Fr. Bill is a retired priest from the church I am interning at this summer. He is in hospice and has Alzheimer's. This afternoon, I went with a deacon to visit him and bring him Communion. His wife greeted us, and we asked if Fr. Bill would like to receive Communion. He was agitated when we got there, but she thought that he would appreciate it. So we read the short service for "Communion in Special Circumstances," and the deacon put the Host in Fr. Bill's mouth. He did not want it, and spit it out on the floor. His wife gathered the chewed pieces up, saving them to try again later, and failing that, to bury them outside. We finished the prayers with some difficulty, as he was becoming more agitated and mumbling incoherently. As we were saying goodbye, Fr. Bill opened his clear, blue eyes and looked straight at me, and so I introduced myself to him and he seemed to understand. Then right before we left, he got very upset and his face contorted in an expression of anger and fear I will never forget. "Damn, damn, damn," he kept murmuring. He quieted as his wife stroked his face and patted his chest. She thanked us as we left the room.
Visiting Fr. Bill drove home to me the reality that death is an enemy. The ravages of Alzheimer's--and sickness and suffering generally--are signs of death savaging the goodness of human life. While in one sense, death is natural because humans are mortal creatures, the ways in which it arrays itself against human flourishing makes it an enemy. St. Paul named death "the last enemy" (1 Cor 15:26).
But Christian hope is that, through Jesus' resurrection from the dead, death has been defeated, and on the last day, when the dead are raised to new life, it will be no more. Death is an enemy, yes, but a vanquished enemy that will be destroyed (see 1 Cor 15:26, 54-55; Rev 21:3-4). As John Donne put it, "Death, thou shalt die." Death will be no more, precisely because of bodily resurrection; if only "the soul" survived death, then death would still be victorious over the body. But resurrection hope insists that the body will be raised to a new, transformed life. Christian hope insists on God's commitment to the whole person.
Resurrection hope is a sure and certain hope, proved by God raising Jesus from the dead. Contrast this with the vain attempt to engineer a permanent life exemplified by "the Singularity Movement" so popular these days in Silicon Valley (see here). Resurrection hope is certain because God is trustworthy.
Resurrection hope is good news. Good news for people suffering from death's onslaught, people like Fr. Bill. Alzheimer's remains devastating and horrifying, but it is not victorious. Rather, because the living God has conquered death in and through Christ, Fr. Bill will live with Christ forever (Rom 6:3-11).
In the meantime, I mourn for Fr. Bill and his fear and pain and brokenness.
cwy
Chris, thanks for sharing this.
ReplyDeleteit's encouraging to see our education concretely at work in making sense of a broken and confusing world.
""The Singularity is not the great vision for society that Lenin had or Milton Friedman might have,” says Andrew Orlowski, a British journalist who has written extensively on techno-utopianism. “It is rich people building a lifeboat and getting off the ship.”"
ReplyDelete"Peter A. Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and a major investor in Facebook, is a Singularity devotee who offers a “Singularity or bust” scenario.
“It may not happen, but there are a lot of technologies that need to be developed for a whole series of problems to be solved,” he says. “I think there is no good future in which it doesn’t happen.”"
This Singularity Movement thing is terrifying. It is so ironic to hear technology lauded in the face of the BP oil spill. The one solution I haven't heard offered to this problem is for all of us to get un-addicted to oil and stop making technology and progress our eschatological hope. I think BP, President Obama, and all of us need to think about the John Perkins quote that Emily posted: "John the Baptist simplified his life to the point where he didn't need the system."
Then again, I may have just been watching one too many documentaries on the food industry, Wal-Mart etc.
Either way, Chris' post reflects a major dividing line between modern society and Christianity. May we learn from people like Fr. Bill which side of it to be on.
Chris,
ReplyDeletethanks for posting. I lost my grandmother to Alzheimer's, so your post brought up both sweet and painful memories.
hope all is well in texas!
e