In hospitals, you really only get one chance.
One chance to get in the door of a patients room, especially as a clergy member or chaplain. As a chaplain, you know you are assigned a unit to take care of and you cold call on patients to see if they need any spiritual support.
You’re met with different reactions sometimes, and things are told pretty bluntly (I can’t say I would do any differently in the hospital). Sometimes you can pray, sometimes you can read scripture, sometimes you just end up having conversations.
As I was preparing for my sermon this past Sunday, I read an article from a pastor who was called on to visit a parishioner’s sister and brother-in-law. The sister had just received news that her cancer had spread, that surgery was pretty futile, and it would be a matter of time.
The pastor knocks and enters the room. There was nothing going on. Both of them were there, but they weren’t talking, no tv, no music, just silence. The first thing out of the sister’s mouth was, “We don’t go to church. We wouldn’t live any differently if we did, so we don’t go.”
Now this is what caught my attention. The pastor writes, “What I almost said to them—what I so wanted to say but didn’t and haven’t yet figured out if it was pastoral sensitivity or cowardice on my part—was, “So it wouldn’t make any difference in how you live. Would it make any difference in how you die?” That is the question I wanted to press on them. It is the question that would have made my visit helpful.
She knew she was going to die. Whether she liked it or not was a different story. What about us? We know we’re going to die too. Do we like it, maybe not. Will it come anyway? It most certainly will.
And we continue in this season of Easter in the life of the church. We continue to celebrate Jesus’ resurrection and shout the alleluias that we have suppressed for the Lenten Season. And yet, the pastor’s question still haunts us. Would it make any difference in how you die?
There is such a thing as dying well. Atul Gawande wrote a book in 2014 called Being Mortal, and it is an honest account of living a good life all the way to the end. It was turned into a movie and really made the rounds within the hospice community and helped them to get into the conversation about what it looks like to live and die well.
How is it that we want to die? What example do we want to leave others? What role does our faith play in that?
I have faith in God. I have faith that God raised Jesus from the dead and that we will also be raised because we have been united with Jesus in his death and resurrection. I hope that means when I die I might do so confidently knowing that death isn’t the end and that there is a good future for me because God said so
