289 - Enduring to the End

Enduring to the End
By Hugh T. Kerr

ONE OF THE intriguing features of current piety revolves around the frequent use of such words as "accepting," "sharing," "affirming," "supporting," "receiving," "assuring," "participating," "upholding," plus a whole cluster of "with" words, "empathizing with," "resonating with," "listening with," "feeling with," and the like.

The vocabulary seems to feed upon itself, and we see and hear the written and spoken language almost everywhere these days. The terminology also reflects a modern mood, both psychological and religious, with a large assist from our contemporary obsession with personal identity and interpersonal relationships. Years ago around the campfire, we sang an insipid little ditty "The more we get together ... the happier we'll be." Today we've dignified that sentiment and given it overtones of existential angst, sometimes easily confused with evangelical euphoria.

I

There are two theological aspects of this participatory trend that need to be lifted up for closer inspection. One is the obvious and encouraging reminder that this is what the church is all about and what true Christian fellowship must involve. From the Acts of the Apostles, through the Epistles, and on to the Apocalypse, being a Christian in the world means supporting and upholding one another.

The church as the body of Christ must not only function harmoniously and worship corporately, but its various members must relate to each other in edifying and helpful ways. That surely is not a new idea, but every age must rediscover this interpersonal apostolic mandate for itself and its own time.

The Pauline "body" analogy has usually been interpreted so as to give honor and distinction to all insignificant members who are urged to work together for the common good. But in this rather functional and

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pragmatic view of the church, Paul's closing words are often forgotten, namely, "If one member suffers, all the other members suffer …" (I Cor. 12:26; Phillips). Today there may be good reason to make something special of this text, particularly for those who feel so personally vulnerable and in painful need of mutual acceptance and assistance.

A second theological consideration has to do with the current anxiety about being able to endure, to hack it, and just to cope. When life hands us a bum deal and when we are hurting, suffering, and feeling deep pain, we crave the assurance that there is a caring God. But we also need to know that our family, friends, and associates, and perhaps even complete strangers, will rally round to encircle us within a warm womb of protective love and compassion. Three illustrative incidents of this may be briefly noted.

II

In a recent issue of Concern (July, 1980), a magazine for United Presbyterian women, six anonymous women tell of being shattered by divorce, abortion, zero ego-feelings, being physically battered, dealing with a pregnant teen-age daughter, and rape. Coming out of these experiences and finding new incentives for living, most of these women repeat the refrain of sharing, supporting, and affirming. Virginia Stieb-Hales, a Concern editor, concludes these personal accounts by writing, "My hope is that all women ... will learn to risk discovering their own woundedness, to say 'I hurt' and share their hurts with one another." Curiously, and we will come back to this, the hurting and the sharing are not related to either theology or personal faith.

On TV, June 16, 1980, over many PBS stations, an hour semi-documentary received unusually wide coverage. The program, "Choosing Suicide," told of a mature woman, Jo Roman, who decided to end her life after cancer diagnosis. The sessions with friends and family mostly "supported" Jo Roman's decision. When a single protester began to raise questions, she was quickly silenced. Very little if anything was said about religion, but audiences were treated to endless chatter about the right to die with dignity and how a conscious decision to end a hopeless existence could actually enhance and enrich the meaning of life. Taking an overdose of Seconal, Jo Roman died, June 10, 1979, as she had planned it all in advance.

An excellent critique in The Christian Century (April 23, 1980) by Parker Rossman, who has written about the hospice movement, prompted me to visit the Drama Book Store in New York to buy a Samuel French copy of the 1977 Pulitzer Prize drama, "The Shadow Box," by Michael Cristofer (not as the Century reported, "Shadow Box," by William Christopher). More is certain to be known about this remarkable play when it appears on ABC-TV in an adaptation directed by Paul Newman.

The action has to do with the residents of three hospice cottages on

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the grounds of a large hospital. The patients are all terminally ill and struggling with death and themselves. Cristofer invokes as a preface to his script a quotation from Kübler-Ross regarding the now familiar sequences -denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. And the play moves along swiftly with equal portions of pathos, humor, wit, and raunchy language.

Provocative lines tumble over each other: "You get tired of keeping it [the certainty of death] all inside. But it's like, nobody wants to hear about it." "Everything's all right." "People don't want to let go, do they?" "The trouble is that most of us spend our entire lives trying to forget that we're going to die." "You always think ... no matter what they tell you ... you always think you have more time." "So, how is he? ... Dying, how are you?" "I have one lung, one plastic bag for a stomach, and two springs and a battery where my heart used to be." "You look fine ... I look terrible." "I can't help it. I'm scared to death." "It's getting dark." "I'm all right. I'm all right." "No, you're not sorry. You don't know anything about sorry." "I don't want to talk about it." "Some of us are here for the duration. And it is not easy."

The three residents adjust in one way or another to their destiny and manage to endure to the end, and finally, in the face of death, saying "Yes." But family and friends, who should be affirming and supportive, simply cannot accept the ultimate finality. And once again, almost nothing is said about the place of religious faith, or the lack of it, in this otherwise perceptive collage of hurting people in need of mutual compassion.

III

With or without the mutual support of family and friends, it is seldom ever easy to endure to the end. To face numbing suffering and cruelly inflicted death can be, and usually is, full of terror, violence, and anguish. To die with dignity, to live fully every minute up to the last, to affirm life over death-these are terrific ideas most of us are quite willing to discuss intellectually.

