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[Republished without revision from March 7, 2005]
MORE FEARFUL NOW THAN DEATH, to those fortunate enough to live in the first world, is the a long decay before death. We fear mortality but we fear a long morbidity before mortality more.
Living wills. Increases in approved euthanasia in many nations. Personal hordes of pills, "just in case." "Senior care" warehouses to sustain us; to fill us with tubes and place us in a bed that monitors our internals that the least little slide towards death triggers alarms and the staff scuttles in to haul our shattered bodies back again. Rinse and repeat until our 'living' will or tired family frees us. All these are our shared horror show of which we know but seldom speak.
We live more and more, but more and more we do not know how to die.
To teach us this thing the Pope will now enact the lesson, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear. His is the ancient church that, teaching First Things in ways many now no longer care to hear, teaches us now about Last Things in ways that many fear to learn. And it is the leader of that Church who, as he has in all things for decades, again leads in this teaching. If you are, as am I, late to the study of this man and his life, it would be best to pay attention now. This lesson of the Stoic will not be repeated.
In this sodden age of self-intoxication, the Stoic is little heard from but often admired even as we avoid emulation. He fights our wars and does his dying far afield.
At home we see only torrents of treacle-drenched homages to a drunken selfish kitchen Suicide prevail in our Daily Shows. These homages to the horrible always many orders of magnitude above than any honors paid to those who selfless gave, on the same day, "the last full measure of devotion." The Romantic persists as our Feste, our jocular and foolish advisor about life. We know we listen to his Gospel of Fun at our peril, but still we hold him up to our ear the better to hear his lush platitudes:
"Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!"
With that promise of a palliatory, medicated release playing in as the Muzak of our lives, who would wish to heed the harsh lesson acted now by the Pope on the stage of the world? It seems so medieval, doesn't it? Here is a 'mere man' refusing to 'just let go,' declining to let a convenient and orderly succession proceed as would any sensible CEO, rejecting the advanced euthanasia formulas easily available throughout the western world, and refusing the cup that would take him down into a world without pain, a sleep without dreams, and a death in which the Vatican's silver hammer cannot be felt and the calling out of his name cannot be heard?
Why would anyone, many ask, suffer, when they could simply elect to die? It is a common question of our age and the common answer is, "Of course, no sane person would. After all, the pain not to mention the expense, and of course the burden on the family, society, etc, etc."
The different, more difficult answer from the Pope is that his Church does not side with death but always with life; even life made intolerable. It does not side with elected death at the beginning nor at the end, and that the Shepherd of the Church promises this as he assumes the Papacy. He cannot and, it seems to me clear, does not wish it otherwise. When Karol Wojtyla the man became Pope John Paul II it did not mean that he could or would become Karol Wojtyla the man again when life became difficult. It meant a promise kept beyond death. A promise that would, in word and deed, and in long measure, enact a life in imitation of Christ. One need not be a Catholic or even a Christian to learn from this lesson.
The Passion of the Pope is a living lesson that will teach many things to many millions of the faithful and the atheist alike in the days to come, not the least of which will be that the value of life in all conditions and all stages is not something that can be casually discarded or medicated or made easy simply because we can elect to end it.
Ronan Mullen says it well when he writes:
As the Pope approaches the culmination of his suffering, it is easier to see the thematic significance of what was going on all along. John Paul II has been trying to live in imitation of Christ. From the beginning of his papacy, he determined to be a teaching Pope. Yet, to imitate Christ, he knew he must also accept suffering. The case history is as well known to us as that of a well-loved relative. We remember his shooting in 1981 because we saw it on television. We learned of the tumour in his colon, the dislocated shoulder, the broken leg and, finally, the Parkinson's disease. We have seen a person stripped gradually but relentlessly of all those faculties which made him so remarkable to the world's eyes. The man who loved to travel could no longer walk. The actor who loved to gesture could no longer smile. And now the Pope who loved to communicate can no longer speak.
Perhaps not, but I believe that these last days of John Paul will speak volumes, if we have but ears to hear, but not merely about how to die when the fall is all, but how to live when it is always all.
Long ago, when my daughter was young, there was a plaque on a wall at her school that read "This is the day God has made. Rejoice and be glad in it." These days I find I still have not learned that lesson, but I am heartened that there are still among us men who can make me ready to learn anew.
