The Cult of Celebrity

Image via Wikipedia

I am sorry that Whitney Houston, a beautiful woman with a beautiful voice, died, apparently another victim of the “fame factory” of the music business. Neither money nor fame provide fulfillment in life. If a person chooses to be sad over her death, there is nothing wrong with that. I remember feeling quite down after Elvis Presley died on August 16, 1977 (my Grandpa on my dad’s side of the family died the next day, so those dates are both etched on my mind). No one can deny that professional singers such as Elvis Presley and Whitney Houston have done good in providing a source of joy, the gift of music in its many styles, to their fans. However, there has been a lack of balance among Americans. One would think that a major world leader had died given the amount of coverage of Ms. Houston’s death. Of course that is not her fault, and she probably would have been embarrassed. Americans (and the Europeans) are unbalanced in their fascination and obsession with celebrities in the entertainment industry, whether such entertainment be music, movies, or athletic teams. Such as obsession implies, in my judgment, a shallow society that trades the most important things for the less important. When Mother Theresa and Princess Diana died within a few days of one another, people went wild with grief over Princess Di‘s death. It was as if she had no faults. Yet little was said about Mother Theresa’s death, and she did not receive the posthumous adulation that Princess Di received. Yet although Princess Di did a great deal of charity work and had been speaking in favor of abandoning mines in warfare, I would guess that Mother Theresa did much more good. And while Whitney Houston thrilled the country with her stirring performance of the Star Spangled Banner during the First Gulf War (which was a bad war anyway, in my opinion), physicians and scientists who help to save lives and restore people to their formal level of functioning receive little thanks. The near-worship of celebrities borders on idolatry, and anything said even remotely negative about a favored celebrity can land a person in a fistfight.

In a nation where community is dying and people grow more geographically from their families, the celebrity can become a substitute for family members or friends. Someone will keep up with a celebrity in the same way in the past that people would keep up with their family members through community gossip. One gains a “companion” without the risk of intimacy. When a celebrity dies, especially at a young age and unexpectedly, the news media focuses on that event to the point that it, in effect, canonizes the celebrity. Perhaps in a world stripped of saints and ritual, the cult of celebrity functions as a substitute for religion. If so, it will disappoint, for celebrities, in the end, are human beings, with weaknesses and faults like every other human being, from the wealthiest celebrity to the poorest people on the planet. Celebrity worship is the religion of the immature and shallow, of people who have little more to do than read the gossip magazines every week. It is good the enjoy the fruits of talented people in athletics, in acting, and in music. What is not good is an unhealthy obsession with people one barely knows rather than focusing on one’s own family and friends. It becomes an easy way to “care” without really caring, to “love” without the hard work that goes into real human love. It is an escape, and a pathetic one. Hopefully people into such unworthy worship will take a look at their lives and look to the true sources of meaning in life, faith, family, friends, and others whom we love, both emotionally and practically.

Newspapers and Stillborns

Image by massdistraction via Flickr

Before I read Robert Kastenbaum’s textbook on death and dying, I was not aware that some U. S. newspapers refuse to print the obituaries of stillborn infants. I had to read the statement twice to believe it was there–to be fair to Kastembaum, he does not like that fact any more than I. Although my fraternal twin brother, Jeffrey, was not stillborn, he died two hours after birth of severe bilateral pulmonary hemorrhage. The tendency in society is to downplay the import of such losses and downplay the parents’ grief. “The child really didn’t get a chance to live.” Granted, the child’s life was short, but what follows from that? Is a mother or father’s love somehow missing because a baby was stillborn or died shortly after birth? What gives a newspaper a moral right to deny the existence of such infants to the point of refusing to print their obituaries? I wonder if a society that allows abortion through the ninth month of pregnancy (provided, during that last trimester, that a woman has a doctor certify that the fetus is a threat to her physical and/or “mental” health) can properly value stillbirths or infants dying shortly after birth. Those newspapers that forbid such obituaries are reflecting the values of moral liberals in the wider society, liberals who do not admit the intrinsic value of human life from conception onward. Such an attitude is reflected in bioethicist Peter Singer’s statement that “An adult chimpanzee is of more moral worth than a newborn human infant.” He would go as far as to deny personhood to a newborn until the baby is a week old, and even then Singer does not believe that true moral personhood is present until the child is several years old. American society may not be quite that radical, but when children are considered to be burdens rather than gifts, a stillborn infant can be relegated to secondary status–or perhaps to tertiary status, lower on the scale of value than nonhuman animals.

