14. Death

We must all suffer and eventually die. This common destiny poses three questions: Why? What must we do? Why do we have to? Why bother caring and battling against illness if death is always to have the upper hand? What are our faith resources?

An amateur of black humour once asked that on his tomb be written the words: "See you soon!" But the joke was found to be sinister and in bad taste, so the epitaph was rejected. It is a want of discretion to make of death a common topic of conversation. Death is inevitable, but it inspires fear. It is a scandal which revolts us and which we reject outright.

"There is no such thing as a natural death, nothing which happens to man is ever natural, because its presence calls the world into question. All men are mortal, but for each man, his death is an accident, and even if he knows it, and even if he consents to it, it is an undue violence."

We always die of "something". Remove from the hospital wards accidents caused in the work place, the overworked, those with agonising problems, those victims of external aggression... remove the victims of bad ecological or affective environment, or those who by way of compensation have become alcoholics... go back a few generations and remove those whose background is tainted in some way... transfer to medical research what is gained by the arms race; you will discover that old intuition: man in his enthusiasm is destined to live forever! God creates for life, a life to be conquered, but a life which sin drags down, in a headlong slide towards death, towards nothingness.

To sin has always been to choose death. Biological death is a metaphor for spiritual death. It is a fact that some are already dead before their bodies die. There is a saying in Provence which is both humorous and realistic: "He's dead, but we're not telling him... when he does die, we'll take advantage of it to bury him."

The Gospel rejoins us in our historical condition, that of death: a constant daily dying, death which comes to us through generations long gone by, death which has become organised into a system. No one can escape it. But the Gospel does not teach us how to die, but how to live! By giving us back our taste - the salt as it were - to our love of life, it makes death still more intolerable!

Only those who are passionate, the non-resigned, are capable of suffering. Only those who love know the cost of dying. Only the living can die! Jesus did not die as a hero might have done. Neither was He calmly resigned to it as were the Stoics. He entertained no morbid death wish. Completely innocent, He alone could cry out with every bone in His body: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken Me"? Everyone who dies participates in this unique dying. He enters into the death of the Man, which is now the death of Christ, and he bursts through the mighty door of the Resurrection. "Death is swallowed up in life" "I am the Resurrection. Everyone who believes in Me, even though he die, will live."

But how can we believe, when everything contradicts faith? Adherence to Jesus Christ is gained by fighting against doubt and despair. That is why, when a Christian follower of Christ becomes ill, other Christians gather round him to ward off loneliness, strengthen his hope and sustain his faith. They pray that the patient may recover, for they genuinely desire his return to full health in his family, at his work and in the community.

Between the anonymous sheets of a nickel hospital, confronted with suffering and broken bodies often deprived of their dignity and reduced to the state of objects (handled, looked at, manipulated), Christians recognise this same human body given over to men, to treatments by his contemporaries. They recognise Him who had lost all His autonomy, whose entire body was lacerated, whose liberty and responsibility has been taken away from Him. They see the body, the mask of the Suffering Servant, who takes upon Himself all our infirmities.

"All our infirmities", which besides organic troubles, must include the injustices of society; for with my faith, I recognise in this an identical suffering, an identical and unjust violence which torments all those who are affected by it. The same clamour surrounds all the cries; many and diverse are the wounds, however there is but one suffering, one passion, one human cry: "Jesus is in agony until the end of the world", wrote Pascal, and Saint Paul: "I fill up in my body what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ, for His Body which is the Church."

Suffering, injustice, illness, can never be explained or justified; evil is always evil, opaque, absurd, nonsensical. But our refusal in the face of it, the protests that rise up within us, find their total and strongest expression in the cry of Jesus on the Cross. "Beyond despair", through suffering and death, a breach is opened, and from that moment, all is changed. Our fight against sickness and death strengthens us, forms us, and tempers us, making us like to Christ suffering, assimilated to Him, side by side in the same battle, united in one desire, in one longing, in one breath: "It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me."

So it is vital to celebrate this paradoxical communion which breaks through isolation, and re-establishes solidarities. We must proclaim Hope in the very place where it is tested. We must collaborate with the work of the Spirit of life, communion and holiness. When we are sick, we need an extra dose of faith, a special sacrament.

The oil of anointing symbolises all the different treatments. It expresses the very large context into which the Holy Spirit infiltrates each gesture that activates the healing process. The oil of anointing recalls baptism and reactivates the first choice, the election and the privileged love known to the Christian. He receives the royal anointing, that of free men, of witnesses and of those ready to do battle.

As a man is never completely free on his own, but grafted on to a people, a Christian linked to the Body of Christ, so the sacrament of the sick demands a public expression, the presence of the body that is of the Church, of the community. A sacrament is never a private affair, but presupposes that the Church congregate around the brother who is testifying to his faith.

And if the hospital becomes a sort of hypermarket offering all kinds of medical care, and where a patient can be treated as just another case or a simple number, the Christian community must intervene and testify, that the doctor is there to serve the patient and not the other way round. It thus accomplishes an act which demystifies the claims of science and technology, desacralising the medical world, and restoring to the patient his dignity as a member of Christ. After all, this body is first of all a person!

Unfortunately, all this is hard to live when surrounded by tubes, X-rays, the daily rhythm of duties which of necessity and as a general rule have priority. Faith is never an easy thing, but it is precisely because this attitude cannot be taken for granted, that it is a sign both to believers and to unbelievers that it is truly a sacrament. It is a festive act, one that is public, open to discussion, prophetic - in short, an act that expresses something, a true preaching. It is completely geared towards life, requiring people who believe and are aware of what is happening, sick people who are conscious. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Extreme-Unction!

For the last moments of life, there is a final sacrament. Because it is a sacrament for the journey, for the passing over to eternal life, it has received the name of "viaticum" "Jesus, knowing that His hour had come to pass from this world to His Father, having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them unto the end" He took the bread of His Body, broke it and gave it one last time, thus expressing the definitive meaning of His life and of His death. If there are tabernacles, they exist for that reason: we keep the Body of Christ and we give it to the dying, so that in a final communion" with the Risen Body, source of life and health, i.e. complete health and eternal life, they may cross the threshold, completing the Passover by becoming one body with Christ.

There are some who die peacefully, but there are others who in the final spasms, cry out in anguish, tear through as it were, the darkness which is closing in upon them. Rebels, you will say? But no! Christ Himself lived this torment in Gethsamene when He "offered up prayers and entreaty, aloud and in silent tears, to the One who had the power to save Him out of death"....Heb.5.7