[Dialogue] A Time to die Guest essay on Bishop Spong's Newsletter

[kroegerd@aol.com]

March 23, 2005
A Time to Die? 

(To my readers: Dear Friends, I have for some time been on the lookout for other progressive Christian voices that I can present to you through this column. It is my hope to introduce four of these guest columnists a year. Each is a voice that this country and this world need to hear. Today's author is Harry T. Cook, an Episcopal priest from Michigan. For some time he has been a creative change agent within our church. He writes with passion and conviction and both of us invite you into dialogue on the content of this timely piece. Please send your comments and reactions to me at support at johnshelbyspong.com. I will try to use as many of your opinions as possible in a future column. The issue Harry Cook addresses is one that needs to be debated publicly. Please feel free to do so. John Shelby Spong) 
"It's what God wants," was the explanation proffered by one U.S. Congressman as he joined the stampede to "save" Terri Schiavo. Ms. Schiavo, who by all reasonable medical opinion has lain in a vegetative state for the past 15 years with no hope of recovery, has been the object of years of legal maneuvering as her parents battled her husband over whether to remove the tube that has artificially prolonged her "life." 
It was bad enough when the Florida legislature and its governor with the last name of Bush got involved, but when the U.S. Congress decided to issue subpoenas to Ms. Schiavo and her husband, and then re-convened both Houses to enact legislation to remove the case from Florida jurisdiction, one thought that brute insanity had taken control. The subpoenas were never meant to bring the bed-ridden Ms. Schiavo to Washington, D.C., but rather to forestall the removal of her feeding tube pending some further legal wrangling. The hastily passed Palm Sunday bill guarantees it. 
It was what God wanted, said the congressman. This writer was not on the spot to interview him, but had he been, the request would have been as follows: "Congressman, be so kind as to tell us how you knew what God wanted in Ms. Schiavo's case. While you're at it, please also tell us how you or any human being can a) know anything about God, and b) can know anything about what that God might want or will in any case." 
This writer has many times put that same challenge to those good folks who would certainly join in the scramble to keep Ms. Schiavo alive and on the same basis, i.e., knowing that it was God's will so to do. The response would therefore be something like this: "It says in the Bible 'the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,' so a person doesn't die until the Lord calls him home." If I have heard that bit of insight once, I've heard it a hundred times. It reminds me of the likewise brilliant piece of nonsense that goes, "Everything happens for a reason" - as if the universe were a fantastic machine clanking along cog by cog, each event somehow connected to the ones before and the ones after so that everything comes out just like the machine's inventor intended. 
Let us agree, at least for the length of this article, that a) no human being could possibly "know" anything about the existence of any god and therefore must infer from observable data any propositions concerning a deity, b) that any such propositions are at best provisional and c) that no person knows what an actual deity might want or will and, therefore, should be ignored when he or she makes a claim for such knowledge. 
That established, what are religiously inclined people to think about the melodrama swirling around Ms. Schiavo? Some of the very same evangelical types who celebrate what they take to be the fact of Jesus' death as the agency of their eternal salvation are also pontificating about the "sanctity of life," as if death were not the end of every living thing. The grass withers, the flower fades . . . Surely the people is grass. It is certainly a crying shame that what was perhaps a potassium deficiency caused Ms. Schiavo's heart to cease beating now more than 15 years ago, sending her into the state in which she has abided for the last 5,475-plus days. A sane and stable person must assume that physicians, who, as a type, are usually the last people to acknowledge that death is inevitable, have done all in their power to help her regain her cognitive qualities. I have never known a physician from whose lips the words "persistent vegetative state" did not have to be pried letter by letter, syllable by syllable - and that with enormous reluctance. 
