
Synthesis of the person
into an integrated whole is one of the traditional functions of healthy
religion, but unless there is some intentional movement to bring this
to the patient, it usually goes missing. Even with the intention,
modern “progress” toward efficiency has made this problematic. The pace
and flow within a modern hospital make it difficult for a minister to
connect with the patient for any length of time, especially
uninterrupted time, unless they have the rare freedom of an open
schedule. Often patients become lost in the system, perhaps so
compromised and with no other person present to advocate for them that
their spiritual needs go wanting. The staff is too driven by the system
to fill in these gaps. “Not only do religion and philosophy seem
distant from the bedside but their questions seem tangential in terms
of modern physicians and what actually goes on.”51
If the patient only speaks and understands a language other than
English, these problems are then multiplied. If anyone wants to know
the sense of isolation and of being lost in the system that patients
feel, all they need to do is read Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ book On Death and Dying.
Complexity in the Definition of Death
There have been
remarkable changes not only in the technology and procedures in
medicine, but also in how we talk and think about them. To take just
one example, the whole construct around defining death, and thus the
associated repercussions, is a complex that has been built up only in
the last 40 years. For most of historical time, there was not even an
official technical definition of death since the sciences as we know
them did not begin to be developed until the late Middle Ages. Since
then, until recently, death was usually characterized by the cessation
of breathing or the function of the heart. However, as medical
abilities progressed to the point of successfully sustaining these
functions artificially, this definition of death sometimes became
problematic and it was not until 1968 that an official body, an ad hoc
committee of the Harvard Medical School, broached the idea to cast a
new definition of death based upon brain function, although this first
venture referred to irreversible coma as a new criterion. After this,
diagnostic criteria for death in this new paradigm were studied and
improved upon by a number of medical entities and was formally codified
in what was termed the UK code by the Conference of Royal Colleges and
Faculties of the United Kingdom in 1976. In the United States, the
President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine
drew upon the UK code for its “Guidelines for the Determination of
Death” in 1981 which accepted brain death as a legitimate diagnosis. It
detailed specific criteria to make such a diagnosis and prevent other
medical conditions to be mistaken for brain death and has been used as
the basis for all states in their subsequent brain death legislation.52
At the same time that this edifice of medical determinations and
diagnostic procedures for brain death was developing, respective bodies
of work were being created in law and medical ethics as well as an
evolution in the field of organ and tissue donation. Thus, clinical
practices around death that did not even exist as recently as the
mid-1900's had germinated and grown into significant structures in the
span of a few decades. It has not only changed medicine, but arguably
society’s attitude as well. It has touched everyone by its addition to
conversations and ideas in popular culture, as exhibited most recently
in the highly publicized polemics around Terri Schiavo.53
The point here is not in the details of the technical or legal
intricacies around the definition of a person’s death, but that these
intricacies have newly become part of the landscape. They are arguably
the best evidence that there are new players and influencing forces,
such as lawyers and insurance companies, in a field where heretofore
none had ever existed previously or, if they did, in much simpler
forms. They are markers as to the increasing complexity of an event
(death) that used to be a natural, organic process at life’s end, where
medical practitioners and loved ones could largely act only as
observers and companions in an otherwise unstoppable process. An
educational guide by The Catholic Health Association witnesses to the
following:
More than 80 percent of the 2.2 million people who die in this country each year die in
institutions, . . . All too often the final experiences of dying patients are crowded by
procedures, personnel, and machinery that are disorienting, intrusive, and largely
unnecessary.54
Medical Systems as a Commercial Industry in the United States
Our country has been coursing a significant shift in the nature
and soul of our entire healthcare system. As an analogy, the main
change parallels the quoted admonition by Nixon’s Secretary of
Agriculture, Earl Butz, in the 1970's to participants of US
agriculture, “Get big or get out!” This trajectory has been unrelenting
and apparently inextricable and we have had our version of prophetic
voices--voices which are true to form in how they make us
uncomfortable--along the way. Daniel Berrigan proffers this snapshot
from the year of 1980:
How marred our hopes are! Things which should be available to all inevitably cost
a great deal. . . . Hospitals have fared less well, for a multitude of reasons. The cost of
medical care, as is no news to anyone, has soared out of sight. Nineteenth-century
orders of women, founded to do basic medical work among the immigrants and poor,
have withered before the blight of the buck. Either the (male) diocesan chanceries have
grabbed the facilities and “integrated” them into church-state hyphens, or the sisters
have given in, done the same sad thing on their own. In either case, the mirage of
bigger and better has won over the solid reality of small and beautiful. By now the
Catholic hospitals, in any given town, including New York, are a crawling sprawl, big
and getting bigger, pledged to roughly the same medical practices, abortion excepted,
as their secular counterparts. In the process, original intentions have all but vanished.
