Article
Assisted dying
Creed
Suffering
4 min read

Assisted dying: in praise of being a burden

It's not a reason to end a life, it's the very possibility of our being human.
A younger hand holds a wrinkled older hand of someone in a bed.

A lot has been said already about assisted dying. In the raging bonfire of public discourse, there has been a lot of heat, but not a lot of light. But amid all the noise surrounding Parliament’s upcoming discussion around assisted dying, a recent conversation hosted by Prospect between Brenda Hale (former President of the Supreme Court) and Rowan Williams (former Archbishop of Canterbury) served as a reminder that we are, despite everything, still capable of having meaningful and fruitful discussion about even the most divisive of issues.  

The conversation is earnest and hard-won throughout; both Hale and Williams each push and probe the other for more detail, more nuance, more outworking of implications. And yet their tenor remains respectful. There is no cheap point scoring, no trite comments or easy aphorisms. These are two people working to understand the other, in full recognition of the gravity of the topic.  

One particular moment, however, was frankly spine-chilling. As the conversation progresses, Hale is asked the following: “How do you deal with the pressure questions – pressure from family or financial pressures? What safeguards can you build in?” Her response – in full, for context – is as follows: 

“Well, you can build in the safeguards that the decision must be made without undue influence, coercion, duress or fraud. But in the end, it’s a matter of evidence, isn’t it? One of the things I find most difficult is that I don’t think it’s necessarily irrational for somebody to take into account the suffering their suffering is causing to the people dear to them, or the burden that looking after them is placing upon the whole community.  

I wouldn’t call that “undue influence”, but it’s one of the questions I find most difficult about all of this. You know, obviously there’s duress, there’s financial abuse, there are all of those sorts of things that have got to be checked against, and there ought to be objective evidence of absence of that. But when it comes down to somebody thinking, “I don’t want to be a cause of others suffering,” that seems to me to be a reasonable thing for somebody to take into account.”  

The idea that my dependency or burdensomeness might factor into decisions about whether I continue to live, seems to me to be contrary to the very notion of the Christian message. Let me explain why. 

We are made to be a burden, then. To depend on others, to be burdensome to them, is to be human.

We are, whether we like it or not, now rapidly approaching Christmas. At this time of year, Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus; the divine Son of God made flesh and born of a virgin. As the divine Son of God, Jesus lived the perfect human life of joy, grace, and faithfulness; the kind of life I can only aspire to. 

Because of this, as a Christian, I look to Jesus’ perfect life of faithfulness as a model for what a truly healthy human life looks like. And I am often surprised by what I find there. For example, it turns out true human flourishing does not involve getting married, having sex, or having children; Jesus’ perfect life of flourishing featured none of these things. 

But crucially, Jesus’ perfect life often involved depending upon others; upon being a burden to those around him. As an itinerant travelling teacher, Jesus relied on the financial support of his followers to make his ministry possible. He relied on being made and given food to eat, and a roof to sleep under. He was far from self-sufficient. Rather, he gladly made himself a burden to others in service of his ministry.  

But more than this, we often overlook the radical significance of the Christian claim that, at Christmas, we celebrate God’s becoming a baby. For the first years of his perfect life, Jesus was entirely – entirely – dependent upon his parents for all his needs. Here we see God, in the person of Jesus, depending upon Mary and Joseph to feed him, to clothe him, to cuddle him, to clean up his sick and his excrement. This is what human flourishing looks like. 

This is mirrored at his glorious death, too. Prior to his arrest, Jesus asked his friends for support; to stay awake while he prays for comfort. The Gospels go on to tell us that, having been mercilessly tortured, beaten, stripped, and interrogated, Jesus had his cross carried by a man named Simon of Cyrene. After his death, having no tomb of his own, Jesus was buried in the family tomb of his follower Joseph of Arimathea. And this, too, is what human flourishing looks like. 

Throughout his entire life Jesus lived the perfect life of human joy and faithfulness. And this often involved depending upon others and being a burden to them in every way conceivable. We are made to be a burden, then. To depend on others, to be burdensome to them, is to be human.  

To think, then, with Baroness Hale, that my dependency and burdensomeness upon others might somehow serve to underwrite a decision to end my life, is fraught with difficulty for me as a Christian. I simply cannot reconcile her words with the life I see Jesus living in the Bible: a life of joyful, difficult burdensomeness.  

