Nov 01 | Beautiful Broken World, Part 1 (Letters from the Coast)

This is another multi-part entry, this time on a murkier topic: MAID, or medical assistance in dying.

I’ve found that as I deepened in my faith, my trust in absolutes became more tenuous, and I was shocked to find my attitudes about both abortion and MAID became more complicated than they were before.

Disclaimer: I consider myself pro-choice, would never support an overturning of the right to abortion, and wholeheartedly support the offering and government subsidization of sexual education and contraception.

I am also not doing any political or religious advocacy to overturn the decision on MAID, and I absolutely do not believe that God punishes those who make that choice. I also believe in offering non-judgemental pastoral care to those who choose it.

But still, I struggle with the question of who owns life, when it begins, and who has the right to choose it or refuse it.

 

PART I: IN GOD’S IMAGE

The first time I met Rose (not her real name), I was mostly just impressed with my colleague’s easy way with her. Like a lot of folks I had not yet fully considered that a nonverbal person in a wheelchair could have an easily discernible character.

I was so wrong, about everything.

For one thing, Rose wasn’t ever really nonverbal. She laughed – a loud, high, delightful sound of pure joy. And she could say “Yeah,” and, most poignantly, “Amen.” She could also speak through a special computer system which she controlled through Morse code, tapping at sensors set up on either side of her head. She used it fairly rarely however, because it was easier for people to give her a hug when it wasn’t attached to her chair.

She also emailed me sometimes, and those emails revealed a person who was incredibly devout and kind. She worked hard to be an advocate for people with disabilities. She had many challenges, and many health issues that came up regularly, but that’s why she loved what she called “church family,” and all of them loved her.

 

Years later, I met Mary (also not her real name). Mary also moved with the help of a wheelchair, but had been able-bodied before. She had other health issues related to aging, the last few thorns of a bramble-choked life of pain and sorrow. She was beginning to find life unbearable, but was still young and healthy enough that she could see herself becoming weaker. Feelings and desires were rising up for her that she had never before experienced, and she didn’t know how to handle them in these last few twilight hours of her life. She talked to me extensively, through angry, despairing tears, about her difficult relationship with God, whom she felt was laughing at her.

 

In 2016 it became legal in Canada to seek Medical Assistance in Dying, which meant it became possible, under a set of strict rules, to ask for and receive help from a physician to die.

The Anglican Church of Canada wrote a paper called “In Sure and Certain Hope: Resources to assist pastoral and theological approaches to Physician Assisted Dying” which explored the issue extensively. At a Diocesan Clergy Day during that year we all talked about it and explored the document. I was proud to witness so much diversity of opinion among my colleagues. Many of us had very complicated feelings.

What moved me most, though, were the stories of death, and in a room full of clergy, there are always many. We all spoke with gravitas and gratitude about our experiences being invited into families’ private stories of grief. We mused that we saw things, sacred moments that many folks do not get to witness in their daily lives. I myself had only just witnessed someone die a few weeks before. A few of us pledged to work toward a coordinated effort to support each other as professionals who are so often privy to these beautiful but heavily weighted moments.

 

The year before, the parish where I did my curacy hosted a panel discussion for the neighbourhood on Medical Assistance in Dying (which at that point was still being referred to as “Physician-assisted suicide”). We had religious and medical professionals talk about the ethics and the pastoral and spiritual implications. When we opened up the mic to the crowd, a veterinarian in the audience shared, with great dignity, that she and her colleagues were waiting to be consulted by people on the matter, as they had been trafficking in this gentle ferrying of souls from bodies for decades.

There were no patients or candidates for the procedure on the panel.

There were no disabled people either.