A Sad Story With a Sad Ending
One of my favorite writers has been Anne Lamott. I love her wit and grace and just plain down to earth way she describes her life and faith. Her book on writing, Bird by Bird is a must-read classic. Her two books on faith, Traveling Mercies and Plan B are wonderful reads. Like her, I, too, tend to be liberal in thinking. However, if what she wrote in Sunday's LA Times is true, I am deeply saddened by her view on life and death.

In the piece she talks about assisting an old friend with terminal cancer to die. She starts out with the line

THE MAN I KILLED did not want to die, but he no longer felt he had much of a choice. He had gone from being tall and strapping, full of appetites and a brilliant manner of speech, to a skeleton, weak and full of messy needs.

She then goes on to explain and explore her support of assisted suicide. This what she wrote about what happened when she expressed her willingness to help "Mel".

Mel was sort of surprised that as a Christian I so staunchly agreed with him about assisted suicide: I believed that life was a kind of Earth school, so even though assisted suicide meant you were getting out early, before the term ended, you were going to be leaving anyway, so who said it wasn't OK to take an incomplete in the course?

This saddened me deeply. It makes no sense from anything I know about the Bible or Jesus. Life is not an "Earth school" for something greater. Life is where and how we live out our discipleship and followership of Jesus and God. We can't take an incomplete. The course is over when we are. End. Done. That's all there is to life.

Not eternal life of course, which begins here and is lived here in this life first, but also forever. Eternal life is knowing God and Jesus Christ, His Son, in the here and now and here and forever. I am a firm and consistent believer in the choice given in Deuteronomy:

I place before you this day life and death. Choose life.

Not comfort or ease in this life. Life. We humans are so good at choosing death- even for seemingly good reasons. Yet we struggle so deeply at choosing life, consistently choosing life. We war and fight and have gang wars and execute criminals and much too easily take life. To add to that in the name of being Christian is sad and demeaning of life.

We all participate in one way or another. We are all co-conspirators with death more often than we know or will admit. But we can never be proud or self-satisfied with that. It is always a breaking of our covenant with God.