Dying with Christian dignity

...There was to be no lugubrious address, no lamentation, no groaning and no moaning, but gratitude and -- after Mozartian sounds of flute and harp -- the powerful singing of the congregation, in which not only believers joined but also many doubters and perhaps those who no longer believed or did not yet believe: "Now thank we all our God, with heart and hands and voices, who wondrous things has done, in whom the world rejoices_9 _9 . ." Was all this wishful thinking...

...And so finally elevated in the transcendentad sense: elevated beyond life and death into the Infinite of eternal life, not in the dimension of space and time, but in the dimension of the divine...

...This we have also found appropriate and true for our own death: for a self that is willing to die to itself, death is an aspect of our existence to be accepted and embraced as itself a step, a medium, a symbol of the transcendent ground on which we are dependent...

...Those who think they are firm should take care lest they fall - - theologians first of all...

...Should it not be possible to him who believes in something more than an all-begetting and all-engulfing universal nature, who believes in an absolutely last, absolutely first reality that we call life, good, love itself, that we may call the loving God and Father of mankind...

...In this way would not a dying in composure, quiet expectation, hopeful certainty, be possible, perhaps even -- after everything is settled that needs to be settled -- in joyous, devoted gratitude for what was -- with all its evils -- a rich life in the present age, a life now dissolved (aufgehoben in the threefold Hegelian sense) into eternity...

...For he, that is responsible for thy composition originally, and thy dissolution now, decides when it is complete...

...But ought there not to be today once more something like an ars moriendi, a n " a t t of dying...

...If then it is not the doctor but God who remains Lord over life and death, death and life, man can also gain a new freedom in this life of suffering: _9 liberation for a new freedom, not from suffering but in suffering, that freedom of the believer who is never depressed by any fear of pain, who never despairs even in death in all his doubts about himself and the world...

...From then onward we have been able confidently to assume that we do not die into a darkness, into a void, a nothingness, but into a new existence, into the fullness, the pleroma, the light of a quite different day and that at the same time we do not have to achieve anything new, but only permit ourselves to be called, led, sustained...

...He was merely following worn liturgical paths, and he would have bridled at the deviant theology I was fastening upon him...

...I backs to us all...

...9 liberation for the sober understanding that suffering and death can be fought with every means, but not finally conquered, that all the techniques of healing still fail to silence the question of the healing of the whole...

...9 liberation from the illusion that we could ever abolish death and the discordance of reality as a whole by technological developments, psychological stabilization, genetic manipulation, break through the vicious circle of human selfdestruction and ourselves create the realm of freedom from all suffering and death...

...This is the authentic stoic attitude...

...No, when it comes to dying, the Christian must not - - like the stoic - - suppress emotions, deny passions, put on an act of emotional coolness and composure...

...But at the same time in a positive sense, preserved by the death of death...

...That at least is what I felt in the Minster at Basel when as an ecumenical theologian I had to speak for Catholics on the death of my fellow countryman and fatherly friend Karl Barth...

...The Protestant theologian Heinrich Zahrnt rightly says: "Christian belief in eternal life follows quite logically from belief in the God proclaimed by Jesus Christ...

...The Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius, who held a stoic-pantheistic belief in a "universal nature," ends his unique "Communings with Himself": "What hardship then is there in being banished from the city, not by a tyrant or an unjust judge, but by Nature who settled thee in it...

...And it is not spiritual presumption only if it proves effective as care for life...

...Without faith then we can in fact only hate death -- or simply be resigned to it...

...it is itself a vehicle or medium of the transcendent, a medium that must be accepted, approved and willed, if life is to be found...

...I S IT NOT POSSIBLE to draw from this some conclusions in regard to a new approach to dying...

...Very possibly, but in life three acts count as a full play...

...If then we look to the cross of Christ and the reconcifiation of God with men, that took place there, "in some strange way death has already become a medium of revelation, a mode of the divine action and so even a symbol of the divine through which the divine is itself manifested to us...

...Through death we transcend both life and death...

...As E. Jiingel puts it: "A death that has been deprived of power...

...he or she who would save their life, let them give it for another...

...By relying -- despite breaking off all links with human beings and things -- wholly on the one link, re-ligio, while all departing involves hope of a new beginning, knowing that dying itself was always a part of Christian living...