Recent research on grief suggests that parents, especially mothers, mourn deeply over stillbirths and over infants who die shortly after birth. The least a newspaper can do is to acknowledge their loss by printing their child’s obituary. To do otherwise is to exhibit a fundamental lack of respect for the dignity of the stillborn infant or of the infant who dies shortly after birth. To do otherwise says that the severe grief felt by parents over the infant’s death is misguided. I suggest that it is not the parents who are misguided; it is newspaper editors who refuse to respect the dignity of all human persons, born, stillborn, or unborn.

Dr. Richard Nilges: A Tireless Advocate of Truth

Image by Robert S. Donovan via Flickr

Dr. Richard Nilges, neurologist and long-time critic of brain death criteria for human death, died last month after a long, productive life. I never met him in person, but via e-mail and telephone–the first time was in 1996. I was interested in editing a book of essays opposing brain death criteria. Never having edited a book before, I asked both Dr. Paul Byrne, a neonatologist and the dean of opponents of brain death criteria, and Dr. Nilges to help, and both graciously agreed. Dr. Nilges wrote a chapter for the book, which was published in 2000 as Beyond Brain Death: The Case Against Brain-Based Criteria for Human Death (Kluwer [now distributed by Springer-Verlag]). Dr. Nilges’ chapter, “Organ Transplantation, Brain Death, and the Slippery Slope: A Neurosurgeon’s Perspective,” was the most passionate chapter in the book, reflecting a lifetime of difficult battles against the medical establishment. He retired early after serving as an Attending Staff Member in Neurosurgery at Swedish Covenant Hospital, Chicago. His conscience would no longer allow him to declare patients dead using brain=based criteria. For many years after his retirement, Dr. Nilges, writing with Paul Byrne and others (such as Dr. David W. Evans and David Hill in the U.K.), spoke out against brain death criteria when medical and scholarly opponents of brain-based criteria for death were scarce (the late Professor Hans Jonas of the New School for Social Research was an exception). During the 1970s and 1980s, Dr. Nilges’ position was considered to be a fringe position by the medical and medical ethics establishments. But the work of Dr. Nilges and other pioneering opponents of brain death criteria eventually bore fruit. Professor Stuart Youngner began to hack at the medical arguments in favor of brain death criteria, bringing out arguments concerning continuing brain function in patients declared “bran dead” which Byrne and Nilges had noted years before. The real breakthrough came with Dr. Alan Shewmon, a pediatric neurologist at the UCLA School of Medicine, came out in opposition to brain death criteria. Eventually an entire network of physicians, philosophers, sociologists, and other scholars came to oppose brain death criteria; many questioned the morality of the current system of organ transplantation. If brain death is not death, then removing vital organs from the “brain dead” patient involves killing the patient. Not all opponents of brain death criteria oppose organ transplantation–Dr. Truog does not–but even Dr. Truog believes that people contemplating signing a donor card and families considering donation ought to be told that organ transplantation from a beating heart “brain-dead” donor kills the donor.

Now articles opposing brain death criteria have been published in major medical and bioethics journals. Some younger scholars are writing against brain death criteria, such as Professor Scott Henderson in his Death and Donation (Wipf and Stock, 2011). Thus there is a third generation of scholars willing to oppose the medical establisment’s continued support of brain death criteria. This would not have been possible without the pioneering and courageous work of the first generation opponents, including Dr. Richard Nilges. His legacy and influence will live on in the patients he helped over the years and in the scholars he inspired to have the courage to question what they may have previously taken for granted.

Dr. Nilges was a devout Roman Catholic whose faith was central to his life. Requiescat in pace.

