I mentioned in my sermon on
Sunday that I just finished reading a book entitled, “The way we die now.” The book was not written by a Christian,
which made his conclusion even more striking:
“There
is a perception—even a consensus—that death is something that medicine should
somehow ‘sort out’. But our needs are spiritual, not medical. Medicine’s
dominion should be limited and explicitly defined. Medicine, and our culture,
would be healthier and happier if we stopped expecting medicine to solve our
existential and spiritual problems, if we stopped thinking of our bodies as
machines and if we gave up our fantasies of control and of immortality. Doctors
can indeed help the dying, but dying needs to be de-medicalized” (271-272).
When the author, a medical
doctor, writes about giving up “our fantasies of control and immortality” he is
talking about doctors who will do everything necessary to keep someone alive
even though those doctors know 1) this may result in much more pain and
suffering for the patient and 2) that the disease is terminal regardless of
what the doctors do.
The author says he wrote the
book “because my limited, strictly medical, expertise was inadequate to meet
the demands placed on it by society and by my dying patients and their
families. I had no answers, no profound insights.”
I appreciate his honesty. Ultimately, the
only one who has the final answers to life and death is the One who himself
conquered death through His resurrection. We have His thoughts and the Spirit-inspired
wisdom of his earliest followers, in the New Testament.
