The Bible says in John 5:24-26: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life. Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live. For as the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself.”
The featured quote for this episode is from Edgar Allan Poe. He said, "Even in the grave, all is not lost."
Our topic for today is titled "The Spirituality of Dying, Part 6" from the book, "The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come" by Rob Moll.
--- A Spiritual Reality
Those steps recommended by the Christian art of dying — expressing willingness to die, showing belief in Jesus, offering final thoughts and encouragements to family and friends, giving hope in the life to come — do more than create a peaceful and welcoming environment for the dying person. These actions prepare the spirit.
Repeated and intimate experience with the dying, over the course of centuries, taught Christians the necessary path to dying well. While everyone is different and these steps may not look alike from person to person, the general outline is the same. And Christian wisdom teaches that it works to bring a dying person on the right path from mortality to immortality.
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The Bible says in 1 Timothy 6:7: “We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.”
The featured quote for this episode is from Mark Twain. He said, "The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time."
Our topic for today is titled "The Spirituality of Dying, Part 5" from the book, "The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come" by Rob Moll.
--- Letting Go
Jim’s renewed sense of purpose and spiritual vision came about with some difficulty. First, Jim said, he had to learn to trust that God would take care of his family. “I am a control guy,” Jim explained. “It was unfathomable for me to figure out how God could take care of my wife and kids without me on the scene.”
But reading Luke where Jesus talks about leaving family members behind for fidelity to Christ, Jim was struck by Jesus’ words. It was exactly what he couldn’t do. Jim said he heard God ask, “How much do you love me, Jim? Do you really love me enough to trust me to take care of your wife and your children?”
Once Jim had let go of his need to be his family’s sole provider, his family had a surprise gift for him. Early on Easter Sunday morning, a friend came to get Jim and took him to church. The pastor met Jim outside, and the three friends walked through the church doors together. Inside, his pastor gave Jim a program for the event that was about to take place. His pastor said, “Jim, you have about a hundred friends in there, friends of yours, friends of your kids. Your wife has put this together. All four of your kids are going to get baptized.”
That morning, Jim’s kids all gave their testimonies and were baptized. “It was just a little service for our family and for our friends,” Jim said. His wife also shared with their friends about the difficulties she had dealing with Jim’s illness, but also the strength God had given her to handle her husband’s death.
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This podcast will help you get ready to face the inevitable unpleasant things that will happen in your life — things like trouble, suffering, sickness, and death — the death of people you love and your own death.
The Bible says in Ecclesiastes 7:1: “A good name is better than precious ointment; and the day of death than the day of one’s birth.”
The featured quote for this episode is from Natalie Babbitt. She said, “Don’t be afraid of death; be afraid of an unlived life. You don’t have to live forever, you just have to live.”
Our topic for today is titled “The Individual, the Church, and the Ars Moriendi (the Art of Dying), Part 6” from the book, “The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come” by Rob Moll.
— A Beautiful Injury
As Donne’s final weeks attest, he remained spiritually alive even as his body neared death. He eagerly awaited and looked for his entrance to life with God. He prayed, and having let go of things on earth, began to clutch those of heaven.
Yet, while Donne died well, those who loved him still mourned. Good deaths, even the best of them, are terrible because they separate — if only temporarily — people who have intertwined their lives. So, Christian history teaches us, the good death still injures the community. Death, even the good or happy death, is a painful event. It is evil and not a part of God’s creation, though God can bring good from it. And those closest to the deceased, in particular, need their wounds healed.
Funerals and other Christian rituals following death are meant, in large part, to nurse those wounds and reunite a community that has fractured. Phillipe Aries describes the classic Western Christian behaviors when the member of a community died. It “solemnly altered space and time,” he says. Shutters were closed and other visible signals outside the house alerted neighbors to what was happening inside. Candles were lit, prayers said, and clergy visited and performed their rites to bind the wounds of the mourning. Neighbors and relatives visited, and when death occurred tolling bells marked the significant loss of a member of the community.
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The Bible says in Psalm 39:4: “Lord, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is: that I may know how frail I am.”