Suboptimal Design, Evolution, and Anger at God

Image via Wikipedia

C. S. Lewis once said that modern man places “God in the dock.” That is, moderns, instead of humbly submitting to God as the “clay to the potter,” they put God on trial and call Him to account for the evil and suffering in the world. Although Job, the Church Fathers, Augustine, and the other Medievals dealt with the problem of evil and suffering, it was modernity that developed full-fledged theodicies, broad-based explanations of why God created a world in which He permits evil and suffering.

A woman was driving down I-95 near where I live and was in an accident. She was rescued from her burning car. Only a few weeks later she choked to death on a piece of bologna in her home while her small children were asleep. This is one of those stories almost too painful to hear (like the scene in Saving Private Ryan when the soldier holds up his helmet that had been shot through and said something to the effect, “Hey look here! How lucky can that be” before a bullet hits him square between the eyes and kills him).

I have struggled with religious doubt all my life. I have also struggled with anger at God for the suffering of the world, especially (though not exclusively) the suffering of children. When I thought about the woman choking to death I thought of the suboptimal engineering of evolution. We walk upright and have developed the ability to talk, but that makes it anatomically more likely that we will choke to death. A human engineer would be fired for putting the food pipe and the windpipe where food can easily go down the wrong way. The epiglottis does not have a fail safe. I confess that my feelings were fury at God that He would use such as sorry a..ed process such as evolution to produce a suboptimal product that even a human engineer could design more efficiently. Other instances of suboptimal design can be mentioned: our mouth being too small for all our teeth, or our backs suffering pain because originally backs were meant for walking on all fours. There are young people who die suddenly and unexpectedly of a “primary electrical event” in the heart, some defect so small that our autopsy techniques and microscopic studies cannot yet identify it.

I do not know that there is an answer to the mystery of inefficient design this side of heaven. Some people might explain it in terms of a primeval Fall, but it is difficult to place that story in an evolutionary framework (although C. S. Lewis has tried). Given the sometimes violent behavior of our close relatives, the chimpanzees, toward one another, it seems that humans were always “fallen.” If that is the case, isn’t human suffering, pain, and death a part of the suffering, pain, and death that occurs in “nature, red in tooth and claw,” to use Lord Tennyson‘s words?

The Eastern Orthodox Church has the approach that makes the most sense to me–that the ultimate answer to evil and suffering is eschatological, beyond this life. Ivan Karamazov could not live with that answer in the novel The Brothers Karamazov, but like Ivan’s brother Alyosha,  I do not see that there is a choice if one wants to hold onto sanity. If God is evil or does not exist, then the world is absurd. I, at least, cannot live my life believing that. So my anger fades and I trust that God understands and will forgive this “miserable sinner.”

Fundamentalists and Afterdeath Communication

Image via Wikipedia

I listened to a fine talk tonight at the Rhine Research Center in Durham, North Carolina by Louis LaGrand on extraordinary experiences of those grieving a loved one. Many of these individuals have an experience of the loved one communicating with them, ranging from an intuition of the deceased person’s presence to a full-body apparition carrying on a conversation with the surviving loved one. Many people who have such experiences, which as LaGrand noted, are really “ordinary” rather than “extraordinary” (millions of people have them) are given a cold shoulder by fundamentalists from two camps: the religious and the secular.

Secular fundamentalists who accept materialism as their religion would reject such experiences as subjective hallucinations. No matter what veridical evidence the grieving person offered, the secular fundamentalist would automatically reject it. These secular fundamentalists are often college and university professors who should be open minded, but who would not hesitate to ostracize or even threaten the job of an academic who dares to take these experiences as possibly objective or real. If secular fundamentalists are wrong about exceptional experiences being hallucinatory only, then their entire world view would be undermined. Their religious faith in secularism would be destroyed. And since many secularists are still in adolescent rebellion against an overly rigid religious upbringing, they will insist that any evidence contrary to their own views is invalid, the facts be damned.

The same is true of religious fundamentalists. Protestant fundamentalists, for example, will say, “The Bible says the dead don’t contact us and we shouldn’t contact them. If anything does contact us, it’s probably a demon rather than a loved one.” Of course they ignore Samuel’s vision of Saul rising up from Sheol, but they claim that was a one-time exception due to the permission of God.