Where nuns are present in the typical hospital, they are more apt to be commandeering
switchboards or accounts offices than nursing the sick and dying. The services are
secularized, with all the ambiguity that implies; so, it goes without saying, are the
finances. The poor receive the kind of health care which the state allow or disallows,
another function of that bulldozing of existence euphemistically, and despite all
malpractice, named “welfare.”55
Berrigan also points out that this change has been heralded by
popular culture as a model of success, which misses or overlooks the
deleterious effects upon personal dignity and meaning in an attitude he
characterizes as, “the American farce of size, quantity, media
puffing.” He then drives his point painfully home. “You don’t have to
be poor in America to die badly. You just have to be dying; the rest is
supplied”56
I do not offer Berrigan’s characterization as a call to reverse this
course, to perform the impossible feat of re-establishing hospitals
owned and operated by religious sisters but as a benchmark and vivid
reminder of where we have been and where our contemporary prophet
points to we are going. He makes this comparison from the halcyon year
of 1980, a striking point for reflection when one considers the
trajectory our society has traveled in 25 years.
Nor is this offered in order to browbeat the medical industry and cast
them as scapegoats in the process, because there are many examples of
good and creative improvements that have come along this same period.
The establishment and growth of palliative care and hospice are
examples of advancement and hope for the chronically ill, dying and
their families. There has been significant improvement in planning and
defining death for the chronically ill and easing their pain through
clinical techniques.
Nevertheless, there is value is taking a hard look at the situation in
the medical system and taking an honest, uncomfortable accounting of
the impact its structure and operation has upon the average person. It
is fair to say that even for capable persons with sufficient resources
the journey through a medical experience, especially one culminating in
the agony of a death, is complex, confusing, anxiety-producing and
expensive. With that admission in hand, more telling is to measure this
experience against one of the oldest and most solid measures of justice
in Christianity (Isa.1:17, Jer.22:3, Matt 25:40). That is, gauging by
the experience from the vantage of our most vulnerable--that is by the
poor; the alien who struggles to communicate in our culture of
rapid-fire English and efficiency; the elderly and mentally-diminished
(no longer just the vulnerable widow); the solitary person who no
longer has available family or friends to act as advocates or guardians
and persons lacking economic access to medical care. What are their
experiences within one of our hospitals or nursing homes and especially
when they are dying? As a critique, how are we doing by the experiences
of our most vulnerable as they die today? Can our systems (and
ourselves by association) stand up to an objective scrutiny?
The Mission of Healing
Our country is undergoing a
slow shift from non-profit healthcare structures to a for-profit
system. Insurance and other financial bodies have a greater say in the
treatment regimen. With a diminishing amount of Church-owned medical
facilities there is a somewhat corresponding loss of spiritual support
in the system, though there is still some appreciation left for the
involvement of faith as a resource. This is especially ironic given the
depth of historical involvement of Christianity in matters of health
and healing.
From the start, Jesus’ ministry had healing as an important factor in
the Gospels. Raymond Brown says that the tradition of his healing
activity “is as old as the tradition of his words and must be taken
seriously in any historical discussion.”57
Another author presents evidence that the burgeoning Christian Church
saw health ministry as part of the mandate by Christ for evangelization
(see Mark 16:18 or Acts 3:16). Hector Avalos, whose premise in his book
is that New Testament historical scholars have understated the
prominence of health matters in Church activities, goes so far as to
make this statement, “Christianity may be seen as a Jewish sect that
had, as one primary goal, the reformation of the health care system
enunciated by the forms of Judaism that held Leviticus to be normative.”58
He therefore holds that one reason Christianity was successful in
attracting members was that it restructured, thereby opening, access to
healers as a part of its new understanding of fulfillment of the
kingdom taught by Jesus Christ. “The distinctive aspects of Christian
health care may be seen when we compare it with the health care systems
offered by other Greco-Roman religious and secular traditions as well
as the health care system evinced in Leviticus.”59
In the later centuries are the monastic traditions, particularly
Benedictine, of providing herbal medicines and infirmaries up to and
through the Middle Ages in Europe and women religious orders
establishing nursing care and hospitals on their own initiative. This
tradition carried to the new continent of North America where the
backbone of our hospital system was built by Catholic sisters.60 The decline of this tradition is a very new development when considered against this historical backdrop.