The featured quote for this episode is from John Donne. He said, "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee."
Our topic for today is titled "The Individual, the Church, and the Ars Moriendi (the Art of Dying), Part 5" from the book, "The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come" by Rob Moll.
--- A Public Event
As bells tolled across England and Europe announcing another death from the plague, Christians were reminded at every moment that death was a public event and instructive to the church. While death was a spiritual event, according to Christian tradition, it was and is not a private affair simply between a Christian and God. Indeed, the loss of a single brother or sister in Christ wounded deeply the community of faith. "No man is an island," wrote Donne in his Devotions, "every man is a piece of the continent."
Two characteristics of death in the Middle Ages, says historian Phillipe Aries in his one-thousand-year history of Western attitudes of dying, lasted until the end of the nineteenth century: its familiar simplicity and public nature. "The dying person must be the center of a group of people," says Aries. As late as "the early nineteenth century, when the last sacrament was being taken to a sick man, anyone could come into the house and into the bedroom, even if he was a stranger to the family."
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The Bible says in Psalm 23:4: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”
The featured quote for this episode is from humorist Charles Bukowski. He said,
"I carry death in my left pocket. Sometimes I take it out and talk to it: I say, ‘Hello, how you doing? When are you coming for me? I'll be ready.’"
Our topic for today is titled "The Individual, the Church, and the Ars Moriendi (the Art of Dying), Part 4" from the book, "The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come" by Rob Moll.
--- A Dying Face
The early ars moriendi taught that the spirit of the Christian was quite alive, wrestling with angels and demons, even as the body died. Therefore, death was to be actively undertaken. Though Christians changed in their beliefs about what happens at the moment of death, they never dismissed the idea that the spirit was still active.
Modern science teaches that in the process of dying, when death is not caused by trauma, a body actually shuts itself down. It does not simply stop working. Rather, organs prepare themselves to cease their function, like a factory closing shop by turning off the machines and sweeping before cutting the power. So our body, even while dying, is still working. In the same way, the spirit of the Christian is too.
For example, hospice workers often report seemingly strange events which, for them, are proof of purposeful living even in a dying person. Some wait hours or even days until they are alone before dying. Other times, those who are extremely ill may appear to doctors to be physically unable to live, without blood pressure or signs of breathing, yet they stay alive until certain words are spoken or certain visitors arrive who perhaps offer reconciliation or permission to die.
What nurses and doctors recognize today, Christians understood centuries ago. When medical techniques to prolong life were not available, says pastor John Fanestil, people were not so passive about their dying. "Those who practiced the ritual of happy dying near the turn of the nineteenth century... did not approach it in a spirit of resignation or despair. To the contrary, because they believed God's hands were strong and trustworthy, [they] embraced death, or, better yet, they rose to greet it as if rushing into a loving embrace."
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This podcast will help you get ready to face the inevitable unpleasant things that will happen in your life -- things like trouble, suffering, sickness, and death -- the death of people you love and your own death.
The Bible says in Ecclesiastes 9:5: “For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten.”
The featured quote for this episode is from H.P. Lovecraft. He said,
"That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die."
Our topic for today is titled "The Individual, the Church, and the Ars Moriendi (the Art of Dying), Part 3" from the book, "The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come" by Rob Moll.
--- Reforming the Art of Dying
In centuries gone by, Christians acknowledged that the dying process is a deeply spiritual event. Today, those who have been able to be present at the death of a loved one often agree, describing it as a spiritual experience. Yet Scripture tells us very little about the life to come or what precisely Jesus meant when he promised to come to take us to himself.
As a result, anxiety is natural and common among Christians. Even though the Bible assures us of our destiny, getting there can be frightening. A hospice patient once told me about his ailments: a bad heart and colon cancer. "And now they've got me in hospice," he said with obvious concern. "So I don't know what's next." He looked at me plaintively, but it was clear we both knew what was next. The thought of his death was visibly worrisome to him. He then asked me to pray for him. "That's the best thing, you know!" he said. A lifelong, active Christian who said he looked forward to being in heaven, this patient was still concerned about the process of dying.