The ignorance of Christian fundamentalists lies primarily in their claiming to know more than they really do. How do they know what state human souls are in between death and resurrection? How do they know whether the Biblical injunctions against mediumship and communication with the dead applied to such practices in pagan religious circles? How do they know that God would not give permission to a deceased individual, in certain cases, to communicate with a living person who needs comfort? I have always been impressed by the intellectual pretense and arrogance of fundamentalism, both Christian and secular. Both ignore the possibility that deceased loved ones may indeed be contacting their grieving friends and relatives. Both ignore a potential way through exceptional experiences to comfort the grieving in their loss.

Death and Annihilation

Image via Wikipedia

When I was a child, I broke Piaget’s rules of child development–I had a developed concept of death by age five–that of complete annihilation. Having a twin brother who died two hours after he was born complicated matters for me since I learned about death at a young age. When my dog, Fuzzy, was killed by a car, I learned first hand that death meant the loved being would not return. And then, while watching the Easter episode of “Davy and Goliath,” when Davy’s grandmother dies the day after she looks perfectly healthy when he’s playing in the attic with her and they’re playing catch in her front yard, devastated me. I could not see through death’s darkness to discover the light of resurrection.

Later I was taught the Christian hope of the resurrection of the body. Intellectually I believe it is true. But emotionally, at two a.m., lying on my left side, hearing my heart pound through the mattress, I wonder if my religion is totally false, whether God does not exist, and whether death really means annihilation, the blanking out of consciousness.

The ancient Epicureans believed in annihilation and the famous Epicurean poet, Lucretius, wrote, “Death is nothing to us,” since if a person is annihilated, he can no longer suffer–so what’s there to fear about death? When I have taught philosophy classes, I find that most students agree with Lucretius.

Few students agree with Miguel de Unamuno, the great Spanish writer, who in his book, The Tragic Sense of Life, considered the prospect of annihilation at death worse than images of suffering in Hell. Nor do they understand Milton’s Paradise Lost, when the demons are damned to hell–they say something to the effect, “Yeah, it’s bad that we’re in Hell, but at least we have our consciousness, our self-awareness.”

Most atheists claim that the prospect of annihilation is either a matter of indifference or of comfort. David Hume horrified Samuel Johnson by his lack of fear of annihilation. Bertrand Russell once said, “When I die, I shall rot,” and had no more problem with the prospect of annihilation that someone would with a minor inconvenience. Is my attitude due to a strange personality, or is there more to the fear of annihilation than meets the eye.

Rene Descartes famously said Cogito, ergo sum: “I think, therefore I am.” Although I do not agree with him that the human essence is consciousness (embodiment is an essential part of human personhood), there is something to be said for his focus on self-consciousness. Consciousness is a gift we take for granted. How wonderful it is to be aware of the beautiful world around us, to be aware of loved ones, to be aware of our bodies and our own thoughts! Can we realize what a wonderful gift that is? Losing one’s awareness totally and irretrievably, blanking out into nonbeing, is not frightening because of any pain I would feel, but because I would feel, think, and sense nothing at all–for all practical purposes, there would be no more me. That is why the promise of resurrection is so precious–it is a promise to restore us to the fullness of life, which includes our self-awareness–and more. But if death is the end, as St. Paul put it in I Corinthians 15, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” That is why I have always thought Hell was a gift of God’s mercy–He gives the unrepentant as much reality as they can have without annihilating them. I have no sympathy for the view of Edward Fudge and others who believe that Hell is total annihilation, for that would be an act of a cruel deity. The concept that I could be annihilated at death if the nonbelievers in an afterlife are correct frightens me, like it did Unamuno, almost infinitely more than the prospect of consciousness in Hell. We, like all creatures, have a natural desire to continue in being (philosophers as diverse as Aquinas and Spinoza recognized that fact). Death in the sense of total annihilation goes against that natural desire. This is why Ambrose Bierce’s short story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” is one of the most frightening stories I have ever read–I won’t give away the ending–it’s worth reading. I pray for deeper faith, to go beyond, “Lord I believe, pardon my unbelief” to a faith that lives beyond doubt. May we all have such faith.