There may be many other reasons why people decide they want their lives to end. But a sense of burdening others ought not to be one of them. Being a burden is not a reason to bring one’s life to an end, because it is the very possibility of our being human in the first place. To need others, to place ourselves into their care, does not make us less human, it makes us more human. And therein lies its glory.  

Article
Belief
Creed
4 min read

Are miracles real?

In miracles, as in much of life, you see what you're looking for.

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A woman sees her reflection in a mirror and hold a finger up.
Ivan Lapyrin on Unsplash.

Recently, I heard a remarkable story about a friend of mine who happens to be a vicar. He had been diagnosed with a serious cancer, and the diagnosis was bleak. He was preparing himself for a difficult few months, readying himself, and his parish, for the end before too long. His body was reacting poorly to chemotherapy, and the prospects did not look good. However, he continued to try to get a balance of rest and work through the tiredness, praying when he could - little and often - but without too much discomfort.  

A short while ago, during a routine visit to the hospital to receive the results of a scan on how the cancer was progressing, something puzzling happened. 

The surgeon showed him the scan related to the original diagnosis. He asked, "Can you see the tumour?" My friend replied, "Yes, of course, it's right there," pointing to the black mass. The surgeon then showed him another scan. 

He asked again, "This is the most recent scan we’ve just taken; can you see it on this one?" My friend peered closely into the scan and said, "Hmm. I'm not sure I can." The surgeon then responded, puzzled, that somehow, between the two scans, the tumour seemed to have disappeared. 

He added: “To be honest, in my world, we don't really have an explanation for things like this. But I suspect in yours, you do.” 

Besides being delighted for my friend, since hearing the story, I've pondered what it means. Of course, miracles are by their nature rare and we cannot automatically predict them, My friend was in the kind of church that doesn't routinely demand God for miracles but simply carried on gently praying that somehow God would be with the vicar in his struggles, hardly daring to hope that the cancer would in fact vanish.  

Was it a miracle? Or was there some other explanation? It seems to me that the answer you give to that question depends on the framework you bring to it. If you are a believer in a God who might do this kind of thing from time to time, and consider that such things can and do happen occasionally, not regulated by the usual course of cause and effect, but by some extra dimension of reality unseen to us and immeasurable by the methods of science, you will probably simply accept it as one of those occasional interruptions to the normal course of things. And then give thanks to God and rejoice with my friend at this sign of God’s goodness.  

Of course, it raises the question of why this cancer was healed and others aren’t, but that takes us into other territory, which I’ve examined before in relation to Donald Trump’s narrow escape. Would we rather a world in which such things as this never happened, and my friend’s cancer had taken its usual deadly course? Or a world where just every now and again, something delightful and unanticipated happens, like stumbling on a gloriously unexpected view of rolling hills and a dramatic sunset at the end of a routine walk on a summer’s evening?  

Belief in miracles doesn’t mean an irrational rejection of science and its benefits in favour of an entirely random world. it simply means an acknowledgement of the limits of our reasoning. 

An honest doctor like the one treating my friend, might recognise that the methods of medical science, for all its brilliance, value and wisdom, on which we all depend so much, has to shrug its shoulders at this point, realising that it doesn’t have the categories to explain it, reverting to a kind of agnosticism. A more thoroughgoing materialist would say: “Of course we know there are no such things as miracles, so that’s the one thing we know it is not. There must be some other explanation, and science will one day discover why such mysterious things happen.” 

What we believe about such things is determined not by the self-evident ‘facts’, the bald evidence of what is before us, but by our pre-conceived mental map of the world, our framework of faith, what we think the world is, and what, or who we think God is, (if he exists at all). We are all believers in the end – the difference is what we believe in.  

Belief in miracles doesn’t mean an irrational rejection of science and its benefits in favour of an entirely random world. it simply means an acknowledgement of the limits of our reasoning, open to the possibility of an extra dimension of enchantment that occasionally shows its face, and that there is a bigger world out there than we with our small minds and spirits are able to comprehend.  

GK Chesterton once put it like this. "Somehow or other an extraordinary idea has risen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles except them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them, rightly or wrongly, because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them, rightly or wrongly, because they have a doctrine against them." 

In miracles, as in much of life, you see what you're looking for.