Several members of Congress, who have run away to join a political circus in which they could not resist piling out of the clown car in order to be noticed, have said the failure to re-insert Ms. Schiavo's feeding tube would be "tantamount to murder." To what would its re-insertion be tantamount? At the very least to getting the government back "on the backs of people." Politicians who are working overtime to kill Social Security and to end all government programs to help those less fortunate, who vote against any proposal to increase the size and scope of government, who miss no opportunity to assert government control over a woman's reproductive organs, now act to prevent a woman from dying a physical death after being otherwise dead for 15 years. I'm sorry, but all that is exactly what it looks like: exploitative, manipulative politics. 
Some of the overtly religious reaction to the Schiavo case seems to be predicated on the belief that the biological life of every human being is a special instance of a creator's will. Because that is believed by some to be so, it is for them unconscionable to let nature takes its course with Ms. Schiavo whose regrettable condition is beyond amendment. What then is life? What is death? And if we are to be expected to keep every brain-dead person on life support until something else kills them, why then is there such bloodlust to execute criminals? Why do those who support the war in Iraq not rage against the terrible deaths of now some 1,525 young American and the unnamed, uncounted Iraqis who have been killed since March 19, 2003? Consistency may be, as Emerson so famously said, "the hobgoblin of little minds," but is it stretching too much to question the inconsistency of the passion to keep Ms. Schiavo alive whilst the nation stands by as young American men and women are being tamped into the cannons of George W. Bush's war on terrorism and states fight the courts to execute as many prisoners as possible before DNA tests might possibly testify to their innocence? It is not insensitive to note that American soldiers in Iraq and prisoners on death row are not brain dead while Ms. Schiavo is. Again I ask, what is life and what death? 
Whoever gave us the biblical document known as "Ecclesiastes" left us a piece of wisdom as blunt for its realism and honesty as that ubiquitous bumper sticker proclaiming the painfully obvious truth that "S_ _t happens" - a conclusive dismissal of the nutty and unsupportable notion that "everything happens for a reason." The Teacher, as the author of Ecclesiastes is called, wrote: "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die . . ." Nothing is more obvious than that, and yet The Teacher's statement is one of the most quoted of all scripture passages. Why? Because that's the way it is. What constitutes "a time to die?" The time to die would seem to be when the life form in question ceases to be able to be what he, she or it essentially is. When the Christmas poinsettia has drooped its final droop, out it goes. That is its time to die. When the light bulb's filament disintegrates, it is no longer a "light" bulb. Following that logic, when a human being can no longer think, is no longer able to function cognitively and persists in such a state beyond the considerable ministrations of modern medicine, it is his or her "time to die." 
That says nothing whatsoever about the idea of dying with and in dignity. Poor Terri Schiavo is well beyond that point now, thanks to the unending litigation over the feeding tube. Do her parents and their perfervid religious and political cheerleaders hope for a miracle, for a divine intervention? Do they actually believe that her severely damaged brain will shrug off that damage and suddenly begin to function again? If they so believe, on what rational basis? Fifteen years of treatment and the most meticulous of custodial care in full view of both her husband and his adversaries, her parents, have availed nothing of their understandable hopes. Absent some new and heretofore unknown or undisclosed indication that she is "brain alive," Terri Schiavo is brain dead. The church of which I am a priest knows what to do in such a case. Its lay and ordained ministers mobilize to offer some of the most poignant funeral rites known to humankind. They speak and hear again words attributed to Jesus, I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord . . . Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord; even so, saith the Spirit, for they rest from their labors. They rise to sing a hymn of antiquity: The strife is o'er, the battle done . . . Finally, they let go as they hear the priest intone Into thy hands, O merciful Savior, we commend thy servant Terri . . . . Receive her into the arms of thy mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light. 
A time to die? Certainly. John Donne's bell will toll for each and all of us. Let it now mercifully toll for Terri Schiavo as she enters a well-deserved eternal rest.