Aquinas’ Third Way to Prove God’s Existence

Image via Wikipedia

I’ve always hated change. Perhaps that is part of being an Aspie (having been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome), or perhaps it is that longing for something permanent lodged in the human soul. As a small child, I cried when my parents replaced my old bed with a new one. But more important losses came–my dog Fuzzy was killed by a car, my Uncle died suddenly when I was in my junior year of high school, my Granddaddy in my senior year of college, Granny while I was in graduate school. I remember the Sunday dinners at Granddaddy’s and Granny’s with all the great aunts and great uncles and my aunt and uncle. Meatloaf, black eye peas, lima beans, salad with rich French dressing, pecan pie, Coca-Cola cake, strong but good iced tea. Outside was a world of wonder under twin maples, and I’d swing across the gravel drive, lost in the moment. All those moments live only in memory–every moment is, as the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1869-1947) said, is “perpetually perishing.”

What does this have to do with Aquinas’ third argument in his Summa Theologica for God’s existence? The Third Way has to do with contingent beings and necessary beings. A contingent being is anything that is possible both to exist and not to exist. For example, you and I are contingent, as well as trees, dogs, cats, the earth, the moon, the stars, galaxies, and even the entire universe. It is possible for all things to pass out of existence. But if everything were contingent, if the universe has existed forever, then all would have passed out of existence (or at least the universe might “exist” as ruined husks of old stars and dead dark matter) by now. But things do exist now, so there must exist a necessary being, one that cannot pass out of existence, and this necessary being is God. Given the radical contingency of everything in our lives–we ourselves will lose all, literally, at death, it is comforting to realize that a necessary being must exist–a being who can never change, who is all-loving and all-powerful, who will restore everything that is good at the end of time. Aquinas’ Third Way speaks to me because my greatest fear has been to lose all in annihilation. It is not just my own annihilation that matters, but that of all those people (and animals) who loved me and whom I have loved–and I’ll even include some of the inanimate objects. A necessary being cannot let us down. He keeps contingent things in existence constantly–creation is not a point act but continues throughout time. If God were to (metaphorically speaking) remove His creative glance from the universe for one microsecond, everything would immediately pass into nothingness. Aquinas’ argument speaks to all of us who have suffered loss, who have felt the contingency of all finite things (especially the very old, who lose so many loved ones as they age). And we all suffer loss. But since God, the Permanent Thing, lives and creates the universe by His power and His love, we have a door that opens beyond the multitude of life’s changes. As the old hymn, “Abide with Me” says,

Change and decay in all around I see;

O Thou who changest not, abide with me.

Haunted (Creative Nonfiction Essay)

Image by valkrye131 via Flickr

The essay below won the 2007 Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Contest of the North Carolina Writers’ Network. It originally appeared in the NC Writers’ Network Newsletter. I own the rights, so I am posting it below. I hope you find it meaningful.

Haunted

I am haunted—not by graveyard ghosts rising as white fog over desolate tombstones or by eerie voices heard at midnight from a bedroom window, but rather by my twin brother Jeffrey, who died the day we were born.

As a child, I knew that Jeffrey had died, yet the story remained a mystery to me. But recently I secured Jeffrey’s death certificate and learned that he had drowned in his own blood.

Department of Public Health, Certificate of Death, State of Tennessee, Division of Vital Statistics. Name: Jeffrey Potts. Date of Birth: December 25, 1961. Date of Death: December 25, 1961. Age: 2 hours. Death was caused by: Immediate cause—pulmonary hemorrhage, bilateral, severe, etiology unknown. Other significant conditions contributing to the death: erythroblastosis fetalis, minimal. Was autopsy performed? Yes.

