Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 30, 1991 TAG: 9103300111
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: CALLAWAY LENGTH: Medium
Led by Episcopal Bishop A. Heath Light and the Rev. Christine Payden-Travers, director of the center, they spent more than six hours last weekend considering the small deaths and resurrections in their own lives.
Many said the experience helped them to fear less the reality of their own deaths and to sense the presence of God, through Christ, in all assaults on their joy of living.
Light, who is in his 12th year as bishop of the Diocese of Southwestern Virginia, spoke of his own disappointments in family and professional life. In groups of four and in full sessions, participants also told of how they had died in spiritual senses and been reborn.
"We find death in the midst of life," said the bishop, adding that Christians are crippled by their unwillingness or inability to face death's reality. At the death and raising of his friend Lazarus, Jesus showed by his tears and awareness of the body's decay that he was not dealing with a disembodied "immortal soul" but a person gone forever.
Christians facing death today, said Light, are hampered by being torn between their refusal to go - as poet Dylan Thomas said - "gently into this dark night," and passivity born of confusion about what treatments to choose.
And many doctors still feel bound by their duty to keep patients alive and are haunted by seeing deaths as their own failures.
Light said the Lenten season, which ends tonight, is an appropriate time to face up to one's death by considering living wills - the need to give a responsible person power of attorney and to inform one's doctor of what is to be done in illness judged terminal.
As important as making the decision for oneself is the need to talk about it with loved ones. This goes, said the bishop, for aging adults talking to their grown children as well as for such children's learning their parents' wishes and for all siblings being level with each other.
"The real dying time is when we don't have an effective theology of resurrection - when we don't come to terms with our own weakness," Light said.
A working theology of death is getting attention, several involved in the hospice movement indicated, because medical technology can prolong physical life when a patient has seemingly little reason to live.
Light noted that it is easy to shy away from discussing decisions about medical matters because they are complex and Americans dislike any threat to their individualism. But because of widely disseminated information on such diseases as cancer and AIDS and the suffering many see them causing, even the young are frightened by the process of dying.
And if the diseases don't scare people of all ages, the dread of financial ruin from medical costs does, many noted.
Two years ago, Light studied medical ethics at the University of Virginia on a sabbatical leave. Experiences with the dying there, he said, shaped his own views of what hospice workers call "a good death," as opposed to suffering which comes from both physical agony and inability to share feelings with loved ones.
Good death involves intimacy, a sharing of the deepest feelings, memories and insights of people who love each other, he noted. The inevitable grief and guilt after death is eased when this has been done, several participants agreed.
Those on the retreat saw a video prepared for hospitals, in which incoming patients are informed of their need to state a preference whether they wish to be kept alive by artificial means. In Virginia a law will go into effect in December requiring such a decision to be made.
Payden-Travers, an Episcopal priest, asserted that church people must not permit the power of medical wisdom to override their ideas of what is right before God. Increasingly, she said, doctors are taking into consideration the religious values of patients, but they cannot do this if not informed by those who are theologically literate.
Light said the church has been too slow to help its members decide issues of life and death. It's fully as important for living wills to be filed with the pastor as with the doctor and close family and friends, he said.
Today's medical technology, as well as the reality of people living to 90 and more, has forced conscientious doctors to think through their own views of what true living means. The bishop said these considerations include allowing patients to make more decisions for themselves, ensuring that caretakers do no harm to mind as well as body, and judging if the great cost of some treatment is worth what family or taxpayers will have to pay for it. Newspapers frequently report these medical dilemmas, Light noted.
Even the best executed living will cannot guarantee a patient's full control of dying, the bishop emphasized. He indicated that resurrection for the individual comes at the point of death, as in life, in awareness that a loving God is in control.
by CNB