[Dialogue] Spong on Death and Politics

[KroegerD at aol.com]

February 7, 2007 
There is a Time to Grieve: John  Harvie Knight 1960-2006.  

Life, for all its sweetness and wonder, still strikes us with unbearable pain 
 from time to time. Tragedies that are so far out of the normal order of 
things  are never anticipated. Yet that experience engulfed close friends of mine 
when a  phone call at 4:00 a.m the day after Christmas informed them that 
their adult  son, in apparent good health, had been found by his wife dead on the 
floor. At  some point in that fateful night the creative, sensitive, caring 
and competent  life of John Harvie Knight came to an end. My readers will not 
know John, but he  was a husband, a father, a son, a brother, an uncle and a 
friend. Survivors were  left to wonder, to weep and yes, to pray.  
There is a temptation in bereavement for people to use the grieving process  
to try to explain the inexplicable. Clergy often resort to the familiarity of  
pious words, the assurances of heavenly bliss primarily, I believe, because 
we  do not know what else to do. The hurt is so intense, and we desperately 
want to  soothe a searing pain. I have never found that to be helpful. I do not 
for a  moment deny the reality of what we Christians call our heavenly hope. I 
avoid  this rather because it sounds to me much more like denial, even 
pretending.  Pointing to a future hope rarely meets the depth of bereavement now, a  
bereavement in which all of us are living at this moment.  
Every person I know has had to undergo personal bereavement. I am no  
exception. I know what it means to lose a father, a mother, a wife and a brother  
just to name my most intense memories of grief. I have also, in my ordained  
career, been privileged to live inside the experience of others' bereavement  
hundreds of times. Yet whether it was in my personal life or my professional  
life, comfort has never come to me in pious words or heavenly promises, which  did 
not come near the place where I was living when grief surrounded me. So I  
now make no attempt to avoid facing the experiences of death and bereavement.  
They must be entered - embraced - endured. Their pain cannot be tranquilized or 
 denied. Death is not a bad dream that will flee with the dawn. If we are 
going  to live honestly, death must be accepted as real. We must journey through 
what  the 23rd Psalm calls "the valley of the shadow of death" with our eyes 
wide open  - with death at our side in every step we take.  
Traditional Christian theology has tended to view death as an enemy. "The  
last enemy," Paul called it, which must be overcome. I think Paul was wrong! In  
Paul's era, a time that might be called the "childhood of our humanity," 
death  was seen as abnormal- as an externally imposed divine punishment. Given that
  definition, we were taught to ask the question the Bible tells us that Job 
also  had to ask: "What did the victim do to deserve this fate?" Sometimes we 
expand  that question to ask: "What did the loved ones of the deceased do to 
be forced  to endure this pain?" With that definition death becomes the great 
guilt  producer, the "grim reaper" that comes to extract the deserved penalty. 
Echoes  of this mentality are still heard in parts of our burial liturgies. It 
is time  for us to stop being intimidated by this ancient ignorance. When we 
rise to new  levels of human maturity, we must say an overt no to this 
mentality - no to that  idea! Why? Because the God of Love requires it; the pain that 
it inflicts on so  many necessitates it, and the fact that it is not true 
demands it. Tragedy  requires that we enter the grief process with the 
recognition that death is  neither abnormal nor unnatural; it is part of life itself. 
Death is not a  punishment. Death is not an enemy. Every living thing enters 
into a predictable  pattern of birth growth, maturity and decline and then 
ultimately dies. It is as  if there is a clock within living things that finally 
winds down to zero. That  is simply a fact of life.  
Thus I have come to believe that life's secret is found in embracing death as 
 a companion and walking through life, ever conscious of and intimately bound 
up  with death. That is not so strange an idea since Francis of Assisi 
suggested it  almost a thousand years ago. Death is a friend, a brother, who needs 
to be  accepted, even appreciated. Look at what death gives to life or try to 
imagine  life without death. The fact of death gives life its passion. Death 
rings the  bell on all procrastination. Death means that each moment has an 
ultimate value.  It is unrepeatable. If wasted it is lost forever. Death means we 
must take time  to live now - not tomorrow. Today is the day that we must say 
"I love you" to  our spouses, our partners, our parents, our children and our 
friends. Because we  live in a finite world we cannot wait until tomorrow. We 
say in the political  arena that justice postponed is justice denied because 
life is not endowed with  eternity. In the personal arena it is also true that 
when the opportunity to  love is not grasped, the life that love has denied 
will never be as full and  whole as it might have been, if that love had been 
shared. Death reminds us of  life's finitude. Death calls us to live, to love 
and to be all that we can be in  every moment.  
John Knight was a young man, only 46. No one should die that young, we  
protest. Truth lies in that observation. It is hard to leave the party called  life 
with so much that is unfinished -- before his children are grown - his  
life's work complete - before he has drunk as deeply as he might have of life's  
joys. But how does one measure the meaning of life? Surely it is in the quality  
- not the quantity - of our days.  
All of us have known people who lived to ripe ages, only to face death with  
the regret that they had never really lived at all. We have also known others  
who have died at relatively young ages and yet in a brief span of years have  
impacted the life of the world permanently and dramatically. The Bible tells 
us  the story of Methuselah who, according to the biblical legend, lived to be 
969  years old. The only thing, however, that the biblical writers noted 
about this  long life was that Methuselah died. What a commentary! Imagine living 
969 years  and all that was said of that life was that he died. There are 
other stories in  the bible in which people are struck down in the prime of life: 
Abel, Cain's  brother; Jonathan, Saul's son and David's friend; Jephthah's 
daughter, unnamed,  but needlessly sacrificed to her father's vow. There was King 
Josiah, the hero  of the Deuteronomic reform, struck down in battle when he 
was only 26. Recall  John the Baptist or Jesus of Nazareth, each of whom died 