I have no memory of the first time I heard about Jeffrey. Mama or Daddy may have told me, or I may have asked, having heard them speak his name—but I remember once at five, just before Easter, sitting on the tiled living room floor that had become slick and yellowed with overwaxing. I watch the old black and white TV as “Davy and Goliath,” a claymation series about a boy, Davy, and his dog, Goliath, begins. I find the brass rendition of “A Mighty Fortress is our God” stirring as the episode, called “Happy Easter,” starts with Davy visiting his old but vivacious grandmother who has black hair and wears horn-rimmed glasses. She and Davy are having a wonderful time in the attic, finding and playing with old toys. All seems well, idyllic as my own world, living with my parents and grandparents in the country, every nook of our house holding the promise of new adventure. But the next day, Davy returns home after a neighborhood baseball game and walks into sadness; his mother and sister are crying. Davy asks, “What’s wrong?” and his father answers, “Grandmother died this morning.”

I feel my stomach sink. I’m lying on the cold floor, my face inches from the screen to which I’m glued. Then as Davy’s father explains the concept of the resurrection, all I see is blackness. I run into the kitchen, sit on a chair beneath the bright florescent light and hold my head in my hands, sobbing, “When will I die?” My mother, peeling potatoes over the kitchen sink, doesn’t even look up. “Probably not for a long time,” she says.

Although I don’t often consciously think of Jeffrey, he seems to lurk just behind  my obsession with death. He is the ghost who whispers what might have been, who fills me with unexpected moments of grief and regret.

Fast forward twenty-one years to 1988. I’m in the office of a pastoral counselor with whom I meet for weekly sessions. We talk about my long-time fear/fascination with death, and I tell him about Jeffrey. When he asks if it ever bothered me that I had lost a brother, I say, “No.” Then he asks, “But did you ever wonder about losing a twin brother with whom you would have played, shared, grown up?” and I burst into tears.

Growing up, I didn’t think of my brother often—not once a day, not once a week, not even once a month. Usually, his ghost visited only when Mama mentioned him, though there were some rare instances when I wondered how much Jeffrey would have been like me, whether we would have had the same interests, whether I would have confided in him. Sometimes I imagined him looking down on me when I did wrong, like the time in third grade I lied to the teacher about staying outside past play period to watch two boys fighting. I had climbed near the top of monkey bars to watch them, cupping my hands over my eyes and squinting into the sunlight. The boys’ silhouettes leapt as though they were boxers exchanging blows. The bell rang for class, but I stayed outside before finally returning to class with other tardy students. The teacher asked which students had disobeyed the bell to watch the fight. I didn’t raise my hand. Several classmates yelled at once, “Michael Potts is lying.” I turned red, and for some reason thought about Jeffrey, felt him as a visceral presence.

Even today, when I catch myself lying or doing wrong, I think of him and if he’d be ashamed of me. Or if he’d be proud of my accomplishments: my Ph.D., my academic articles, my published poems. Is it a sense of loss, of  buried grief that rises, insisting to be acknowledged? But what kind of loss can I feel about someone I never knew?

Jeffrey Potts…died Monday at Rutherford Hospital shortly after birth. His twin brother, Michael, survives. Graveside services were held at the family cemetery near Smyrna….

Jeffrey’s remains were moved—twice. Once from the family cemetery, near the Stones River in Smyrna, Tennessee due to the construction of Percy Priest Dam to Mt. Juliet, thirty miles from home. Then family visits were rare, though I remember riding with my family one Sunday (I must have been seven or eight), the drive punctuated by the rolling hills of middle Tennessee which seemed to run forever by my car window. The motion was disorientating, making me sick to my stomach, and I was glad when we finally stopped. I don’t remember the grave itself, a small patch of grass and a curved headstone. But many years later, as an adult, I drove to the graveyard alone, looked for almost an hour before finding the tiny headstone. I wept openly. No one else was around—no person, no squirrel scurrying up and down trees—just a breeze which briefly interrupted the stifling July heat.