The transition of healthcare from Christian to secular hands would be
incidental if it only involved issues of efficacy and outcomes.
However, Raymond Brown also illumines the component of meaning, as in
mission, that is also a part of this history. For he points out that
Jesus’ extraordinary deeds carried significance above and beyond the
immediate problem-solving. “The miracle was not primarily an external
proof of the coming of the kingdom (i.e., the fact that Jesus worked
miracles proved that the kingdom had come), but one of the means by which the kingdom came.”61
In other words, in Christian sensibility, healthcare carries an
eschatological function--at least in its roots--a belief in and an
expression of the fruition of the kingdom so central in Christ’s
message. In distinction then, Christian healthcare owns a layer of
meaning and hope which is missing in the secular realm. This aspect of
mission is uniquely Christian; Brown points out that no other prophet
or historical figure imbues this meaning into their healing activity.
“Jesus connects them with the coming of the kingdom, a definitive
eschatological context absent from the prophetic miracles.”62
However, in this pragmatic and factual age, we are prone to only
consider the medical issues and overlook this other layer of meaning.
In this myopia we are probably in good company with the people in
Jesus’ society who were impressed by the immediate results but mostly
clueless about the deeper significance. Because this awareness is
vanishing in our medical industry, the environment lacks the
appreciation and supportive role of the eschatological meaning and hope
found in the Gospels. At the top levels of the institutions where the
mission is decided, efficiency and profit margins often have become the
newer grounds for meaning.
Our Culture
The cloth of what makes up our culture is
extensive, so I will pare the pertinent topics down to values,
secularism, meaning and mythology. These are interrelated and
interdependent so that it is impossible to isolate them cleanly. Again,
the interest is how contemporary trends in these areas work against
faith community, meaning and hope as they play out in our lives and
deaths today. If asked to briefly characterize our American culture
today, I would call it as chronically busy and distracted; our success
in life paradoxically sows the seeds for our failure in dying.
Marty says that the difficulty with the richness of choices is that it
has created “choppings up of existence,” that events and parts of our
life happen in discrete episodes which lack meaningful connection.
“There are no signs, symbols, or languages to communicate across the
boundaries that separate world views create.”63
If anything, this reality makes it difficult to activate our faith as a
way of living, the “living praxis” that Nolan preaches, since there are
no consistent threads of meaning or practice running through all these
discrete parts of our complete existence. Faith, in consequence,
becomes a stuttered feature in the modern life.
The natural human
response to this chopped-up reality is the yearning for integration.
Marty borrows from sociology the phrase “wholeness-hunger,” and says
that in a spiritual sense it applies to man’s yearning to be reunified
with God, “that term may well summarize the ageless spiritual quest.
Whether or not modernity changes the concept completely, there is now
an evident intensifying of such hunger.”64
Values and Secularism
The idea that secularism lives large
and influences the values we hold is not a new idea, and there is a
wealth of material that addresses this issue; this much is obvious.
What may not be so obvious is how this factor has impacted our dying
and death and so, again, I will be selective in addressing this. Martin
Marty makes the point that the modern reality will not change and the
best response for Christian Churches is to be “specifically open” to
secularity rather than rigidly oppositional. Despite our nation’s claim
to relatively high percentages of membership in religions, mostly
Christian, it has a strong characteristic of secularity that operates
openly and robustly, “secularity is to moderns what Hellenism was to
the Greeks; an envelope, a taken-for-granted aspect of reality.”
Because of the human species innate need for durable meaning (as
previously noted by Becker), the search for significance and
spirituality will never extinguish. “Whole societies may be officially
secular, but subculture and individuals within them are as occupied as
ever with ultimate meanings and the signals of the sacred.”65
Idolatry becomes the central issue here, and perhaps this is where
Hellwig’s catechetical response most needs to be engaged, since this
comes down to the question of where we place our ultimate faith. The
best indication of what we ultimately depend on can be seen in where we
spend our time. To be fair, the actors of influence and their power in
our lives are unlike any that previous societies have ever experienced.
