David Brooks Respects the Future and Misses the Point

In response to the Snelling family tragedy, David Brooks writes,

        Either Snelling . . . lost control of his faculties, or he made a lamentable mistake. . . Our job is not to determine who is worthy of life, but how to make the most of the life we have been given. . . . But who is to say how Snelling would have felt four months from now? The fact is, we are all terrible at imagining how we will feel in the future. . . our capacities for imagining the future are . . . horrible in moments of stress and suffering.  Given these weaknesses, it seems wrong to make a decision that will foreclose future thinking.  It’s better to respect the future, to remain humbly open to your own unfolding. . . .If you look at life through the calculus of autonomy, then maybe Snelling made the right call. . . . But if you look at a life as one element within a mysterious flow, . . . Charles and Adrienne Snelling still had a few ripples to create.

In present-day U.S. realities, there is no return from Alzheimer's; after age 80 the outlook for an autonomous, productive, and meaningful life in the absence of some form of dementia is bleak at best, even for those with the means to pay for long-term, humane, enlightened, assistance.  To suggest that anyone in the circumstances faced by the Snellings had “a few ripples to create” in the “mysterious flow” of life, is naive at best, cruel at worst.

Brooks declines to present the religious arguments against murder and suicide, “many of which are based on the supposition that a life is a gift from God.”  But larger theological minds than Mr. Brooks’ have gone far beyond such simplistic pietisms and wrestled with the “courage to be” – to live fully and completely in the face of the knowledge that one day we will cease to exist.  Mr. Snelling stands accused by Brooks of either a profound and callous self-centeredness, or romantic delusion.  But neither may have been the case.  Instead, in the face of the failure of both society and the religions that claim to nurture and guide it, Mr. Snelling looked into the possibility of non-existence and chose it. 

That choice shows a trust in the nature of life and the universe that is close to the trust that Jesus taught and embodied.  Progressive, liberal religious people – Christians particularly – should look to Jesus’ relationship to God beginning with Matthew 6:25-34.  Jesus says, “don’t fret about your life . . . there’s more to living than food and clothing . . . Take a look at the birds of the sky . . . the wild lilies . . . the grass in the field, which is here today and is thrown into an oven tomorrow.”  Go on from there to John 14:1-4, followed by Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, 15:51-52.  Read these passages in the context of today’s cosmology – what we now know about the nature of the Universe, including the laws of physics, not the 1st century cosmology of a triple-decker universe with God above, earth in the middle, and hell below that conventional religion insists upon to its continued irrelevance. 

Jesus taught a seamless relationship among the spirit of life, the natural world, and humanity, and he trusted that relationship to the point of his own unjust death at the hands of Roman occupiers.  Paul writes, in the new translation by the Westar institute scholars:

        I am going to tell you a wondrous secret: We are not all going to die, rather we are all going to be transformed, in an instant, in the blink of an eye at the sound of the last trumpet-signal.  The trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised incorruptible and we [too] will be transformed.  Because this perishable man must be clothed with the imperishable, and this mortal man must be clothed with immortality.  And when the perishable is clothed with the imperishable and the mortal is clothed with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: Death has been engulfed by victory.  Where, O Death has your victory gone?  What’s happened, O Death, to your fatal sting?

21st century cosmology is clear:  neither matter nor energy can be created or destroyed, but only transformed.  We should have the same confidence in God that Jesus did: the same confidence in justice-compassion, in the spirit of life, and the nature of the universe itself.

In this Holy Week that celebrates the liberation of Passover and the incarnate promise of Easter, instead of concluding that Mr. Snelling “either lost control of his faculties, or made a lamentable mistake,” progressive spiritual leaders should grant him the courage to look into nothingness and encounter life itself.

Love and Death

In today’s New York Times Susan Jacoby writes,

        As the aging baby boom generation places unprecedented demands on the health care system, there is little ordinary citizens can do — witness the tortuous arguments in the Supreme Court this week over the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act — to influence either the cost or the quality of the treatment they receive. However, end-of-life planning is one of the few actions within the power of individuals who wish to help themselves and their society. Too few Americans are shouldering this responsibility.