The same was true even for those medieval Christians who learned the “ars moriendi.” Though the deathbed scene, when peaceful, comforted onlookers, it was not always serene. In fact, "horror and fear are the emotions most commonly associated with late medieval perceptions of death and the life everlasting," writes Eamon Duffy in “The Stripping of the Altars,” "and preachers, dramatists, and moralists did not hesitate to employ terror.. to stir their audiences to penitence and good works."
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This podcast will help you get ready to face the inevitable unpleasant things that will happen in your life -- things like trouble, suffering, sickness, and death -- the death of people you love and your own death.
The Bible says in 2 Corinthians 5:6-8: "Therefore we are always confident, knowing that, whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord: (For we walk by faith, not by sight:) We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord."
The featured quote for this episode is from Marcus Aurelius. He said, "It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live."
Our topic for today is titled "The Individual, the Church, and the Ars Moriendi (the Art of Dying), Part 2" from the book, "The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come" by Rob Moll.
--- The Christian Art of Dying
Since the beginning of the church Christians have cared for the dying and sought to practice their deaths in ways that express belief in Christ's death and his resurrection. These practices sought to honor the body as the image of God. If God became a human, and even he had to die, Christians recognized that to die is not something to fight against, though it was not a part of God's original design. And if Christ was raised from death, Christians believe that death does not hold any power over the faithful.
Donne was immersed in a culture that prepared even its children to die well, expressing these Christian values and beliefs. Medieval Christians contemplated their own deaths early and often. Disease struck the young and old without warning. "Life, men thought then, was a preparation for death, and it behooved each one to be ready to meet it," writes one of Donne's biographers. "The surest way to meet such a moment was to have been through it often in the mind, to have endured it all in anticipation, and so to be able to meet it with the confidence becoming a Christian who trusted in the saving grace of Christ's sacrifice."
This mental preparation resulted in the ars moriendi; the art of dying. Christians in the second half of the fifteenth century endured their deaths in anticipation of the resurrection with the help of illustrated woodcuts. At that time the plague raged through Europe, and Christians could no longer count on the support of others at the end of their lives. Priests typically cared for the dying, administering the last rites, but during the plague, writes historian Arthur Imhof, "many people died at the same time, and there were not enough priests to assist everyone." These widely circulated woodcuts provided a way to minister to people who were alone.
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This podcast will help you get ready to face the inevitable unpleasant things that will happen in your life -- things like trouble, suffering, sickness, and death -- the death of people you love and your own death.
The Bible says in Hebrews 9:27: "And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment:"
The featured quote for this episode is from Euripides. He said, "No one can confidently say that he will still be living tomorrow."
Our topic for today is titled "The Individual, the Church, and the Ars Moriendi (the Art of Dying), Part 1" from the book, "The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come" by Rob Moll.
In late winter during the 59th year of his life, John Donne braved the weather and rough roads of the English countryside to keep his final preaching engagement before the king in London. He had spent most of that winter, which would be his last, battling "consumption," and on several occasions he nearly died. But he was eager to simply preach again. Donne had grown to love his midlife calling as a preacher. Better known today and early in his own life as a poet of love, Donne was also an exquisite expositor.
Throughout his life, Donne was a very public figure in London. His poetry circulated widely, passed and copied from hand to hand. As a young man, his earliest verses spoke of a wild decadence—trysts with women and overseas adventures. But public scorn of his elopement followed by years without steady work sobered his spirit. Years later, when the king offered him a position as a priest in the Church of England, Donne accepted. He was wildly successful in his new career and became even more prominent in London society. So, when Donne performed his death, he performed it as he had lived—as though on a stage or written into a poem.
An often sickly man, it is no surprise that much of Donne's writing dealt with death. Meditating on death was nothing new to Donne. His famous Elegies poetically address death and dying. And his popular Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions are his reflections after nearly dying from plague as it raged through London. Yet Donne never wanted to publish his poetry, for which he is better known. During his final illness, Donne compiled and edited his sermons for publication. As if he were arranging them for posterity to be sure the world knew how he valued his preaching, Donne devoted his healthy hours to this final task.