Father Richard Rohr has often made the point in his retreats of
observing that 99 percent of all advertisers have lived in this last
century. The message they play is unrelentingly all spirit and no soul.
Without a strong counter-influence, we are all sitting ducks.
A way to think about this is that we all are in continual formation.
While formation is normally thought of as an intentional and defined
process for persons entering a religious profession, it occurs mostly
unintentionally for the rest of us. It is a process of subliminal
formation, that occurs below our notice and, to a limited extent, can
be scripted by others whose objectives are different from ours and not
necessarily in our interest. The majority of these voices today are
focused on the immediate fix, compressing the existential domain from
the transcendent realm of God to the limited world of humans. Without a
practice and understanding of the soulwork required for spiritual
balance, we can be effortlessly seduced to always seek comfort and, by
association, to distress when pain or loss intrudes.
Moore talks about the off-kilter nature often found as an inherent, and
accepted, part of what we call the normal modern life. He says that it
encompasses such a level of “adjustment disorder” that he is tempted to
create his own version of the DSMIII66, a standard diagnostic manual for mental disorders.
For example, I would want to include the diagnosis “psychological modernism,” an
uncritical acceptance of the values of the modern world. It includes blind faith in
technology, inordinate attachment to material gadgets and conveniences, uncritical
acceptance of the march of scientific progress, devotion to the electronic media, and a
life-style dictated by advertising.67
All living organisms are built inherently with the need to seek
comfort and we are no different in this. What sets us apart from other
species is that meaning is the strongest instinct in mature humans, not
comfort or survival. Perhaps the Genesis story is not so farfetched,
that the consequence of partaking of the tree of knowledge is
surrendering our primary right to comfort and survival. The two are
tied together so that the path to real meaning is through suffering and
death. This is not a message you will ever hear from the secular voices.
The subliminal formation towards comfort and this temporal existence
has consequences in the storm of a personal crisis because it lacks the
depth of vision and understanding. Culturally, we have been changed in
how we live and face crisis.
It begins to look as though modern man cannot find his heroism in everyday life any
more, as men did in traditional societies just by doing their daily duty of raising children,
working, and worshiping. . . . That is the price modern man pays for the eclipse of the
sacred tradition. When he dethroned the ideas of soul and God he was thrown back
hopelessly on his own resources, on himself and those few around him.68
But humanity’s resources are limited and not sufficient for the
severity of crisis in the dying and death of a loved one, or of
ourselves, especially if one accepts Becker’s theory of death’s
subconscious power in the human species. Here it seems that Elizabeth
Kubler-Ross comes to agreement with Becker and Hellwig in terms of the
need for appropriate and active individual eschatology.
Paradoxical as it may sound, while society has contributed to our denial of death,
religion has lost many of its believers in a life after death, i.e., immortality, and thus has
decreased the denial of death in that respect. In terms of the patient, this has been a
poor exchange. While the religious denial, i.e., the belief in the meaning of suffering
here on earth and reward in heaven after death, has offered hope and purpose, the
denial of society has given neither hope nor purpose but has only increased our anxiety
and contributed to our destructiveness and aggressiveness–to kill in order to avoid the
reality and facing of our own death.69
Nominal Christianity also lacks the ability to fully inform and
support people facing their ultimate demise. Yet many people have
become so busy and distracted in their lives that the convenience (and
misunderstanding of the Christian tradition) of redefining the role of
their religion has meant that they are comfortable in identifying their
faith as reduced to membership and doing correct acts. But faith
divorced from the full message of Jesus Christ is hollow and endangers
their soul by distancing God. “In his [contemporary analyst Philip
Rieff] view, our generation has an ambivalent relationship toward God:
God has disappeared but we still have his calling card. . . . Future
generations, he asserts, will not even have his calling card.”70
Mythology and Meaning
Rollo May defines myth as, “A
myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative
patterns that give significance to our existence.”71
Myth in this sense bases its legitimacy not in facts, but in narrative
and interpretative truths. This understanding is different from the
popular notion of myth as fantasy. Perhaps it is because this age is so
invested in equating factuality with truth that the word is used in a
pejorative way; a myth is good for a tale, but not for making sense.
