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

We’ve been seeking that festival feeling for millennia

Why else do we endure discomfort, queues, and sleep deprivation?

Jamie is Associate Minister at Holy Trinity Clapham, London.

A singer on a stage holds out his arms to conduct the crowd.
Chris Martin enchanting Glastonbury.
Raph_PH, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Why do we go to festivals? It was something I contemplated at 4am while trying to stop a marquee from setting sail into the air during a quintessentially English late July storm. Thankfully we pinned it down, but sometimes it seems we can't get a handle on something until it's been taken away from us. Lockdown allowed us to indulge in some soul-searching about our appetite for summer festivals.  A Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee survey of 36,000 people showed that what people most missed about festivals during the pandemic was 'the atmosphere'. The atmosphere, much like that airborne marquee, is something difficult to put your finger on, but whatever it is, you do want to soak it up.  

So, what contributes to that ‘atmosphere’? Harry van Vliet from the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences compared over 20 studies into motivations for festival-going. He distilled them into: escape, family togetherness, socialisation, and novelty. Other researchers, such as Rippen and Bos, cite realising significance, giving meaning and giving shape, and deploying, developing and maintaining competencies. As abstract and ethereal as our motivations are, at festivals we want to ram the tent peg into the ground, staking the opportunity to escape or to imagine the future. Why else would you endure discomfort, questionable cuisine and sanitation, queues and sleep deprivation? We endure little inconveniences because we have bigger thirsts. 

Then there's the gap between what people hope to get out of a festival and what the organisers are aiming for. Spare a thought for those who booked onto the FYRE Festival, which promised ‘a new type of music festival that would ignite the energy and power of its guests’. Instead, they ignited fury, lawsuits, and six years in prison for the founder. The driver here was greed. If festivals are an immersive experience, what the festivalgoers unsuspectingly immersed themselves in was the sad fruit of that particular rotten orchard. Instead of the gourmet meals and luxury villas, the staff ate sandwiches in styrofoam boxes and guests who’d spent up to $100,000 to attend fought over a limited number of mattresses and tents. One legal document from a guest claimed guests were lured into ‘a complete disaster, mass chaos and post-apocalyptic nightmare’. 

The performer, therefore, is like a prophet or a priest. We get to enter little portals to the divine. 

We know if we’ve immersed ourselves in something more hopeful. I’ve spoken to several people who’ve been to Taylor Swift gigs, all still ‘buzzing’. Cities and countries keep reporting the bounce, the economic uplift they’ve all experienced from a Swift visitation. Deep down, at concerts and festivals alike we all probably know that we’re not there to ignite the energy and power of us as the guests, but to spectate the energy of the maestro at work. They are the ones who plumb the depths of creative introspection for us. They are the ones who concoct, via musical alchemy and a large support team, something reaching transcendence. If we can immerse ourselves in that, then, however fleetingly, all the inconvenience will have been worth it. 

Festivals, therefore, are a pick-n-mix of artistry that we can come up close to. And therefore, the thought goes, their creative genius. Which is almost as elusive as the atmosphere of an immersive festival itself. Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love, says it was a mistake when we placed the human at the centre of the universe, and the pressure that comes from having to be a creative genius. In her 2009 TED Talk she spoke about Socrates believing he had a daemon that spoke to him, and the Romans believed that they had a ‘sort of disembodied creative spirit’ called a genius. The performer, therefore, is like a prophet or a priest. We get to enter little portals to the divine. 

Maybe Coldplay can be right, when on the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury they sang to tens of thousands, ‘you’ve got a higher power.’ 

But what if the founder of the FYRE Festival was actually right? What if the guests themselves at festivals have energy and power, and not just Chris Martin? Millenia ago, this idea was once also floated at the festival of tabernacles, or Sukkot, where the Israelites made a pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem and would camp in tents for seven days. 

The gospel writer John says that Jesus spoke to whatever it was people had pitched up tents by the temple for: 

‘On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, ‘Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.’ 

John goes on to explain that ‘By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified.’ 

Where the Holy Spirit had previously been given to specific people, for specific times and purposes, including creativity, here the Holy Spirit was promised to anyone who would believe in him. And as well as their own fulfilment, the divine creative energy would flow through them to others. 

More than a mere atmosphere or nebulous spirit, Jesus claims to be one with the creative energy who hovered over the waters at the start of the Bible, the dwelling place at the end of the Bible where God will be with his people, and drove a stake, or a cross, into the ground to enable this to happen. 

Maybe Coldplay can be right, when on the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury they sang to tens of thousands, ‘you’ve got a higher power.’