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This podcast will help you get ready to face the inevitable unpleasant things that will happen in your life -- things like trouble, suffering, sickness, and death -- the death of people you love and your own death.
The Bible says in Ezekiel 18:32: "For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Lord God; so turn, and live."
The featured quote for this episode is from Dean Koontz. He said, "Because God is never cruel, there is a reason for all things. We must know the pain of loss; because if we never knew it, we would have no compassion for others, and we would become monsters of self-regard, creatures of unalloyed self-interest. The terrible pain of loss teaches humility to our prideful kind, has the power to soften uncaring hearts, to make a better person of a good one."
Our topic for today is titled "Losing the Christian Death (Part 3)" from the book, "The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come" by Rob Moll.
--- We Have No Christian Dying
There is an untapped reservoir of Christian belief about dying. Christians are people who claim to worship and have the life of the risen Son of God. A renewed practice of Christian dying should affect not just the dying and those caring for them, but will fundamentally affect church life and individual spiritual lives from beginning to end.
For example, I have prayed in church and in prayer groups for the sick and the terminally ill. I've always felt obliged to pray for a miracle, that God would use the opportunity of a person's severe illness to disrupt the apparent laws of nature and display his power. But, eventually, praying this way became discouraging because those miracles never came. Slowly, I began—I thought—to pray more realistically. Instead of asking for a miracle, I prayed simply for grace and comfort from the Holy Spirit for the patient and his or her family. I prayed for wisdom when deciding among treatment options, and I prayed for those treatments to be effective. When they were not, I fell silent.
Yet my so-called realistic prayers were not really better prayers. I never prayed that someone would die well, as a faithful Christian. I never prayed that a death would bring about an opportunity for reconciliation and completion in relationships, or for God to bring something good from this evil. I never asked God to smooth someone's entrance to eternity. I know better now. "The idea that deaths can be inspirational—even redemptive—almost never enters modern conversations about death," writes John Fanestil, "yet this understanding lies at the core of the Christian gospel."
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This podcast will help you get ready to face the inevitable unpleasant things that will happen in your life -- things like trouble, suffering, sickness, and death -- the death of people you love and your own death.
The Bible says in Job 14:14: "If a man die, shall he live again? all the days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come."
The featured quote for this episode is from James Patterson. He said, "The funny thing about facing imminent death is that it really snaps everything else into perspective."
Our topic for today is titled "Losing the Christian Death (Part 2)" from the book, "The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come" by Rob Moll.
--- Lacking Spiritual Comforts
Christians once saw a window to the next world as a fellow believer entered eternity. Visions of heaven, Jesus and family were once common on the deathbed. This provided faith-sustaining, hope-inducing and grief-allaying comfort to those who survived the death of a loved one.
Wells quotes a newspaper account of the 1817 death of Anna Vedder in Schenectady, New York. "The newspaper remarked that the manner of her death was 'not only calculated to sooth the grief of those by whom she was held dear in this life, but also to inculcate most strongly, upon the minds of all, the blessedness of those that die in the Lord.' The paper assumed that 'it cannot be uninteresting to hear that she died in the full assurance of faith. The candle of the Lord shone upon her head. Death had lost its sting. She walked over the waters of Jordan . . . shouting the praises of redeeming love. She declared, moreover, that she beheld a place, more splendidly decorated than the tongue of mortal could describe, wherein was a seat prepared for her.'"
Such an expression that heaven was in view was once common and expected among Christians. Dallas Willard writes in The Divine Conspiracy, "Before the widespread use of heavy sedation, it was quite common for those keeping watch to observe something like this. The one making the transition [dying] often begins to speak to those who have gone before. They come to meet us while we are still in touch with those left behind. The curtains part for us briefly before we go through."