In an efficient society with no place for myth as a type of wisdom, two
things happen. First, the myths themselves are discarded or force-fit
into a way of understanding that will not hold together. This
misunderstanding explains why the Bible itself is so problematic,
either misinterpreted or rejected. Second, we lose the skills to craft
and interpret our own intelligible myths and so cut ourselves off from
a valuable way of knowing.
May identifies four functions of myths: They give us a sense of
personal identity, make possible our sense of community, undergird our
moral values and help us to deal with the inscrutable mystery of
creation.72
With such basic and important meaning at stake, I believe that we
cannot actually stop our myth making, but by denying it we push it back
below our conscious awareness, and call it by other names.
Perhaps
more accurately stated, today’s myths have become smaller and episodic,
compressing down from the undivided realm of God into the chopped-up
realms of our earthly existences. Rolheiser says:
The unconscious, and in many cases the conscious, mythology that moves people today
is that of success, of moving up the ladder, of being rich, of having a beautiful body, of
being well dressed, of having prestige, of luxuriating in material comfort, of achieving
optimally, but in comfort, everything that is potentially attainable within our limits.73
I have italicized the last three words because they strike me as
the sticking point--and consequence--of this earthbound perspective.
When myth has been scaled down to reside within our limits, the
redeeming access to something greater has been cut off. Thus, so has
the inherent meaning and significance of the transcendent been lost.
One could say that the narrowing down of mythology this way, or the
jettisoning of meaning that connects us with something more powerful
than ourselves, can be termed as a lack, or loss, of reverence.
It is by this method that our society is moving into an increasingly
insecure and fractured future, at the very least in an existential
sense. With the rise of enlightenment, mankind began to feel a
self-assuredness in human abilities, looking to the advances in science
and markets as signals that we could begin to solve all the problems on
our own. In twentieth-century America, with post-World War II
prosperity and significant technological advances, the notion of
independent, secular self-determination really took off. In our
confidence, we had (perhaps unknowingly) replaced God with the idols of
money and self-reliance, though we continued to maintain our formal
relations with the representing religions by going to a church on
Sunday and identifying ourselves as a member of a religion. But in
terms of where our operative loyalties and hopes really lie, that has
shifted to a reliance on financial vehicles or upon our own powers of
reasoning and ability. Thus the era of self-help books has arisen,
which cooperates with the ideals of individualism. This mythology
worships the superiority of relying on one’s own self rather than the
messier option of a communal response or the vulnerability of trusting
God. We could almost anticipate the publication of a text entitled Dying Well for Dummies.
May provides a measure from his field of psychiatry, “But especially in
America the narcissistic personality has become the dominant type of
patient in the decades since the 1960s.”74
This fractured and incomplete mythology is sustainable only while
things move along smoothly, more or less as planned. Yet life never
operates that way for very long and the whole edifice comes crashing
down when its strength is tested. Without a comprehensive or planned
structure for nurturing--and instructing--the soul of believers, a
vacuum naturally arises out of the need. Thomas Moore states, “The
soul, for example, needs an articulated worldview, a carefully worked
out scheme of values, and a sense of relatedness to the whole. It needs
a myth of immortality and an attitude toward death.”75
Lacking this sort of structure, it is understandable how competing
influences can so readily fill the vacuum with their own mythologies.
Without a framework of meaning supplied by religion, the entertainment
industry can readily offer the fantasy of death as amusement; a quick,
clean termination of a usually-anonymous life with no sustaining
consequences to deal with. Death becomes a caricature or commodity in
the market of ideas and beliefs, fashioned according to the immediate
goals of the marketer with little thought to the sustainability or
intelligibility of the mythology it creates as measured against
traditional beliefs.
Our Church
There are many books and articles
published in the last few decades around a proposition amounting to the
Roman Catholic Church being in crisis. While there is truth in this, I
believe it is not principally in the way that our commercial media
might have us believe. The American Catholic Church does face
substantial challenges in dealing with the sex scandals, the shortage
of religious vocations, various contests to its authority and the
secularism of our culture, but the Church has always dealt with similar
issues in the past. Rolheiser asserts, “Anger and hard theoretical
questions about the church are not the biggest problem; indifference
and a culture of individualism are.”76
Responding to these headline issues, and living in the complexity of
the modern world, our Church suffers the malady of its
culture--chronically busy and distracted.
