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To Die Death. Everyone must die. Agreed, but how? How prepare oneself for death? To begin, one starts with the fact that each is a believer; there is no other way to live. One lives by believing in someone or something. I myself believe in God, but in a personal God, one who is personally interested in me. Granted that one has faith, but how characterize this belief or faith? Faith should be of a certain kind. Of the various kinds of faith it seems better to have a childlike faith. I said I believed in a personal God, as a Christian and Catholic. This means that one believes in the Cross. The Cross signifies nothingness—to rejoice in one’s nothingness, to die laughing, to die out of love for the Cross. It is to desire to die more than to live. All the courage to suffer in peace comes from God. Then, to approach death, an unknown and unknowable event, is to approach reality, a real thing. And believing in the God of Christianity is to believe in the Incarnation, that God became woman and man, to accept that Jesus became man. But to believe in the Incarnation has its own historical difficulties. Because of the various aspects of technology, and their multiple effects on a human being, it may be possible that human nature has been changed, that to be human may have been altered—we are different from what we have been historically. Jacques Ellul is a French academic who recently died. He is considered to be one of the chief commentators and analysts of technology, principally through translated books such as The Technological Society and The Technological Bluff, and many other books and articles. Ellul believed that over-reliance on technology leads one into the world of evil. This evil, wondrously disguised, reaches to the Infinite. One needs to get outside the world of technology through faith in the transcendent. Many of us are infatuated with consumption, making ourselves a commodity. We are not prepared to say with Simone Well that there is a single act: God is and we are not—a way of expressing contingency. There is a further difficulty in believing in the Incarnation, perhaps of purely human origin, perhaps not. One can either approach the reality of the Incarnation either as a human being or a human being changed by technology. This is technology’s specific problem. The overall effect of technological health care is to produce a therapeutic society. Then, the therapeutic society often becomes the only acknowledged legitimate way of living. With respect to dying, this is done principally through medicalization, to medicalize every aspect of human reality. What is real is then turned into the dictates of the health professions. It should be evident that I am biased; I want to live a natural life, die a natural death, to die my own death. In living and dying, I have an example to which I am indebted, Ivan Illich. In my latest book, Dying Is Not Death, I include a chapter on Illich, “An Art of Suffering.” Otherwise, the book is a series of stories, mostly of people I knew, but the last chapter is “The Pursuit of Health,” a contemporary pathogen. I strongly suggest that the pursuit of health is a chimera, an illusion. Formerly, and perhaps still today, the end of life was sought in certain external goods: money, honor, fame and power; or in internal goods: sex, food and drink. TV ads contribute their share to this orientation, offering products which cannot fulfill. Overall, one recognizes a cult of self, the “me-too generation.” Catholics are encouraged to pray for a good death. Perhaps this encapsulates a certain wisdom. Lee Hoinacki |