After asking Willard about this passage, he told me of his own experience. He said, “My brother, who died of Parkinson’s, had been in a state of noncommunication for a long time. Just before he died, he turned and said to his wife, ‘Now, dear, you must let me go.’ And he went.”
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This podcast will help you get ready to face the inevitable unpleasant things that will happen in your life -- things like trouble, suffering, sickness, and death -- the death of people you love and your own death.
The Bible says in 1 Corinthians 15:26: "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death."
The featured quote for this episode is from Benjamin Franklin. He said, "Many people die at twenty five and aren't buried until they are seventy five."
Our topic for today is titled "Losing the Christian Death (Part 1)" from the book, "The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come" by Rob Moll.
Instead of fighting death until the end, church history teaches us about the good death — one in which a believer seeks to faithfully express her hope in eternal life. It is a tragedy that the church has lost this vision of the good death. We are sending fellow believers into eternity unprepared for their journey. They may be sure of their destination but unsure how to get there. For Christians in previous centuries, death was a sacred moment long prepared for. It was considered one of the most important events in life, an event on which hung all of eternity. Christians took care to perform their dying faithfully. On their deathbeds they received family and friends who sat watch with the dying person, seeking evidence of their entrance to heaven.
Christians sought to learn from the dying because of their increased spirituality as they neared eternity. Pastor John Fanestil writes, “Christians living in early modern England and America believed that the closer a person drew to the edge of death, the closer that person’s soul was to God.” Deaths were recorded by family and friends and retold to those in the community who could not be present. The community drew comfort and encouragement from reports of those who crossed over in peace and hope. Preachers took the opportunity of a death to remind congregants of the source of death — sin — and its remedy through eternal life in Jesus Christ. In all these ways, people learned how to die well, so that when the time came, they were prepared.
Another feature of this tradition taught that the dead were a permanent part of church life. Centuries ago (and in some traditions that celebrate All Saints Day still today) the church saw itself made not only of the members who sat in the pews each sabbath but also those entombed believers awaiting the resurrection. The bodies of those Christians were often buried in the cemetery next to the church building, under its floor and inside its walls. The “communion of the saints” meant far more than pot luck dinners and small group fellowship.
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This podcast will help you get ready to face the inevitable unpleasant things that will happen in your life -- things like trouble, suffering, sickness, and death -- the death of people you love and your own death.
The Bible says in 1 Corinthians 15:51-52: "Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed."
The featured quote for this episode is from Benjamin Franklin. He said, "Fear not death for the sooner we die, the longer we shall be immortal."
Our topic for today is titled "Gradual Dying and End-of-Life Care (Part 4)" from the book, "The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come" by Rob Moll.
--- Are Christians Too Pro-Life?
A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that people of religious faith (95 percent of whom were Christians) were three times more likely to choose aggressive medical treatment at the end of their lives, even though they knew they were dying and that the treatments were unlikely to lengthen their lives. The study determined “that relying upon religion to cope with terminal cancer may contribute to receiving aggressive medical care near death.” One of the researchers told me, “patients who received outside clergy visits had worse quality of death scores in comparison to those who did not.” In other words, our churches are not teaching us to die well. Why?
Those who intensively rely on their faith when suffering from terminal illness, the study found, “may choose aggressive therapies because they believe that God could use the therapy to provide divine healing, or they hope for a miraculous cure while intensive medical care prolongs life.” God, however, doesn’t need the surgeon’s assistance to restore health. Not only did they choose more aggressive medical interventions, the study found religious people were less likely to have done any end-of-life planning or to understand the legal documents involved.
The researchers report that there may be good reasons to pursue aggressive end-of-life care. Many Christians believe it is simply morally wrong to forgo any potential opportunity to increase their life, even if only by a few days. However, as the study notes, “Because aggressive end-of-life cancer care has been associated with poor quality of death and caregiver bereavement adjustment, intensive end-of-life care might represent a negative outcome.” One researcher said, “We believe that the problem is that religious people who are dying . . . along with their families are not receiving spiritual counsel in their medical decision making.” The researchers say these patients are “not being counseled in how to die.”
