I had a sort of vague idea,* Monday morning, that I would launch forth with the confusion of thoughts percolating through a haze of lemon curd and paschal lamb about the fact that the very day upon which I was busy celebrating the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus from death and the grave a proclamation was issued about something called Trans Visibility Day. You might remember that thing that the Whitehouse put out with a little bunny festooning the letterhead, reminding everyone of this fact. Three or fifteen years ago the official day was made, but this year happened to fall on the Christian celebration of Easter.
I know the news cycle has moved on to other pressing matters—the internet waits for no blogger— such as this piece which I encountered in so many different places. Oh, and this tweet has been pattering around in my head for twelve hours. Also, it seems relevant to note, it is Easter—a season that lasts for fifty whole days.
What is a Christian? Richard Dawkins wants to know. A Christian is someone who trusts in the crucified and risen Jesus and, though I have found this to be controversial to say, is spiritually and physically (by actually participating in a local congregation in real life) bound to the Church in a meaningful way. The culture that Christianity necessarily produces is only accomplished by individual people becoming Christian and being joined inexorably to other Christians. It’s slow and painstaking. And it has to be undertaken again right now as people—real people with souls—are suddenly tumbling over the precipice of a malign and cruel anti-culture, one that represents the endpoint of a studied rejection of the deep magic (in its Narnian sense) of corporate Christian belief.
In the tweet, the person named Jane, who honestly to me seems completely sane, explains that she “didn’t fail society, society failed” her. In illustration of the kind of failures I’m talking about, let’s truck over to the long piece, where we read this:
Ter Beek, who lives in a little Dutch town near the German border, once had ambitions to become a psychiatrist, but she was never able to muster the will to finish school or start a career. She said she was hobbled by her depression and autism and borderline personality disorder. Now she was tired of living—despite, she said, being in love with her boyfriend, a 40-year-old IT programmer, and living in a nice house with their two cats. She recalled her psychiatrist telling her that they had tried everything, that “there’s nothing more we can do for you. It’s never gonna get any better.” At that point, she said, she decided to die. “I was always very clear that if it doesn’t get better, I can’t do this anymore.” As if to advertise her hopelessness, ter Beek has a tattoo of a “tree of life” on her upper left arm, but “in reverse.” “Where the tree of life stands for growth and new beginnings,” she texted, “my tree is the opposite. It is losing its leaves, it is dying. And once the tree died, the bird flew out of it. I don’t see it as my soul leaving, but more as myself being freed from life.” Her liberation, as it were, will take place at her home. “No music,” she said. “I will be going on the couch in the living room.”
And this:
There won’t be any funeral. She doesn’t have much family; she doesn’t think her friends will feel like going. Instead, her boyfriend will scatter her ashes in “a nice spot in the woods” that they have chosen together, she said. “I’m a little afraid of dying, because it’s the ultimate unknown,” she said. “We don’t really know what’s next—or is there nothing? That’s the scary part.”
And this:
“I’m seeing euthanasia as some sort of acceptable option brought to the table by physicians, by psychiatrists, when previously it was the ultimate last resort,” Stef Groenewoud, a healthcare ethicist at Theological University Kampen, in the Netherlands, told me. “I see the phenomenon especially in people with psychiatric diseases, and especially young people with psychiatric disorders, where the healthcare professional seems to give up on them more easily than before.”
And just one more:
I asked Piet de Groot, a CLW member and a self-described pious Christian, whether he has any problem with euthanasia and assisted suicide and about the philosophical divide between the right-to-die camp, which views life as a commodity, and the faithful, who say it is not our place to end a life that God has created. “We want to go when we are still happy and comfortable,” de Groot said simply. “It’s not that everyone should do it, but people should have the freedom to do it.” He added that, in the Bible, there are seven suicides, and no one ever calls it a sin. Theo Boer, the bioethicist, acknowledged that none of the suicides in the Bible is condemned, but he added that they are not lionized or commemorated either. “Suicide in the Bible belongs in the realm of the tragic, and the tragic should not be condemned—nor should it be regulated or celebrated,” he said. He feared that this was, ultimately, the price we will pay for low-cost, easy-access suicide: a loss of the sense of the tragic.
I commend the whole piece to you, particularly if you feel like wallowing in despair. But, let me just offer some, how shall I call it, Christian perspective.