Mama wanted the grave closer to home, and the family all agreed. And even though I had moved out of state for graduate school, I still wanted to be able to visit when I returned to my parents’ home. They purchased a new gravestone, casket, paid the fee to move the remains. I wanted to be there for the reburial, but Mama and Daddy didn’t tell me, so I missed  it. Later that week when I phoned for details, Mama described the scene: how the old black casket was carried out of the grave and placed on the grass. Decayed, the lid had collapsed. A cemetery worker needed to scrape out tiny bits of bone amid the earth; what was poured into the new casket was mainly dirt. I remember thinking of God telling Adam, “Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return.”

Jeffrey’s remains now lie in the “Babytown” section of our hometown cemetery. A small but attractive stone marks the grave. Whenever I visit, I clean off the excess dirt, pull grass where it has overgrown, say a short prayer, cross myself before I leave. Then I walk over to Granddaddy’s and Granny’s graves as well as to my Uncle Lytle’s and do the same. Looking across the Tennessee countryside—filled with Eastern Red Cedars, sugar maples, farmer’s fields full of alfalfa and fescue, good food for cows—I imagine such beauty lasting forever. But then the ghost of death, like a cold, unwelcome wind comes, and I must leave.

Jeffrey’s death, or rather the idea of Jeffrey—the sense of the other self, the doppelganger, the secret sharer, the person he might have become and how he could have influenced what I might have become—still haunts me, especially on Christmas Day, our birthday, or when I visit my parents. I take the short drive to the cemetery, stand on the cold ground, look down at his marker, say “Happy birthday.” I close my eyes, sense the missing space in myself where Jeffrey would have been, try to imagine it filled. But my mind remains blank, and I open my eyes to find nothing staring back but brown grass and cracked earth.

Sometimes, I’m troubled by a recurring dream—I’m walking behind the wooden garage that Daddy and my Great Uncle Bill built when I was ten. I squeeze my way between the black wall and the vine-covered fence until in darkness, I bend and touch something soft and squirming. Then I shoot awake, often in a sweat.

And recently, not long after receiving Jeffrey’s death certificate, I remembered rabbit hunting for the first time with my father; I must have been nine. We walk steadily out in a sun-blanketed field, shotguns slung over our shoulders. Suddenly, Daddy spies a single gray rabbit, nibbling at something in the distance. He stops, takes his shotgun, aims, and shoots. The large rabbit pops back and falls. When Daddy quickly, deftly skins it, I ask for the heart, carrying it off to study alone near the edge of the woods—its tight red muscle glistening as I squeeze and squeeze, trying to get it to pump again.

Mediums and Christianity

Image via Wikipedia

How should a traditional Christian regard mediumship, the intentional contact with the dead? Probably most traditional Christians oppose mediumship, referring to its clear condemnation in the Hebrew Bible. It doesn’t help matters that some mediums make no secret of their hostility to Christianity (although others would consider themselves to be in the Christian tradition). I believe that genuine mediumship (as opposed to fake mediums who prey on the gullible by “cold reading” the speech and body language of sitters) can be reconciled with traditional Christianity if such a gift is used with care. The Hebrew Bible condemns mediumship because of its association with pagan religious practices in the ancient world, so those passages condemning it do not necessarily apply to Christian mediums. I am assuming throughout this post that some gifted mediums receive genuine messages from the dead rather than messages from the living through enhanced psi abilities (the so-called “super-psi hypothesis”). The case of the famous medium Mrs. Leonora Piper (1857-1950) convinced me beyond a reasonable doubt that a talented medium could communicate with the surviving personalities of persons who have died.

Everyone probably has some psi ability, whether that ability be telepathy (mind to mind communication apart from normal means), clairvoyance (receiving information from the non-human environment), or psychokinesis (PK, the ability to move objects using the mind alone). But some individuals are especially gifted in one or more of these skills. After all, not all of us have the same athletic skills, mechanical skills, or intellectual abilities–why should the situation be any different with psi? And since a medium would be communicating with the dead through psi, a good medium would have at least good telepathic abilities.

All talents, from a Christian point of view, are gifts from God over which we exercise a stewardship. We have a moral obligation to use whatever talents we have been given in a responsible way. For example, someone with the gift of persuasion might be able to sell snake oil and make a great deal of money, but this behavior would be a misuse of the talent God gave the person. A genuine medium may care only about money and overcharge clients, or may be seeking power from the dead. These are both bad motives for mediumship. Seeking power from the dead is more dangerous than money lust, since all power is of God and is given on loan from God–it should be used for His glory and not ultimately for our self-gratification or use to manipulate and dominate others.

