Chaplain's Corner

On August 2nd The Canadian Press reported that “A group called the Farewell Foundation is in a B.C. court today setting off what’s expected to be a long legal fight for the right to assisted suicide.”  This is an issue that will not be going away until the right is legalized in Canada. I don’t know how long it will take, but as I look over the Canadian moral landscape, it is just a matter of time.

Why do I say this? Because this issue, the issue of assisted suicide, is not unlike the issue of abortion. It is one more of those issues that demonstrates the depraved desire to wrest from God’s hands those matters that are His and His alone.

The matter of abortion finally found its way into the legal codes of Canada because our courts determined that a woman has the unalienable right to determine what happens to her body and at the same time the courts determined that a child possesses none of those rights of personhood until he or she emerges from a woman’s birth canal. The push towards the legalization of assisted suicide is simply the extension of this same issue at the other end of life. Soon the Canadian courts and in all likelihood our highest court will make a decision that recognizes what it and many in our society believe to be the rights of the individual to determine when and how they want to die.

Now many chaplains would be hesitant to express an opinion on such matters, for they would feel that to do so might compromise their ability to provide supportive care to everyone, regardless of their religious, moral, or ethical convictions. For me, this is not the issue. I can care for those who disagree with me. I can support another person’s faith, even if it is not a faith that I could assent to. I can do this not because I believe that everyone’s faith is equally valid, but because I believe God has invested everyone with the right to choose what they will believe and accept with that right the responsibility and consequences for those choices. Consequences that inevitably follow every exercise of freedom we enjoy.

We live in a nation that has long insisted that freedom of religion and freedom of expression are values that are paramount to our way of life. To live in a society that values such things, we must be willing to respect each others right to believe and express our beliefs, even when we do not agree with each other. If I want to have the freedom to believe and express my beliefs, then I must be willing to respect that every other person has that same right and offer those the respect I myself desire.

However, having said that, I can not agree with this progressive investiture of rights that the Canadian courts are giving the citizens of our nation. As I seek to find my place under God’s authority and I believe God does have ultimate authority over everything and everyone by virtue of the fact that He is the creator of all that exists and the fact that He is Sovereign of the Universe; I must maintain a consciousness in regards to the limits of the freedom with which God has invest humankind. To accept and exercise the freedoms within the limits God sets is our responsibility, to push beyond those limits, as I see things, is arrogant and rebellious.

It is little wonder that people who feel marginalized and vulnerable get upset as these issues push their way into the legal codes of our nation. Where will it stop? At what point will a person be stripped of his or her rights of personhood because some arbitrary standard of performance is not met?

Let’s not fool ourselves, economics often fuels the fires of change and as health care is such a significant piece of our national and provincial budgets, there are constant pressures being placed on those who make decisions to use those health care dollars in the most productive way. It is the word “productive” that is frightening, for within that construct of productivity lies a value judgment that demands that the questions be asked, “What does it mean to use health care funds productively?” and “What deems a person’s life worth the investment of precious health care dollars?”

Members of the “differently abled” community fear that the test of productivity may at some point render then unworthy of the health care dollars they need to maintain their lives. A fear that is legitimate as our nation moves step by step, albeit ever so slowly, towards measuring the value of a life by that persons capacity to make “productive” contribution to the society as a whole.

Now I am not by nature an alarmist. But as I have studied history, one lesson I believe we can easily learn is that it is easier to halt a movement in its early stages than after it gains significant momentum and after the society in general has become desensitized to the issues involved. This is where I stand with this movement towards assisted suicide. It doesn’t take a Harvard PhD. to see that this is an incremental step towards permitting a society to become its own “god”. Such a move, invests a society and the power structures within the society with far too much power, a power that we see abused regularly in countries around the world.

Precious Canadian blood has been shed in the past to halt the maniacal spread of some of these powers. In my heart of hearts, I believe that if we continue to move down this path of rebelliously assuming the right to exercise “god-like” prerogatives, it will more than likely lead us to a place, somewhere down the road, to where life and liberty are granted only to those who are deemed to be worthy and the individual rights to control one’s body and as it appears soon to the  case to choose how and where one dies, will be lost to the  “collective we” of society that feels entitled to make utilitarian decisions about what is best for the greatest number, further jeopardizing those whose very existence might be deemed little more than a burden because these require so much and give so little to the financing of the society. This is especially of concern to me as our nation moves rapidly away from it’s Judeo-Christian foundations to a fully secular mindset that relegates religious and moral thought to the privacy of each citizens heart, but refuses to allow those private convictions to have any impact of the society in general because the society in general has no overarching spiritual and moral moorings.

I for one, and I am only one, believe we need to halt our move towards assisted suicide or “the right to die” as it is being called. I am concerned that with each successive move in this direction, the slippery slope may become so steep that there will be no hope of stopping our society’s decline and the ultimate loss of respect for what it means to be people, created in God’s image, living under His grace, from birth, to death, which are His alone to determine.