First of all, I don’t in any way want to vilify anyone, because, as I constantly observe, most people mean well. Most people wake up in the morning wanting to do “good,” however pathetically they understand that term. That said, it is past time to be awfully careful who you consult as a therapist. We—and I use the term so expansively as to exclude myself—didn’t want pastors and mothers to tell us to get on with our lives, to serve others and to cry less. We wanted to think about ourselves more. We wanted to avoid pain and suffering of any kind. We hoped, at all cost, to refrain from experiencing the existential difficulties of this mortal life. Into this shadowland of self-seeking, the therapist takes her mincing steps, settles into her chair, arranges her clipboard—or more likely laptop—and proceeds to make grand promises to solve the hapless and miserable individual’s psychic problems, offering a variety of helps that lack the power to cure anyone of the loss to community, meaning, and hope. The therapist, at least the kind that offer death as a reasonable solution, cannot deliver because he—but often she—does not trust God himself and is not able to direct the sufferer in his direction.
Second, there is a reason to live. There is a reason for every single person to keep living—and that is that this life is only part one of a two-part series. This life, before death, is the time every person is given to prepare for the next one. I’m trudging through this exvangelical book, and the writer is determined to cast shade on how often she was taught to fear hell. The narrative she weaves is meant, I think, to make you feel sorry for her psychic anxiety for the souls of those she loved being thrown into the eternal flames where the worm never dies, the place Jesus himself warned so often. I haven’t got to the end, but it seems as though she will be likely to throw hell over. This is not the way. Every person will rise again when the trumpet sounds, either to eternal, ongoing, forever death, or to life. This life is offered as a time to choose and then prepare for that other life. Christians must talk more about the next world, not less.
Third, Christians must talk about suffering. They must talk about the cross. They must talk about Jesus. They must not assume that anyone—not a single soul—knows any of these things. Most of all, they must assume that people writing about Christianity and the Bible and Jesus probably don’t know what they’re talking about and thereby be ready to correct the record. When some fool like Piet de Groot comes along who is a member of “Coöperatie Laatste Wil or Last Wish Cooperative (CLW)” and yet claims to be a Christian, you and I need to be ready with the Word of Life.
My gosh, imagine combing through the Bible looking for the number of suicides and trying to figure out if the Bible condones or rejects such an activity when God literally comes to earth to rescue people from death and along the way says, I kid you not, I am the Way and the Truth and the…WAIT FOR IT… Life.
I keep coming across articles and podcasts about how people who thirty years ago were sounding the alarm about how the “culture” was going into the dustbin of history are still sounding the alarm like we haven’t sailed past the very point of no return they warned about so passionately. Let me join my voice to the cacophony. If a 28 year old person in a relationship who lives in a nice house and even has a cat can so despair that she will end her life with the help of the state-sanctioned medical industrial complex, no matter what country she lives in, it is time to freak out. It is time to look at the whole of the world that we currently inhabit and start screaming—if not audibly, at least in quiet internet desperation. Indeed, many people are metaphorically and spiritually screaming. Most everyone on TikTok is screaming. Heaps of people on X. Lots of people in their comfortable houses with electricity and running water and free medical care are screaming, if not out loud, at least in spirit.
Could it be, O Best Beloved, that those of us who have encountered the Living Christ, who have entrusted ourselves to his care, who have studied the scriptures and know the grand sweep of the glorious story of salvation, who understand the dangers that lie on the other side of the grave, are, in fact, uniquely equipped to speak to those despairing of this life? What if Christians—real Christians—talked back to the therapeutic regime that is actually giving up, that is abdicating the trust and responsibility entrusted to their expertise, and began to tell the story, as the old hymn says.
The young person who is planning her own death needs a hug, the Romans Road, a challenge, and someone who cares with enough gumption to push past the clipboard and the laptop to tell the truth in the nick of time. Go for it, my dears, we have nothing to lose for Jesus has conquered the grave.
Oh, and for heaven’s sake, have a nice day.
* Apologies for not reading this aloud. My voice is gone. Hopefully it will be back tomorrow.
Amen and amen. The older I get, the more stunned I am to learn that, contrary to what I once believed so firmly, being “in tune with your emotions” can be a really bad thing. The grand story is continuing whether we choose to participate or not. God gives us work to do; whether we do that work or drown in rumination is entirely up to us.
Building relationships that can hold the heavy traffic of truth ought to be a primary priority for the people of Life. Thanks again for wading in the cesspool of foolishness and perversity and there declaring the Truth that calls the dead to Life.