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This podcast will help you get ready to face the inevitable unpleasant things that will happen in your life -- things like trouble, suffering, sickness, and death -- the death of people you love and your own death.
The Bible says in Romans 6:23: "For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord."
The featured quote for this episode is from Ernest Hemingway. He said, "Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another."
Our topic for today is titled "Gradual Dying and End-of-Life Care (Part 3)" from the book, "The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come" by Rob Moll.
--- Miracle Makers
Despite the opportunities of gradual dying, some Christian thinkers and theologians have tended to focus on the challenging questions of bioethics—how and when to apply or withdraw medical technology. At the same time, individual Christians have often placed their hope in the effectiveness of medical therapies to delay death.
Gradual dying means we must be ever wiser regarding our use of medical treatments, particularly when these interventions are designed to treat sudden emergencies such as car accidents and heart attacks, not necessarily diseases of old age. While CPR, ventilators or radical surgery may be appropriate for an otherwise healthy fifty-year-old man who happens to have clogged arteries, the procedures may not be wise on a frail eighty-five-year-old.
Or they might be. The use of medicine to cure or slow the advance of a disease can be a compelling and effective option amid the uncertainty of an elderly person's long decline.
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This podcast will help you get ready to face the inevitable unpleasant things that will happen in your life -- things like trouble, suffering, sickness, and death -- the death of people you love and your own death.
The Bible says in Psalm 146:2-4: "While I live will I praise the Lord: I will sing praises unto my God while I have any being. Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help. His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish."
The featured quote for this episode is from Martin Luther King Jr. He said, "No one really knows why they are alive until they know what they'd die for."
Our topic for today is titled "Gradual Dying and End-of-Life Care (Part 2)" from the book, "The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come" by Rob Moll.
--- A Unique Opportunity
Unfortunately today, fewer people are caring for more elderly.
Chronic illnesses mean that dying takes a longer period of time and involves more complicated medical issues. Despite these challenges, the trend toward gradual dying offers a unique opportunity. "For the first time in human history," Kiernan writes, "we can anticipate our mortality." Of course, the fact of death is not new, but our ability to be reasonably certain that it is or is not around the corner is exceptional. Not only can we look our own death in the eye, but we may have years to do so, during which time we can still work, enjoy family or go on a mission trip. Many Christians find in these final years the opportunity to experience the most valuable years of life.
One gerontologist in the Chicago suburbs confirms the findings of numerous studies. "Less than ten percent of my patients experience unexpected, sudden death," says John Dunlop. He is aware that the thought of a slow decline is frightening to many. "You ask anybody how they want to die today, and they say 'Make it quick,' " he says.
Instead of fearing the slow decline, Dunlop, who has cared for hundreds of elderly patients, says, "I hope I die slowly." A slow death offers opportunities to spend time with family, say goodbye and slowly orient a person toward life with God, he says. "I think most people who have thought it through will say there are more advantages to my family with my dying slow. It's kind of selfish to want to die fast."
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The Bible says in John 11:25-26: "Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?"
The featured quote for this episode is from Anaïs Nin. She said, "People living deeply have no fear of death."
Our topic for today is titled "Gradual Dying and End-of-Life Care (Part 1)" from the book, "The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come" by Rob Moll. And, I want to remind you to take advantage of our special offer. If you enjoy this podcast, please feel free to purchase a copy of this book -- "The Art of Dying" by Rob Moll. It is available on our website for just $20.
While 20th-century medicine drastically changed how we die, it has also had a more subtle — but no less profound — effect. Because of modern medicine, dying often takes a long time. One study found that most elderly are diagnosed as having a disease three years before it will eventually end their lives. On top of that a Rand study found that “Americans will usually spend two or more of their final years disabled enough to need someone else to help with routine activities of daily living because of chronic illness.” Long before we are visiting loved ones on their deathbed, we may be helping them cook, clean and use the bathroom.