-- Harry T. Cook
Question and Answer
With John Shelby Spong
Leon McDuff, via the Internet, writes: 
My wife and I are so impressed by your weekly essays. When we share some with friends, they ask, and we wonder too, are you retired from the ministry? If not, where do you serve as bishop? We think a lot of people would like to know. 
Dear Leon, 
Thank you for your inquiry. I am pleased to respond. 
I am a native of Charlotte, N.C. and attended the public schools of that city. I got my undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina and my Masters Degree in Theology at the Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia. Since that time I have done additional study at Union Seminary in New York City, Yale Divinity School in New Haven, Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, and in the storied Universities in the U.K. of Edinburgh, Oxford and Cambridge. I have taught at Harvard, the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley, California and the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. I was elected Quatercentenary Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1992, and a Fellow of St. Deiniol's Library in Wales in 2002. I have been a scholar in residence at Christ Church of Oxford University. I have been awarded two Doctor of Divinity degrees and two Doctor of Humane Letters degrees. 
I began my ordained ministry when I was ordained a deacon in the Episcopal Church on June 12, 1955, and a priest on December 28, 1955. I served churches in Raleigh, N.C., Durham, N.C., Tarboro, N.C., Lynchburg, Va., and Richmond, Va., over a period of 21 years. Then, in March of 1976, I was elected by the clergy and people of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark (which includes all of Northern New Jersey, the New York suburbs on the Jersey side of the Hudson River) to be their bishop. I served that wonderful diocese as their bishop for 24 vigorous and exciting years. I retired from that office in 2000 at the ripe old age of 68, and as the senior Bishop, in time of service, in the entire Episcopal Church in the United States. To be away from the demanding administrative responsibilities of a vibrant diocese gave me the time and the freedom to expand my lecturing and writing career so that it has now become a full time new profession. I am as excited about this stage of life as I was about each of the others. In the polity of the Episcopal Church I retain my title as well as my seat, voice and vote in the House of Bishops until death. I have chosen, however, not to exercise that privilege. I never felt that retired bishops, who have no jurisdiction, and thus no responsibility to implement decisions made by that House, should vote on matters that bind the active bishops. So I have no intention of ever returning to my seat in the House of Bishops or of ever exercising that vote. I have many friends among the bishops of my church that I miss greatly, but I also have the sense that I gave all of the gifts and the leadership that I possess to that body for 24 years. I have no qualms now about entrusting this church, which I still love very deeply, to the emerging generation of Episcopal leaders. 
Instead I now write this weekly column, I have a contract with my publisher Harper/Collins to produce three more books. The first one is complete and will be in all major bookstores by April 14th of 2005. I give between 200-250 lectures a year across America, Canada and Europe. I have also made seven lecture tours of Australia and New Zealand and treasure my friends in those two countries. My books have now been translated into Spanish, French, Swedish, Finnish, German, Korean and Arabic and have sold well over one million copies. My invitations to lecture come from every tradition within the Christian Church, as well as some 20-25 colleges and universities a year. I have also had the privilege of lecturing to Jewish audiences in Synagogues, a lawyers group in Ohio, a group of high school science teachers in Edmonton, Ontario, and to the national meting of the Hemlock Society (now called Compassion in Dying). This lecture schedule is posted regularly and can be viewed on my Website, www.johnshelbyspong.com. That schedule is heavily European this year with a ten-day lecture tour in Finland, a two-week lecture tour across Sweden, a one-week course at St. Deiniol's Library in Wales and a number of engagements in England. We are also going to do the 190-mile walk across Northern England from the Irish Sea to the North Sea, while we are there. We expect to complete that in 16 to 17 days. Hiking is a special form of recreation for me and I average five miles a day, though that is frequently accomplished not in the beautiful outdoors, but on a treadmill either at home or in a motel. Perhaps the most important thing about my life is that I am married to a spectacular human being named Christine, who is as talented as she is beautiful. She not only organizes my lecture schedule, but she also is my primary and much admired editor. We have five children, all grown and deeply into their careers and six grandchildren, who range in age from 17 to 2, all of whom we adore. I appreciate your asking. I have a sense (strange I'm sure) that my weekly essays are like letters to friends so that it never occurs to me to think that my readers do not know everything about me that they want or need to know but with this column now reaching about 10,000 subscribers, I realize that this is no longer a reasonable assumption. 
I hope to meet you somewhere, someday. 
-- John Shelby Spong
 
Dick Kroeger