in his thirties, yet  each impacted life so dramatically that still today their 
influence is felt.  Longevity is not always a blessing. Early death is not 
always without meaning.  
I have known John's family for more than 30 years. He was blessed in many  
ways. He learned from the example of his mother and father what it meant to  
build a good marriage and his wife has received that gift from him. He learned  
from them what it meant to be a good parent and his sons, who are 16 and 9,  
experienced that from him. He learned what it meant to be caring to a wide  
circle of friends and there are many who are more whole from having received  that 
gift from him. John Knight knew how to be creative, how to solve problems,  
how to engage life deeply. It is specifically because of those good qualities  
that our grief is so deep. This young man filled up crucial places in the 
lives  of so many and those are the people who now feel so bereft. But next month, 
next  year, ten years from now - or in the case of his sons, perhaps even 60 
or more  years from now, each of us will glow with pride and appreciation from 
the very  places in our hearts that at this moment seem so empty and so 
hurting. It is how  we live, not the length of our days that ultimately matters.  
Finally, I am today not certain that the Christian Church has been correct  
over the centuries when it has spoken of God in linear terms as that reality  
that is found at the end of life. Increasingly God is found, at least for me, 
in  the present, in my willingness to enter life, scaling its heights, plumbing 
its  depths, squeezing sweetness out of its every moment. The presence of God 
is  experienced for me when I give myself away to another in a relationship 
of love  and caring. Those are the occasions for me when the finite touches the 
infinite,  and when meaning makes time stand still. It is in the moment that 
we call "now,"  I believe, that time opens into eternity and the timeless God 
is met. God is not  our end. God is our depth.  
Grief invites us all to walk into the shadow of death and to find there a new 
 commitment to live, to live fully; a new commitment to love, to love 
wastefully,  and a new commitment to be all that each of us can be. Grief thus calls 
us to  dedicate ourselves to build a world in which every person has a better  
opportunity to live more fully, to love more wastefully and to be more deeply 
 that which each of us is created to be. That is the way we take death's 
hand,  walk with it daily as a friend. and because of its reality learn to live 
with  new passion. That is how grief will be transformed, God is met in the 
depths of  anguish and heaven is entered in time. That is also where we will 
finally  understand Paul's words that God is that presence in which we live and 
move and  have our being, the God who is all in all.  
John Shelby Spong  
_Note from  the Editor: Bishop Spong's new book is available now at 
bookstores everywhere  and by clicking here!_ 
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060762055/agoramedia-20)   
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
S. Q from Washington, D.C. writes  
"As the presidential campaign begins to take shape, do you think it is  
appropriate and or important for the candidates to express their personal  
religious views and to use religious rhetoric? Why?"  
Dear S. Q.,  
It is inevitable that if politicians think it will win votes, they will talk  
about their religious views. It is certainly now in vogue to do so. I recall  
that in 1980 all three candidates Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter and John 
Anderson  claimed to be "born again Christians." When all make the claim credibility 
 becomes the issue. No one has ever doubted the authenticity of President  
Carter's religious commitment, but in 1980 the "religious vote" went to Ronald  
Reagan. That was unusual especially in that it must be noted that if Mr. 
Reagan  were a "born again Christian," that fact did not seem to require either 
that he  attend a church with some regularity or that he support a church with 
regular  contributions. To show the complexity of this issue we observe that one 
of the  most deeply spiritual presidents we have ever had, Abraham Lincoln, 
was known  not to be a church attendee at all. In 1952 Unitarian Adlai 
Stevenson ran  against unbaptized Dwight Eisenhower and the issue of religion never 
came up in  the campaign. It needs to be stated that both later became quite 
proper  Presbyterians. It was the Roman Catholicism of John F. Kennedy in 1960 
that is  given credit for making religion so overt an issue in national 
politics. America  had rejected the only other Roman Catholic candidate who had been a 
major party  nominee, Alfred E. Smith of New York in 1928. I am certain that 
Smith's Roman  Catholicism was an issue in his defeat though it is hard to say 
that it was the  determinative issue in that election. Senator Kennedy 
defused a potential  anti-Catholic vote in 1960, we recall, by saying that he would 
not allow his  religion to determine his behavior as president. That seemed to 
be a  satisfactory place for a Roman Catholic candidate to stand in 1960. In 
1984,  however, when Roman Catholic Geraldine Ferraro was a vice presidential 
nominee  and in 2004 when Roman Catholic John Kerry was a presidential 
nominee, the  Kennedy stance was judged to be inappropriate by Roman Catholic Bishops 
who  insisted that the moral stands of their church must be the policy of 
American  Catholic politicians - or the withholding of communion was threatened.  
I want my presidents to have a clear sense of who they are, including a sense 
 of what they believe and how they live out that belief. I also want every  
president to know that this is a multi-faith nation and our leader must be  
respectful of all religious traditions and unwilling to impose any particular  
religious viewpoint upon the whole body politic. I trace the beginning of the  
decline in popularity of the present incumbent to his attempt, supported by  
Senator Bill Frist and Representative Tom DeLay, to make conservative Christian  
end of life issues in the Terri Schiavo case, a political cause designed to 
win  the support of his religious base. In a similar manner President Bush's 
use of  such things as the teaching of "Intelligent Design" as an alternative to 
 evolution and his making homosexuality a political issue, both in response 
to  his presumed religious values and certainly to gain support from right wing 
 religious voters, was appalling to me.  
There is a fine line between religious devotion and the use of religion in  
the public arena to gain election. I want candidates for the presidency to know 
 how to walk that line.  
John Shelby Spong 
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