While the period may average three years, many people — particularly women — will spend more than a decade caring for older parents and in-laws. In the coming years, “family care giving —[for so] long the backbone of long-term care — will be heavily burdened,” the Rand study predicted. Today’s family structures— smaller, often spread across the country and more independent— make it even more difficult to care for the elderly and dying. “Longer durations of illness and greater numbers of women working outside the home also place greater burdens on the pool of potential caregivers.”
While the first half of the twentieth century saw the major causes of death change from quick-killing infectious diseases to quick-killing heart diseases or cancer, the end of the century saw those diseases replaced by chronic ones that killed gradually. In 1976 the leading cause of death was heart disease, which typically manifested itself as a heart attack. Strokes were another instant killer. Today, a life-ending heart attack happens at a rate 61 percent below that of thirty years ago. Stephen Kiernan writes that even the death rate from accidents, either on the road or elsewhere, has dropped 36 percent. Rapid response teams are so proficient that they have been able to significantly reduce the number of deaths that occur from such emergencies as car accidents and heart attacks.
Having largely succeeded in treating these, our leading causes of death now advance slowly. Kiernan writes, "In a recent fifteen-year span, deaths from chronic respiratory disease increased 77 percent. Fatalities from Alzheimer’s disease have doubled since 1980... People now succumb to congestive heart failure, lung disease, diabetes that leads to kidney failure, ALS (or Lou Gehrig’s disease), Parkinson’s, [and] osteoporosis."
This podcast will help you get ready to face the inevitable unpleasant things that will happen in your life -- things like trouble, suffering, sickness, and death -- the death of people you love and your own death.
The Bible says in Matthew 10:28: "And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell."
The featured quote for this episode is from Helen Keller. She said, "Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there's a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see."
Our topic for today is titled "When Death Arrives (Part 5)" from the book, "The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come" by Rob Moll.
--- Death & Evil
While dying well is often a matter of living well, to live well we must come to grips with our death. It is difficult, but it can also be invigorating. “It is only by facing and accepting the reality of my coming death that I can become authentically alive,” says the Orthodox bishop Kallistos Ware.
We avoid death or even fear it because death is an evil, the horrible rending of a person from her body, from loved ones, from the ability to be fully in God’s image. “Death is not part of God’s primary purpose for his creation,” writes Ware. “He created us, not in order that we should die, but in order that we should live." Jesus wept at Lazarus’s death. The apostle Paul called death the last enemy. Death is indeed evil.
Yet death is also a mercy; it is the final affliction of life’s miseries. It is the entrance to life with God. Life’s passing can be a beautiful gift of God. This riddle of death’s evil and its blessing is not difficult to solve. We enact it every Good Friday as we recall the evil of Christ’s death to be followed on Easter Sunday with the joy of his resurrection. We do not rejoice in Christ’s death or Judas’s betrayal. Yet there is no evil so great that God cannot bring joy and goodness from it. That is why death deserves our attention in life. Because we instinctively want to avoid it, to turn our face away, it is good to look death in the eye and constantly remind ourselves that our hope is in God, who defeated death.
Meditating on one’s death has been practiced throughout Christian history. St. Isaac the Syrian instructed, "Prepare your heart for your departure. If you are wise, you will expect it every hour... And when the time of departure comes, go joyfully to meet it, saying, 'come in peace. I knew you would come, and I have not neglected anything that could help me on the journey.'"
This podcast will help you get ready to face the inevitable unpleasant things that will happen in your life -- things like trouble, suffering, sickness, and death -- the death of people you love and your own death.
The Bible says in Romans 14:8: "For whether we live, we live unto the Lord; and whether we die, we die unto the Lord: whether we live therefore, or die, we are the Lord's."
The featured quote for this episode is from Hunter S. Thompson. He said, "Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming 'Wow! What a ride!'"
Our topic for today is titled "When Death Arrives (Part 4)" from the book, "The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come" by Rob Moll.
My own first personal encounter with death came when I was twenty-seven years old. My wife and I went to visit my great aunt who was dying of cancer.