The proper motive for using the talent of mediumship is to help people deal with their grief, and perhaps to remove barriers to their faith in an afterlife. Mediumship can only provide, at best, a kind of “natural knowledge” of the afterlife which should be completed by Scripture and the teachings of the Church. However, if knowing that a loved one is okay gives comfort to a grieving person, I see no problem for a Christian medium to contact the dead loved one for that reason. Or if someone who is agonizing over doubts about faith comes to a medium, the communication with the dead can at least remove one major barrier to accepting the fullness of Christian faith.

Such a gift should be used very carefully, with much prayer and with discernment. If the medium senses that the communicator may not be the person he claims to be, the medium should immediately break the link. Traditional Christianity accepts the existence of Satan and other fallen angels, who could try to twist what is a good gift into something that damages a vulnerable person. So mediums should tread with caution. But if they take proper precautions, pray, and practice their talent for the right motive, I do not see any reason why someone could not practice as a Christian medium.

Physician Assisted Suicide and the Ends of Medicine

Image via Wikipedia

When I ask my medical ethics students whether they support physician assisted suicide (in the sense of the physician prescribing a deadly dose of a drug, usually barbituates, for the patient to take when he wishes), the vast majority raise their hands. Even most students in my classes who oppose abortion support physician assisted suicide (PAS). To me this is disturbing, especially since the strongest support for PAS has been in my class of future physician assistants.

What is so wrong, you may ask, about physician assisted suicide? After all, even with ideal pain control, some terminally ill patients either remain in a great deal of pain or have to be totally sedated. Why not allow such patients to “control the time and manner of their own deaths?” Surely PAS will encourage more dignified deaths among patients in intractable pain. And in referendums, Oregon and Washington have passed laws permitting PAS. Shouldn’t this practice spread to other states?

Although PAS sounds attractive, its practice would be a fundamental distortion of the proper goals of medical practice. The internal goods of medicine include restoring a patient to health, and when a patient cannot be restored to health, to make that patient as comfortable as possible. But supporting a patient’s suicide indirectly involves the physician in killing a patient. Physicians have a great deal of power over patients, power which, if misused, can lead to pain, suffering, and death–as the Nazi medical experiments and the Tuskegee Syphillis Experiment revealed. Now a physician can withhold or withdraw medical care that is only prolonging the dying process. The goal is not to hasten death per se, but to relieve the patient’s suffering. But prescribing a deadly dosage of a drug is designed to let the patient hasten his death. One may say that the motive is to relieve suffering, but there is a difference between allowing the disease process to take its course and giving a drug so a patient can actively commit suicide. This abuse of medical power has already spread in the Netherlands, where PAS is legal, to doctors actively killing patients without the patient’s permission or the patient’s family’s permission. Once the line forbidding a physician from assisting in a patient’s death is crossed, it will be difficult to turn back. Doctors participating in PAS will not be practicing medicine, but doing something else entirely–being accessories to suicide.

There is an assumption in the modern world that pain is the worst thing that a person can experience. That was not the view of the premodern world. Socrates was willing to suffer pain and death to keep his integrity. The early Christians suffered excruciating torture via persecution–they believed that they were sharing in the sufferings of Christ. And without modern pain control methods, people suffered far more from diseases than they do today, yet the drive for PAS is a modern movement (David Hume was among the first to defend suicide as an option in a person in great pain). This does not mean that we should not try to stop pain as much as possible short of actively killing the patient or giving the patients the means to suicide. Relieving suffering is a moral obligation of physicians as long as medical power does not cross over the line into aiding a patient in his active demise. Even in this post-Christian world, would secularists really want doctors to cross the line into PAS? Could PAS be controlled once the genie is out of the bottle? I do not believe so–but even if PAS is the only line that is crossed, it remains inimical to the ends of medicine and is wrong.