Beyond the immediate
turmoil, the real crisis I see is the Catholic Church safely and
faithfully guiding its people through the transition from the
Tridentine era to that of Vatican II. We have yet to complete this
passage, in fact it would seem there is a long way to go. Theologians
and historians have understood and commented on how unique and
portentous this council was, not only in the diversity of voices but
the importance in the shift of perspectives. Therefore, it would be
naive to expect these changes to be implemented in short order. Rather,
the Church is still coming to terms with the full meaning and fruition
of Vatican II.
The guiding wisdom of this council was to shift the Church from the
Tridentine model utilizing a classical methodology to one of historical
consciousness methodology. Related to this change of methodology is the
movement to shift from a high christology beginning with the divine
person, to a low christology embracing the humanity of Jesus Christ.
Yet, high christology has been the focus for most of Catholicism’s two
millennia, and much of the theological structure has been constructed
in that context. This shift in perspective will necessarily drive new
understandings about the tradition and raise new questions. The
fruition of these shifts will all take time.
Though Vatican II was the catalyst for beginning this change, the
effects and understandings of this are yet to ripple throughout the
Catholic world. Clerics educated in seminaries may understand the new
directions and their implications of change, but the average Catholic
does not. Most people identify this council by the observable changes
to the liturgy and openness in tone, but the reasons behind them are
unknown. This puts us in a sort of confusing middle ground, with part
of the Church in the informed realm about Vatican II, and part of us
straggling behind or still trying to hold on to the last remnants of
the Tridentine era. One indication of this is the high frequency of
Catholics in the hospitals requesting extreme unction and last rites
for their loved ones, but having never accessed the sacrament of
anointing before coming to the hospital.
The Second Vatican Council will eventually take us to a more balanced
ecclesiology and theology. There will be better participation by all
members, but until then it has left many in the Catholic world without
a firm sense of tradition and they are confused, especially in the din
of strong subliminal formation from the society. Adding to the
difficulty, hopefully temporary, is the deficit of religious members
who act as teachers and shepherds to counter this confusion. The laity
do not sufficiently grasp the extent of this evolving vacuum, nor their
role in this new understanding of Church, and either cannot or have not
stepped in to fill the void.
Monica Hellwig notes that there has been some work by theologians on
individual eschatology that mesh with the new focus on Christ’s
humanity. “The basic question, as all these authors see it, is how we
are to make sense of life in the face of death and what the Gospel of
Jesus as the Christ tells us about death and about the meaning of human
life in face of death.”77
These ideas must be made intelligible and translated to the masses
outside the walls of academia if there is any hope of addressing the
poverty in death ministry and to counter the competing meaningless
voices in the culture. Perhaps this will lead to the Church’s
reclamation of its unique understanding of thanatos and the value of
soulwork that has somehow become de-emphasized in the popular mind.
Rolheiser gives us a tangible sense of the shift Catholics have
experienced in the last 30 years, a shift away from some of the
practices of soulwork.
Thus, you were not just a Catholic because you went to church and respected the
church’s laws on sex and marriage; you were also one because you did a number of
other things: You were a Catholic because you did not eat meat on Fridays, fasted
during Lent, gave money to the poor, prayed the rosary, supported the foreign
missions, and participated in various other devotional practices. To be a Catholic
meant attending benediction; praying the Stations of the Cross; saying litanies to the
Blessed Virgin Mary, St. Joseph, and the Sacred Heart; going to church on first
Fridays and first Saturdays; reading the lives of the saints and other devotional books,
praying for the souls in purgatory; incorporating certain sacramentals, like icons, holy
water, and blessed metals into your life; and going to various shrines like Lourdes
and Fatima.78
Some of these activities may no longer have intelligibility in the
progressing world and theology, but their strength is in their
simplicity and amenability to habit. Catholics of past generations may
have had a better chance of intersecting the paths of their everyday
lives with the way of Christ by adopting these activities of contained
and ritual self-denial into some regular frequency of observance. Even
so, Rolheiser notes that these are not the essence of faith. But the
practice and appreciation of soulwork is vital to finding the ground of
meaning in the scandal of the cross. At the same time the concept of
soulwork is threatening because it runs counter to the other messages
bombarding us daily, both from without and within. Productive soulwork
depends on the ability to think beyond the factual, literal sense and
to appreciate the meaning in myth and paradox. The appreciation and
integration of these deeper and counter-intuitive strains of our faith
will also take time. The source and inspiration of the answer can be
found in the paschal mystery.