My aunt lived alone after her sister died fifteen years earlier. Aunt Eileen lived on the fifth floor of an apartment building on the 1300 block of north Lake Shore Drive. I remembered as a child staring through her window at the city below. Now, as I looked out her window, I thought about those visits when her apartment seemed as if it were set in the clouds. Neither Aunt Eileen nor her sister married. Their nieces and nephews, and their children, were her only family nearby. She lived by herself, but she wouldn't die that way. A few family members, particularly my mom, began regularly visiting her.
For years Aunt Eileen kept her cancer a secret. Even as she neared her eighties, she told no one about her trips across the park that straddled the distance between her apartment building and the hospital, just a few miles north of Chicago's Loop. She walked, not wanting to spend the money on a taxi or ask a family member for a lift to the hospital for chemotherapy. I had visited Eileen seldom in the years before she died. When she'd been sick, she didn't allow visitors. On her deathbed, however, she changed her mind.
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This podcast will help you get ready to face the inevitable unpleasant things that will happen in your life -- things like trouble, suffering, sickness, and death -- the death of people you love and your own death.
The Bible says in Ecclesiastes 12:7: "Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it."
The featured quote for this episode is from Daniel Handler. He said, “It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things."
Our topic for today is titled "When Death Arrives (Part 3)" from the book, "The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come" by Rob Moll.
I began writing this book at a time when end-of-life ethics was being hotly debated in the press. Not long before, the doctors for Terri Schiavo, a woman who had been in a persistent vegetative state for roughly fifteen years, had been ordered by a judge to remove a feeding tube and other medical treatment that had been keeping her alive. Her husband and her family had spent years in court trying to gain, or to prevent, such a decision from a judge. Congress became involved and tried to intervene.
While the legal process and the decision reached caused great commotion among the Christian community, as well as the rest of the country, I found few satisfactory answers to the dilemma. While most pastors, theologians and ethicists agreed that it was permissible to withdraw medical treatment, Schiavo's dilemma was more difficult. She only needed food, water and minimal care. Yet her food and water, delivered through a feeding tube, required medical professionals to perform the delicate maneuver to insert the tube. The contents of her food were scientifically and medically determined. She wasn't simply fed pureed pork chops. Even if Schiavo was so ill that removing a feeding tube was ethically defensible, Christians were rightly furious that anyone would be left alone, without care and human comfort, to die. Yet in my own conversations with doctors, theologians and church leaders, they suggested privately that they would never want to be kept alive artificially (even with just food and water) for fifteen years.
I was unsatisfied with Christian responses that either required the prolonging of life—no matter the physical, mental, relational or financial suffering involved—or that pinpointed what treatments might be appropriate under what circumstances. Instead, I wanted to find a Christian response to these issues that would be useful under any medical circumstance, that upheld the value of life and the dignity of the person.
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This podcast will help you get ready to face the inevitable unpleasant things that will happen in your life -- things like trouble, suffering, sickness, and death -- the death of people you love and your own death.
The Bible says in Revelation 21:4: "He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away."
The featured quote for this episode is from Mark Twain. He said, “The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time."
Our topic for today is titled "When Death Arrives (Part 2)" from the book, "The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come" by Rob Moll.
Living far from our elderly loved ones also removes us from their declining years as well as from their medical care. Adult children find themselves on conference calls with their parents’ doctors. They fret about their loved ones' safety when their home is no longer a safe place to live or when driving becomes dangerous. They fly a thousand miles for a surgery, never quite knowing what is happening and if this trip will be the last. And, in interview after interview, I’ve learned that relatives who live far away have a much stronger tendency to advocate for aggressive therapy, prompting family conflicts when other members, including the dying person, are opposed.
Not only can our unfamiliarity with death make us incompetent when visiting socially with the ill or grieving, we may also make decisions opposed to the best interests of the people we love. A doctor told me recently of a patient who had lived well for two years after deciding to discontinue her chemotherapy treatment. For much of those two years, this woman enjoyed life. She was able to garden, take walks, spend time with her husband and accomplish some final goals she had set for herself. Her mental powers had declined, however. She regularly offered the same joke to her doctor. "Old age is not for cowards," she chuckled, each time thinking it was an original thought.
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