But let us remember that the death and final agony of Jesus was utterly dreadful, dirty, and disgusting. As one of the genuine, caring persons says in "The Shadow Box" about his terminal charge:

We are dying here ... the light is going out ... You can wipe up the mucous and the blood and the urine and the excrement, you can burn the sheets and boil his clothes, but it's still there. You can smell it on him. You can smell it on me ... and feel it inside your belly like a sewer … You try to vomit it out of you. But you can't. It doesn't go away … It's sick and putrid and soft and rotten and it is killing me.

A personal friend, describing for me the death of his wife who chose to die in her own bed in her own home, said, "Believe me, it was a terrifying and shaking experience to be at her dying bedside, watching her struggle and gasp up to the last second."

Here the spirit of Jo Roman may return to haunt us. If putrefying

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death can be so ugly, doesn't it make sense to thwart its stranglehold by deciding to exit on your own? Maybe, but as several of the panelists in the discussion following the TV documentary noted, terminally ill people seldom commit suicide even when they have the chance. Those who do take their own lives, or try to, are usually motivated by fears other than the prospect of unbearable physical pain.

IV

If we examine the biblical notion of faithful enduring to the end, we discover that it has profoundly theological implications. To "endure" may mean, as in the Old Testament, "to wait upon God," or, as in the New Testament, that the Christian has no inner self-generated resources but that the "power of resistance is given by God" (Kittel).

To be affirming and supportive of one another is fine, but to have faith that God in Christ provides our real support and our final affirmation, that, too, demands our attention. Perhaps if we could begin with that, we'd be able to give more substance to our living and our dying and so satisfy our craving for mutual acceptance.

Such a theological reflection by itself would, of course, be of little comfort to the kinds of people we've been talking about. But let us reflect further by way of three biblical references.

When the apostle Paul, in an ambiguous autobiographical aside, confided that he had been plagued with "a thorn in the flesh," we might assume that he would provide his Corinthian readers (very mixed-up people, to say the least) with some pious assurance of how his faith brought health and healing. Not so.

Three times I begged the Lord for it to leave me, but his reply has been "My grace is enough for you"… . I can even enjoy weaknesses, suffering, privations, persecutions, and difficulties for Christ's sake. For my very weakness makes me strong in him (II Cor. 12:8-10; Phillips).

There is something here beyond pious platitudes or cheap grace. Paul had loads of friends who affirmed and supported him, and he lists them gratefully and lovingly by name: Phoebe, Prisca, Aquila, Ephaenetus, Mary, Andronicus, Junias, Amphliatus, Urbanus, Stachys, Apelles, Herodion, Tryphaena, Tryphosa, Persis, Rufus, Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermes, Patrobas, Hermas, Philologus, Julia, Nereus, Olympas (just to note some mentioned at the conclusion of the Roman epistle).

But Paul was also something of a loner, and his ultimate source of assurance that enabled him to endure to the end was, theologically speaking, Christological.

Among those faithful endurers listed in the Epistle to the Hebrews (chap. 11), we are reminded of Abel, Enoch, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Joseph, Moses, Rahab, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel, "the prophets," those who "stopped the mouths of lions,

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quenched raging fire. . were stoned, sawn in two, killed with the sword." And so we read:

Surrounded then as we are by these serried ranks of witnesses, let us strip off everything that hinders us, as well as the sin which dogs our feet, and let us run the race that we have to run with patience, our eyes fixed on Jesus the source and goal of our faith. For he himself endured a cross and thought nothing of its shame because of the joy he knew would follow his suffering (Heb. 12:1-2; Phillips).

Again, the biblical witness engulfs us with a cloud of suffering sympathizers because of the person of Jesus Christ.

The text engraved in stone beneath the so-called "Great North Window" in the Princeton University chapel reads: "He that shall endure unto the end the same shall be saved" (Mark 13:13). And who might "he" (or "she") be? Well, according to the stained-glass artisan, it is the Christ figure as martyr who dominates the whole scene. The color mood is blood-red and, being on the north, the "cold side" of the church, we are face to face with grim overpowering realities.

Who are those who surround the martyr Christ, the cloud of witnesses who testify to and support the faithful and those for whom faith is only a wistful possibility? Well, it's a strange crew:

Sebastian, Stephen, Laurence, Christopher, Cardinal Mercier, Chevalier Bayard, Saint George, Theodore, Jeanne d'Arc, Thomas á Becket-affirmed and supported by the Archangels Gabriel, Raphael, and Michael, with Abraham in the far upper rosette, holding the faithful in his hammock-like bosom.

Under these figures in small square panels are symbols of Christ's passion (the scourges, the lamb of God, the crown of thorns), plus classic emblems of life eternal-the peacock (incorruptible flesh), the chalice (the medicine of immortality), the lion licking its cubs into life, and the phoenix rising from the ashes.

To be a faithful follower of the Christ is to suffer with a suffering God whose redemptive purposes will be revealed, if not now, then eventually and ultimately-which is to say in God's, not our, good time.

Isn't it curious that the Christian fellowship is composed of those who depend on each other for mutual support, even though they may be loners all their lives, and whose ultimate destiny beyond this "vale of tears" is unknown but enticing and beckoning? The Christian gospel is good news because whoever endures to the end will be saved.