Don’t think I haven’t had the thoughts. Standing by a bedside, witnessing the terrible struggle for breath, images of the final scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest come unbidden. Two minutes with this pillow and the suffering would be over. All that would apparently be lost is a few more days of this agony.

Don’t think I haven’t had the conversations. With best friends, talking in the moments past all pretensions, the questions are asked. "Will you swear to push me off this pier in my wheelchair? I mean it, when I’m dribbling down my chin, and I don’t know where I am or who I am, will you remember this conversation and just chunk me into the ocean?"

Pastors have dark thoughts. I see plenty of suffering and plenty of death. I have a tender heart. If we can put animals to sleep, why may we not shorten the last hopeless hours of fellow Christians, and end the searing bedside watches of their loved ones? It doesn’t take more than one story of horrible terminal days to cause all principles inside us to get loosened. How can I make judgements in the face of others’ sufferings? Stories move us, and many times rule us. I could tell you stories to make your heart scream for legalized physician assisted suicide.

Dr. Angell writes of her father’s "courage and resolve" in exercising his "right to self-determination." If our heart-strings weren’t already pulled, she wrenches us with the detail that her father was so thoughtful even to have "turned in such a way that the bullet" could not have harmed his wife. Yet, such a dignified choice was more violent than it needed to be, she asserts, because physician assisted suicide was not available. In fact, Dr. Angell’s father had to face this choice alone for, she surmises, he dared not confide in his wife who might have stopped him or his physician daughter who might have been professionally compromised in her knowing. Mercy! If I have even a speck of compassion, how can I reply in the contrary to the sentiments of a grieving daughter? When I go on to reckon that she is a physician with considerable experience in this area, my mouth simply closes.

And yet. And yet, as one steeped in a different kind of story, I am forced to reply. "No, something doesn’t add up here. Your story doesn’t ring true. Your account of human dignity does not match with the Story I know of who we are and why we are here. There are more courageous stories to be told. There is a deeper compassion, a higher path, a way that in the long term offers more hope to a pained and weary world."

The one true story
The Story in which I live and move and have my being leaves no place for my "right to self-determination." I am not my own. Nor have I entered the world chiefly to find my personal fulfillment. Rather, I am a creature. I have been created by Another, whose purpose for me is that I glorify him. Though I may rage against his intent, I cannot step one inch outside his sovereign control. He has breathed his breath into me, and that makes me a living being. Moreover, I am different than every other kind of creature, for I am fashioned after the image of the Maker. Something in being human partakes of God in a way no other creature does. That something involves relating. I do not live for myself or by myself. Rather I am made to live in communion with God and fellowship with others. All of my living, and even my dying, involves living for the will and glory of God. In fact, it is the very abandonment of self-determination that leads to the flowering of human life.

The Story, however, gets better. The God who made us has stepped into the world as one of us. Our Story accounts for the suffering and the dying, the wrenching pain and the stunning loss, with the arrival of God in our skin. He bears our griefs and carries our sorrows. He picks up our infirmities and takes our diseases. He takes upon himself even the rage that follows our failed self-determination. This God in skin was so courageous as to follow his way of living for us all the way to death on the cross for us. He did not turn aside, even from the grisly end. He laid aside all dignity. In utter humiliation he abandoned self. He died neither in private nor in peace, but hung nailed on rough wood before a mocking crowd. In that way, according to our Story, there has come new life and hope for us. The living way is one of complete self-offering, a giving determined by the will of God, not by any person.

Our lives come from God and return to him. The moment of temporary sundering of spirit from body belongs to the sovereign God. Of this holy moment of death, we have many stories to tell. Those who have lived from the Story of the God in skin who has taken up our cause have reflected, again and again, incredible courage in facing their mortal end. We have stories of those who have endured with grace, and in so doing blessed forever those who have stood by. There are narratives of communion with the crucified one which the dying and their families have experienced. We realize that a deep spiritual intimacy and even a glory would have been lost by a failure of nerve at the last.

Courage in crisis
Between the pillow and the pier, we have stories that tell a different tale than the "courage" and "dignity" in the assisted suicide narratives. But even more, we have an overarching Story that prevents us from thinking that life and death are ever really in our hands, subject to our judgement. Ultimately, we are conferred with a greater dignity than lonely self-determination. We are given the image of God, and sent to follow the One who established eternal life by enduring his dying to the end.

This is the Story to which I must hold, even when other stories pull at me with their compassion or grab me with their poignancy. Our Story comes complete with laws and principles meant to limit our choices. These are given to maintain us within the Story, and keep us connected to the life and fulfillment it offers. In Charlotte Bronte’s famous novel, Jane Eyre, the title character, endures a moment of fierce temptation with these words:

When either the mercifully placed pillow or the plunge off the pier call to my heart, I am yet tethered to another way of telling the meaning of our lives. Though circumstances make me feel "mad" in relation to all I believe, the laws of our Story hold me within God’s narrative. Even when "body and soul rise in mutiny" against continuing life to its appointed end, we are yet constrained to follow him who showed the utmost courage in embracing his humiliation unto death. Jesus gave himself to be spent, bringing forth life out of death. As we pass ourselves, or stand with those who pass, through the valley of the Shadow, however rugged it may present itself to be, we do so in union with Christ who has gone before us. That is our only basis for enduring to the end, and it is the heart of the Story of hope.

1. Marcia Angell, "No Choice But to Die Alone," The Washington Post, February 24, 2002, p. B7.
2. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, Franklin Center, PA: The Franklin Library, 1981, p. 364.