Dear People of Christ Church,

I hope to see a lot of you this week-tomorrow, the art show, Saturday, the release of our own Gene Burkart’s posthumous work of collected essays (see below), and Sunday at the Mother’s Day Walk. Our walking is part of the diocesan-wide Season of Celebration and Service in honor of Bishop Shaw. It has been such a gift for me to be formed as a priest in his witness for justice and peace. Please join me in honoring Tom and in walking in the path of peace with those whose loved ones have been killed, whose deaths are not mourned with public grief and huge ceremony, whose killers are often not found.

In other topics of life and death, on May 18 we’ll have a conversation about end of life issues with our own Rob Atwood, who works as a hospice social worker while not helping out with Sunday readings. On Tuesday Christ Church hosted a day-long workshop for clergy and other caregivers about “Caring for Each Other in Life and Death” (see the tweets at #endlifecare) put on by the Massachusetts Council of Churches-it’s a conversation whose time has come.

Medical technology can do almost anything-life can be extended longer than ever before, and that’s a blessing. I don’t want to go back to a time before measles vaccines and chemotherapy. But our dedication to technology has also obscured the way that death is also part of life. Our bodies are gifts from God, wonderful gifts. In caring for ourselves we give glory to God, in using our skills and honoring our relationships and running and sleeping and loving. But we are also invited into a certain humility about our bodies-they are a gift, but they are also on loan.

As always, Anglican theology is pretty nuanced on the question. In our Church’s teaching about the end of life, we differentiate between “passive” and “active” ways in which death may be hastened. The passive withholding of treatment is an ethical choice; if there is no prognosis for recovery, the question becomes whether the patient’s dying process is being prolonged, as opposed to whether their actual life is being extended. When the ballot question on (depending on your position) physician assisted suicide/death with dignity came across, there were Episcopalians of good faith on both sides of the issue. I do think we need to be cautious about our judgments about what life is “meaningful”-one of the reasons I voted against the 2012 ballot initiative was that I worried about legitimating the notion that some lives are not worth living. From a disability rights perspective, that’s just not a precedent I want to be part of, even as I would be in favor of some of the outcomes of the adoption of such a law.

And there are a lot of legal issues-I learned this week that your next of kin may be the person the hospital calls first, but if there is a conflict with other family members about your care, only an authorized health care proxy has the right to make the final call. So please join us on the 17th-we’ll talk about some of the medical decisions that are made at the end of life, about Massachusetts law concerning decision making authorization, and also (and this part is kind of fun) planning your own funeral. There’s only one way to be sure that one hymn that you hate doesn’t get played… If you can’t make it check out the booklet we put together last year here or make an appointment to see me!

Blessings,
Sara+