...But perhaps there might be an ars moriendi, based on authentic Christian faith, which would not lead people to go "singing" to their death (as the Carmelites did in their longing for martyrdom), but which would enable the day of death to be understood - - as was usual for the fourth century in the early church - - certainly as hemera genethlios, as dies natalis: as the day of birth into a new, eternal life...

...Certainly not in the style of those little books on dying, with this title, widely circulated in the great epidemics and the atmosphere of death of the late Middle Ages as a preparation for the moment of death, which in their illustrated editions depicted scenes of angels and devils in conflict at the deathbed...

...f ROM THE TIME when the sting was drawn out of death by the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the message of eternal life in God, who proved his fidelity in Jesus Christ, has never ceased to be heard...

...Here death is more than a mere negation...

...Once more, should not what was possible to the stoic be possible also to the Christian...

...If these know nothing of the real evidence, where shall the puzzled individual expect to find it...

...A dying in gratitude -- this would seem to me to be dying, not only with human, but with Christian dignity...

...Dying with Christian dignity I ! HANS KI)NG W IE CAN HAVE no illusions about our own behavior at death...

...Nor had he gone out of his way to assert himself and exclude us.But by his unreflective observance he had, it seemed to me, taken on Commonweal: 44...

...Every mortal being h~,his own wholly personal death to die, with its own particular burdens, fears, and hopes...

...Not that this can be seen in death itself...

...From that time onward we have been able with reasonable confidence to rely on the fact that there is no depth of human existence, no guilt, no hardship, fear of death or forsakenness, that is not encompassed by a God who is always ahead of man, even in death...

...Depart then with a good grace, for he that dismisseth thee is gracious...

...In the negative sense, destroyed by death...

...In faith on the other hand hatred of death is turned into mockery, and particularly in view of the bitterness of death...

...42 Jesus's cry still in his ear -- he may be certain that this fear too and this trembling are encompassed by God who is love, are transformed into the freedom of the children of God...

...Should it not be possible to the Christian who can see all that is human and all-too-human, his finite nature and infinite longings, in the light of that Crucified One who was taken up as the absolutely solitary and forsaken dying person by this living God and Father out of the darkness of death into his eternal life...

...Growing loss of belief -- manifested above all in popular addiction to 'suicide pacts' carded out sometimes with amazing flippancy -- is simply evidence of the fact that many hearts are closed to the Christian message...

...wholly different human death, a death with truly human dignity, in fact a death with Christian dignity...

...Or must it be said that what is possible to the stoic is not possible to the Christian...

...Belief in it is based upon Christ's invitation to the soul, and upon the insight given when this invitation is heeded...

...But this spiritual mockery is nothing but concrete trust in God...

...This is one of the most extraordinary truths to be learned from Saint Paul ,whose mind was so set aflame by the promise of deafldessness given by the Lord and by the corroborative evidence of the Resurrection that the issue of immortality is for him the very heart of the whole Christian problem.When he writes that faith is vain if Christ be not risen from the dead, he is thinking of the hopes and responsibilities which loom up before the ever-living soul...

...When all the guarantees, supports and bridges breakdown by which we strive to secure our life, when we lose all the ground from under our feet and sink into complete unconsciousness, from which we can no longer relate to any of our fellow human beings and none of them can relate to us, then faith becomes total, then it is revealed as what it always is or should be by its very nature: reliance on God alone and consequently faith in life and death...

...Death can, therefore, be 'transparent' to the transcendent, to a divine power that is neither life nor is simply death...

...But thou art responsible for neither...

...Yes, ought it not to be possible out of belief in God, out of belief in God's eternal life, in our - - my - - eternal life, to die a II'l I FATHER HANS KONG is the author of Infallible?: An Inquiry, On Being a Christian, and Does God Exist...

...Mocking at death means especially not allowing life to be mocked at...

...Death will no longer be the brutal power of destruction, the extinguishing and breaking off of human possibilities...

...No, a thanksgiving in recollection and anticipation of an eternal life which again turns our attention to a meaningful temporal life...

...26, 1934 III II I I According to Gilkey, this view Of death also provides the framework "for understanding that final ethical message of the gospel, and of many another religious tradition: he or she who would live, let them first die...

...The fact that death has been deprived of power, that it had to leave behind its sting in God, is an article of faith...

...The Christian element here being understood not as an extra, a higher kind of drug, a superstructure, a mystification, but as a reinforcement, as a way of plumbing the depths of the human,which can reach down to and sustain even the unfathomable depths of the ~egative dark and fatal...