In the face of subliminal formation and nominal Christianity,
an observation by St. Paul resonates strongly with the Church’s present
dilemma, that proclaiming Christ crucified continues to be a stumbling
block and foolishness to most contemporary hearers (1 Cor. 1:23). Rohr
begins his book with this brief verse to himself:
Inherent Unmarketability
How do you make attractive that which is not?
How do you sell emptiness, vulnerability, and nonsuccess?
How do you talk descent when everything is about ascent?
How can you possibly market letting-go in a capitalist culture?
How do you present Jesus to a Promethean mind?
How do you talk about dying to a church trying to appear perfect?
This is not going to work (which might be my first step).79
It is only through the lesson of the paschal mystery,
integrating its message into the living praxis of believers, that any
of this might come to pass. This is obviously a dilemma reaching into
all parts of Christian living, but the motivation to address this in a
ministry around death and dying could be the start to a subtle paradigm
shift. There is an obvious hunger for wholeness and meaning in the
average person’s lives, and in their making peace with having to die,
that presents an opportunity for evangelization and a blossoming of the
vision of Vatican II. It has to start with the fundamental
understanding, and living, of the Gospel message.
Too often Christians give in to the temptation to skip directly to the
resurrection as the foundation for their hope, meaning and community,
since the passion and death of Jesus appear to lack these elements to
the rational mind. This supports the idea that there is no value to be
found in discomfort or loss or death--a defeating posture because when
these calamities inevitably arrive in our lives we are left with only
despair, fear and isolation. But the Gospels present the opportunity of
redemption from this desperate state in the paradox of Jesus’ way, and
we have been assured that this is the only
path to the resurrection. “And he said to all, ‘If any man would come
after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow
me. For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his
life for my sake, he will save it’” (Luke 9:23-24).
We all want the
resurrection, but must pass through our personal form of passion and
death in order to obtain this. It is crucial that today’s believers be
able to see that the foundations for hope, meaning and community
actually do lie here, that there is no need, or success, in trying to
skip to the reward of resurrection. Embracing the way of Jesus Christ
prepares us for the approaching storm and assures us that God is still
with us even as it rages and batters our person. In this chapter then,
I will review the paschal mystery as our foundation of Christian
meaning, hope and faith community that enables us to faithfully weather
our personal storms and death.
The Paschal Mystery as “The Way”
For Christians struggling
to understand the ultimate meaning of their lives, it is important to
be able to see the personal relevance, and call, of the paschal
mystery. This is the treasure hidden in the fields and the pearl of
great value that we must diligently search for. When Christ bids us
come and die, he does so not to increase our pain but to help us find
meaning and salvation in the struggle that inevitably comes to all. The
call to follow Christ is not an interesting historical footnote, made
just to Jewish peasants in the first century, but an invitation to
every generation to walk the way of preparation that brings community,
meaning and hope into the synthesis of mankind’s existence. It does
exact a cost, especially difficult in the presence of any residue of
narcissism, to surrender completely to God’s providence.
This essential pattern in Christianity is unmistakable when one is
ready to see it in the narrative examples of the Bible and consistently
throughout the broad sweep of the Christian tradition. Borg notes, “The
synoptic gospels not only report that Jesus spoke about dying as the
path to new life; their literary structure as a whole is also shaped by
the theme of death and resurrection as ‘the way’ of Jesus.”80
It is no coincidence that the passion and resurrection narrative is the
centerpiece and focus of all four Gospels, nor that Mark’s work begins
by quoting Isaiah about “the way of the Lord.”81 We are being instructed directly that this is the only way to follow Jesus Christ and that faithfulness requires a path of kenosis,
a process of self-emptying and completely letting go into God’s hands.
How difficult this is when the ego has formed in the American mythology
of self-making and rugged independence. This is nothing less than a
titanic clash of mythologies.
It is in the wilderness that the way of the Lord is prepared, in the desert
that the highway for God is made straight (Isa. 40:3). Both of these
terrains have long been symbolic as places where people go for
self-purification and re-alignment with God’s will in a process of
asceticism and self-emptying. The Israelites had to wander for forty
years in the desert, a symbolic passage that is replete with struggles
of human will and “stiffneck” behavior that must be given up before
arrival at the promised land. Why would we think that our pattern would
be any different?
Even more frightening to the human psyche is that
all human journeys must end in death. There was no escape even for
Jesus the Christ, despite his divine person.