Life and Death in Lent

Religion Today - Moncton Times & Transcript - February 20th 2016

The reason for Lent is, in fact, preparing for the reality of death. Good Friday is when Jesus dies horribly. The thing is, as a lot of people will tell you, we have a tendency to skip over Good Friday and move right on to Easter- the festival of light and life which declares that even death is not the end and Jesus magically returns from the grave.

Perhaps it is only natural – but we are much fonder of life than we are of death.

There is even a term, and it came up recently, “The sanctity of life” when the news started once more talking about assisted suicide. Life is holy, goes the saying, and so it should be protected at all costs. Life – apparently – is more important than all of the miraculously wonderful things that go into living.

Here is the thing. I spent a morning talking to a man who recently lost his wife. Well – she recently died after a horrific eight-month journey into hell with the rare Jakob Creutzfeldt Disease, or as we think of it, the human version of Mad Cow Disease.

Now, she had a DNR, do not resuscitate order, and they had all talked about how she did not want so-called “heroic” measures taken. But the problem came when she slipped into a coma from which she would never recover – and did not die.

The decision was taken to stop everything that was helping to keeping her alive. Which meant to take out the feeding tube. What followed was four days of starving to death…

I know, this is not a very happy topic… the thing is, I had never really thought about the fact that what actually happens is that you stop feeding them and then let them starve. It seems a horrible way to die, even if you are incurably sick already.

It was one of his final statements that stuck with me and provoked this article. “We talk about preserving the sanctity of life, but we do not talk about the sanctity of death.”

After his wife’s unnecessary suffering he became even more keenly aware of the fact that the more humane solution would have been to help her die quicker, sooner, closer to when her actual life ended.

Currently, he is a fervent advocate of the Death with Dignity movement, and a strong supporter of what the news, unfortunately, calls physician-assisted suicide but which George calls physician-assisted passing over to the great next adventure.

His argument is an interesting one – why do we think being born is a gift from god, but dying is not? Why do we think that life is to be protected at all costs, even when it is no longer worth living? Why would ending the life of a person who is brain dead, in a coma, with no chance of recovery because holes have been eaten out of their brain be called murder and come with a 17-year jail sentence?

Is it not more likely that the moral and religious answer to what would Jesus do would be to administer enough morphine to stop her heart in a second?

That too would be a tough choice to make, a tough moment of courage and letting go. But it would be the humane thing to do – and is, in fact, the human thing to do when a horse breaks their leg or a dog gets cancer. Is it more important to help a pet not suffer than a beloved family member?

Lent is a time when we think about the deeper questions of faith and what it is that keeps us from being the best possible people we can be. The truth is that Jesus saw death as the best possible way to make his point about love and life. Maybe we can stop being so afraid of death. Perhaps it is time to celebrate everything that goes into making us who we are – including our death. 

Getting Ahead by Losing it All

Just when you thought reality could not get any more like the science fiction of the 1950’s and 60’s scientists in Russia and a surgeon from Italy have announced that the first head transplant will be happening early in 2017.

Actually they say it is a body transplant. They are giving the head a new body to control.

I have not heard any of the backlash or religious arguments yet – but I am sure they will come as we think about this. It is a most intriguing idea, one that has been around since we talked about cryogenically preserving brains and then giving them new bodies when the science caught up.

Just the idea that they call it a body transplant shows a bias. People are saying the head, and really they are saying the brain, is what makes us who we are.

Does it?

I don’t have a definitive answer to this, but there is a lot of argument and theory over the last thousand years that shows it is an important question. We could start with René Descartes who famously intoned, “Cogito, Ergo Sum” which means I think, therefore I am. In a nutshell Descartes was saying the only thing we can trust is our own mind – that is how we know we are alive, because we are thinking.

But what of this mysterious idea of the soul? Is there something about the human body, some physical and spiritual aspect that both connects us to God and survives after death? And if so, what is it and where is it?

In the ancient Greek world the soul was thought to be the home of the emotions, and of such concepts as right and wrong. Things like love and courage came from the soul while rational thought came from the mind. Later we would speak of emotions as being matters of the heart – so are brain and heart two separate parts of what makes a person who they are?