The editors could not possibly have anticipated that news of the deaths of Charles Darwin Snelling (brother of the governor of Pennsylvania) and his wife Adrienne would appear to be an accompaniment to Ms. Jacoby’s important and timely opinion piece.  Some reports have named the deaths a “murder-suicide”; and, in truth, culturally, we have no other words to use.  The Times did find a way to be more gentle: 

        On Thursday, months after contributing a poignant essay to The New York Times about navigating a six-decade marriage upended by his spouse’s Alzheimer’s disease, Mr. Snelling killed his wife and himself, the Snelling family said in a statement released to The Morning Call of Allentown, Pa.. They were found Thursday in their home in Lehigh County in eastern Pennsylvania, the police said. Mr. Snelling shot himself, the coroner said. The ruling on Ms. Snelling’s death was pending. Both were 81.

Does “taking responsibility for death” include killing your loved one and then committing suicide? Ms. Jacoby does not answer that question; but she does have a provocative conclusion that points toward “yes”:

        There is a clear contradiction between the value that American society places on personal choice and Americans’ reluctance to make their own decisions, insofar as possible, about the care they will receive as death nears. Obviously, no one likes to think about sickness and death. But the politicization of end-of-life planning and its entwinement with religion-based culture wars provide extra, irrational obstacles to thinking ahead when it matters most.

The Snelling family tragedy is the most recent publicized incident of murder-suicide among the elderly, and speculation about what might have led to it must not be taken personally.  The Times presented a love story, and that is the way this particular one should remain.  But because this kind of end-of-life experience is not uncommon, we can ask questions on behalf of others caught in the same situation.  Did he know that she did not want to continue the long day’s journey into night that is Alzheimer’s?  Did he then know he could not live without her?  Or was he forced to sacrifice himself to the near-sighted gods of retributive justice – both secular and religious? 

He was likely looking at the death penalty if convicted of murder in Pennsylvania.  According to his essay published by The Times in December 2011, families on both sides were a combination of New England Congregationalists and Quakers – so a liberal view of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness might be assumed.  Certainly it is no accident that his name was Charles Darwin Snelling.  At 81, with his own death far more visible in the road ahead than at any other time in his life, traditional Catholic or protestant views about sin and the sanctity of life may not have been particularly relevant.  But he was a leader in the Pennsylvania Republican party, and his brother is the governor of the State.  Perhaps that “politicization” of end-of-life issues, and their “entwinement with religion-based culture wars” called out by Susan Jacoby left him no choice.

In the Christian liturgical year, we are on the cusp of Easter.  This Sunday is Palm Sunday, which in Mark’s gospel ushers in “Holy Week,” the final week of Jesus’ life.  During that week, Jesus orchestrated two demonstrations on behalf of distributive justice-compassion, and in opposition to those near-sighted gods of retributive justice worshiped by both religion and politics.  The first – in stark contrast to the imperial “motorcade” led by Pontius Pilate – was the legendary rag-tag procession led by an improbable messiah, riding on a donkey.  The second was the deliberate disruption of Temple business.  The religious authorities were collaborators with the unjust policies of the imperial occupation.  When the Romans built the Court of the Gentiles in the Jewish Temple, and even allowed the Roman golden eagle to be mounted on the gate, it was clear to many that the religious leadership had sold out.  That’s why Jesus yells, “This house was to be a house of prayer for all people, but you have turned it into a hide-out for robbers!”

It is time for progressive-liberal spiritual leaders of all faiths to overturn the money-changers and political collaborators and stand for justice-compassion.  Engage the questions of life and death without weighing the political advantage.  Have the courage – the confidence in whatever god or spiritual universe – to create a secular humanity that loves and cares for itself.  Mr. Snelling defined his care-giving as “redemption”:

        So, here comes the redemption. It never occurred to me for a moment that it would not be my duty and my pleasure to take care of my sweetie. After all, she took care of me in every possible way she could for 55 years. The last six years have been my turn, and certainly I have had the best of the bargain.

This is the kind of choice dictated by love that can indeed redeem individual lives.  But so long as our society is immobilized by the collaboration of political systems with religious beliefs that force people into conundrums that leave no choice, there can be no redemption.  That’s why Jesus was executed by the Romans.  Whether the spirit of justice-compassion rises incarnate is up to us.