...I II I I I I I I II I I I I 1 | III BELIEVERS WHO GET THEIR CREED FROM 'READER'S DIGEST' IIIIII IIIIII IIIII nil/i@ II I JAMES TUNSTEAD BURTCHAELL A new pastoral method in theology I REMEMBER ASSISTING at the wedding of friends in a parish church in Ohio...

...I was sure that if he were asked, that priest would assert that the ministers of the sacrament were the couple themselves, not the priest.The priest, he would say, stands as chief witness to what they do, and all of us in attendance join him in that witnessing...

...So might a praetor who commissions a comic actor, dismiss him from the stage...

...Its power still seems too great...

...O nng__ o O0 From r r i f t / y o r e a g o : "We must never forget that belief in immortality is, despite all the efforts to derive it from rational hope in and analysis of human nature, essentially one of the gifts of Christ...

...Thus his probable profession, thus the orthodox explanation of it all.Yet I could not fend off the suspicion that no matter what he might profess, operatively he felt himself to be the impresario and the guarantor of the transaction, with groom and bride in subordinate roles, and the rest of us out in the cold...

...In this connection Gertrud yon Le Fort's novella "The Song at the Scaffold" always comes to mind...

...The above article is excerpted from his forthcoming book, Eternal Life?: Life After Death As a Medical, Philosophical, and Theological Problem (English language translation copyright _9 1984 by William Collins Sons Co., Ltd., and Doubleday & Co., Inc., published by Doubleday & Co., lnc...

...As the exchange of vows drew near he called the couple up to him and administered their murmured pledges in a tight huddle with the spouses turning I I I II II I I I III - FATHER JAMES TUNSTEAD BURTCHAELL, C.S.C., a professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame, is the'author of Philemon's Problem and Rachel Weeping, and Other Essays on Abortion (Andrews & McMeel...

...It will cease to be man's enemy, will not triumph over him at the end...

...In ' face of this death the Christian need not deny his fear and trembling, but - - with Jesus's fear of death behind him, Commonweal...

...During the preliminary rites the bride and groom knelt on prie-dieux to the right and left, about forty feet apart, while the priest stood looming atop a flight of sanctuary stairs suggestive of an Aztec shrine or the great temple from Aida...

...To be more exact, might not even a different way of dying be possible, at least if we are 27 January 1984:43 given time for dying and death does not come upon us suddenly...

...Scripture proclaims how one death devoured the other: death has been turned to mockery,' we hear in an Easter hymn of Luther...

...From this theological perspective death will in fact acquire a different place in the scale of values...

...What, then, could be stranger or more ominous than the denial, from supposedly Christian pulpits, of the evidence for immortality...

...The Editors, "The Debate on Immortality" Jan...

...Jesus Christ did not die like a stoic in dispassionate serenity, as painlessly as possible, but in great torment with the cry of one forsaken by God...

...It can be like that, but it can also be different...

...Through this death, according to all Christian piety and theology, God manifests his/her power, purposes, and love to us...

...To die to the self is to begin truly to live...

...it forms merely the perspective of the latter drawn out to infinity...

...But I have notplayed myfive acts, but only three...

...Regarded theologically or -as the American Protestant theologian Langdon Gilkey says -"theonomously,""death shows its reality, power and mean, ing, but in pointing beyond itself to its own infinite ground, it is itself transcended and its negative annihilating power is withdrawn...

...Ought it not to be possible to die -- certainly supported and helped by all the skills and medicaments of the doctors -perhaps not without pains and worries, but nevertheless without fear of death...

...This describes how in the midst of the revolutionary events in Pads the Carmelite nun Blanche de la Force first flees from the convent, because she cannot get rid of her fear of death, but then voluntarily follows the tumbril in which her sisters are going to their execution, and finally overcomes her fear and goes with them to a martyr's death...

...The attitude of the Christian to death will then in fact be the attitude to a death that has been transformed...

...Someone who now talks ,bravely about death can be reduced to silence by fear atits actual onset...

...He was no hypocrite...

...9 liberation for encouraging hope that suffering and dying are not the definitive, the ultimate, that -- on the contrary -the ultimate for man is a life without suffering and death, which however neither the human individual nor human society can ever realize, but which man can expect only from the consummation, from the mysterious wholly Other, from his God...

...And today, however many arguments may be developed pro and con by philosophers, the doctrine of immortality remains what it was in Saint Paul's time...

...He was sincere...