It was Thomas Aquinas sometime in the 1200’s who came up with the idea that the soul survives death – that it is somehow part of the divine, of God, and it is how we go on after we die. For Aquinas the soul was not a physical thing but a spiritual thing – maybe a spark of divine energy that exists in us for a while before returning to heaven?

Modern Neuroscience is convinced that everything we are and do and feel comes from the brain; that everything is rational thought and so something like love is actually just our brain doing a cost effect benefit analysis really quickly and telling us the reasons we should like this other person outweigh the reasons we should not. It is not a very romantic view.

I have heard it argued that the appendix is the soul. No one really knows why we have one. Of course, mine got inflamed and was removed so if that is true then I am in trouble.

Go ahead and do some research; every religion talks of the soul, every person struggles with what makes us unique… is it really just our brain? Can you put my brain into another body and still have me be Brett? If so I am choosing Channum Tating.

But what if it is more than that? Am I more than the sum of everything I think? Does my body, my heart, my emotions come from somewhere else? What if all the different pieces are what makes me me? What if the soul is in the heart? Or the stomach? Or anywhere else but the head?

 
I guess we will see in 2017….

You Can't Make Me Go...

Religion Today Column for Saturday March 17th 2012, Times and Transcript

Why don’t you go to church?

Well, to be fair, if you are reading this you probably are, but why aren’t your kids?

I have spent a lot of time talking to kids, to teens, to young adults, and even middle age people about this; about why they don’t go, or why they don’t get involved, or where they give their money and the number one answer is because it is an obligation.

The next generations do not want to be obligated to do things; they want to do only the things they care about.

It sounds simple, but it seems to be true… pick a day, and say, "at 10 in the morning on your day off you need to go here"; and no one will.

And when you probe deeper you will find two things to be true, they don’t get anything out of Christianity and they don’t know where they fit into it all. There is no personal investment because it simply does not mean anything to them.

We pretend we don’t have answers to questions like this, but we do. And we also like to play nice and to be open and honest so we don’t point out some obvious truths.

Economic and educational class matter a whole lot. If you are poorer and less educated you tend more towards church participation. The conservative churches have messages geared to this demographic and have higher participation. 

The mainline churches are middle class and hyper educated and no one comes.

Again, it is a rubber meets the road why does this matter to me sort of attitude. The idea that heaven will bring you peace, happiness and riches sure does sound nice when you are struggling to put food on the table. There are no athiests in foxholes as they used to say.

But if you are self-sufficient, buy all the things to make you happy, spend your time thinking about social issues on your own, what difference does the message of faith make, really?

And even the conservatives have troubles now because the message goes against the general way we are socialized no matter whether you are rich or poor, young or old. Nowadays everyone is told we can make it on our own. That we should do what makes us happy. We are told that we just need the right car, or the right jeans to be popular. In fact, society is not only all about me, it is about me and my stuff.

Christianity says stuff does not matter. It drags you down. Christianity says you are just one person, that God loves everyone and so should you.

And what we have all failed to do, whether you are Catholic or Wesleyan or anywhere in between, is really, definitively, come up with an answer to this. We are not fighting back.

Why should you not be self-centred? Why should you not be concerned with material things? Because God says so? So what?

Until we can look the younger generations who are struggling with identity and purpose  in the eye and tell them truthfully, "You are not going to be happy till you start looking outside yourself", with the greatest of conviction, we are not going to convince them.

And they won’t listen anyway; people spend billions ensuring this. If cars do not make you happy, then the auto industry, the economy, and life as we know it is in jeopardy. So trust me, the auto industry alone is throwing more energy, money, and intelligence into creating a value system then the church ever could.

What we need to do, is be there to pick up the pieces. We need to accept that we can be a dissenting voice in society, but like the parent of any teen, it is going to take years of experience before they realize we had something to say in the first place that made sense.

Young people are not the future.

They will be the future of church and religion later, when their kids have died in car accidents, when their friends succumb to Alzheimers, when their marriage falls apart because of indifference and self-absorption.

As sad is it might seem, we have an answer to the meaning of life that no one hears till they are brought to their knees by the failure of their current life.

And having that answer is one of the most important things we are about. We preserve the truth of life, of the Divine nature of the universe, we are hope incarnate. And we will be here when you need us…

No matter what dies, that death is a tragedy

SOCIAL STUDIES - Published Monday July 20th, 2009

here was a story this week about three cougars being shot in recent days in Princeton, B.C.

Before I go any further, I think I should point out that this is an unusual story. It seems the cougars were actually stalking humans as prey; almost unheard of. In one case the cougar looked like he was about to pounce on two girls who were floating down the river in tubes.

Everyone involved thinks this is very unusual and perhaps the three cougars were siblings.

It seems that the RCMP and the animal conservation people were very reluctant to kill the cougars, and the language of the news reports, both on radio and in print was very balanced.

Now, all of that being disclosed, and at the risk of getting myself into real hot water; there was a sentence in the news reports, in almost all of them, that speaks of something different. The RCMP officer who was quoted said, "We had to do it before anything tragic happened."

Why is it that the killing of three cougars is not seen as "tragic"?

Now I don't want you to think I am heartless and misunderstand how tragic it would be if some girl in a tube got eaten by a cougar; It would be absolutely heart wrenching. At the same time, can anyone define just why the cougar's life is less valuable?

One of the cougars was shot by a hunter who decided it posed a threat. Again, I was not standing in his shoes, but I imagine that I would have no way of judging if a cougar was a threat or not. I know nothing about the psychology of big cats; I know nothing about cougars in particular. And I am going out on a limb here, but he probably did not either.

For that matter, neither would any single RCMP officer.

Sure, if a cougar were actually attacking my daughter, I would kill the cougar if necessary. Of course, if a person were attacking my daughter I would be just as likely to kill them if necessary. In both cases I would feel extremely bad about ending a life.

I would however, do everything in my power, in either case, not to kill them.

I firmly believe that this is our major problem on the global stage; we as a species have not truly come to terms with our own arrogance.

There are theories that place the human race at the bottom of the totem pole; after all, we can be seen as nothing but a scourge on the face of the planet. We cause the most destruction of habitat, ecosystems, and even ourselves. Of all the species of life that exist, we serve the least purpose, we do not contribute to the life cycle of any other creature in a positive way, except by choice.

A cougar, for example, lives in an interdependent family and covers a hunting range of over 300 kilometres, and its main diet is deer and elk. Their niche in the ecosystem is to control the elk population; and they do not even waste any of it. Once an elk is killed, the cougar covers what it cannot eat with debris and continues to feed on it until it is all gone.

In a pinch they will eat up mice and smaller animals too; keeping the population down.

Like us, however, a cougar is an apex predator; no one feeds on cougar meat.

There are a few examples of them attacking humans. It is rare, but it is possible the three in question needed to be killed to preserve more human life. I am not arguing that; I am simply objecting to the concept that the loss of a human life would be tragic, while the loss of a cougar life is merely necessary.

In this, you should read everything from cricket to house cat, from cow to African elephant. Death is tragic, no matter what is doing the dying.

As long as we can easily separate ourselves from the results of death, as long as we can justify it without peering too deeply into the dark recesses of consequence, then we are doomed to continue in our own self destruction.

Those three cougars were hunting; which means they were providing. If, as has been suggested, they were siblings, they are part of one family unit. If three hunters of one family unit suddenly go missing, there is a strong possibility you have just killed off any number of female and young at the same time.

So here is the thing. If we can start to see ourselves as 'one' of the occupants of the planet; neither the most important nor the most useful; then we can start to interact in a better way with the others.

If we can begin to have empathy for just what it might be like to be a cougar, or an eagle, or a butterfly, then perhaps we can start to see a better way to coexist with all other life.

It is tragic when a plane goes down and kills 150 people. It is tragic when a river is polluted and kills 150 fish. It is tragic when a family dies in a motor vehicle accident. It is tragic when cougars are shot because of human encroachment.

I am not reducing things ad absurdum; there is a better way to understand the interrelatedness of the ecosystem. One step along the way is to see ourselves for who we really are, just one part of the whole organism.