Overton Window

From anglican.ca: "Pastoral Liturgies at the Time of Death in Contexts of Medically Assisted Dying" Authorised for Trial Use, Evaluation and Feedback where permitted by the Ordinary by the Council of General Synod, June 2026

Many of the conversations around what constitutes a good death seek to enshrine dignity of the dying person as the highest value. Very often, the understanding of dignity is tied to one’s autonomy in agency – being able to think, act, and make decisions on one’s own. Human dignity, however, rests in our being created by a loving God. It is not something to be tied to a question of worth to be determined according to standards that place autonomy as the highest value of dignity. God has given us dignity and worth as part of who we are as God’s creatures. Our agency in health care decisions is, furthermore, something that we need to entrust to God in our discernment. We do not make decisions alone, but in the presence of God.

Some Anglicans have had profound experiences in which a death by MAiD has been accompanied by faithful prayer and strong pastoral care. Other Anglicans hold that MAiD does not offer any moral good, and may indeed be against God's wishes for humanity. Many of us share concerns about the potentials for abuse of the practice through coercion or in the fragilities of a health care system that is in crisis. All of us in Canada, especially clergy and other pastoral care ministers, are likely at some point in our ministries, to be met with a request for pastoral care and prayer by someone who has opted for a medically assisted death.

Our intention is to help the church’s ministers to respond pastorally to the needs before them. It is not our intent to enter into the ethical arguments regarding MAiD, nor to provide a moral argument for or against MAiD.(1)

... (1) The General Synod has produced several resources since the legalization of medically assisted dying. In Sure and Certain Hope, 2017, presented a pastoral response with some pastoral and prayer resources, upholding the duty of pastoral care, and also holding up some key theological principles of caution with respect to MAiD. Faith Seeking Understanding: Medical Assistance in Dying: Reflections by Canadian Anglicans, 2024, gathered up over forty reflections from theological, pastoral and ethical perspectives by Canadian Anglicans, representing a wide collection of experiences and positions on the ethics of MAiD.

Yikes. True, the intro says "Human dignity, ... is not something to be tied to a question of worth to be determined according to standards that place autonomy as the highest value of dignity." And the 2017 document is " holding up some key theological principles of caution with respect to MAiD". But the 2024 document is "representing a wide collection of experiences and positions." It sounds like they don't know how to say no and stick to it.

"To some following some Dioceses’ guidance or their own consciences, it will be important to walk the challenging path in choosing and adapting prayers in this resource that do not imply that the procedure, the medical assistance in dying itself, and the decision to employ MAiD, are not being given God’s blessing." I read that as meaning that they foresee priests sometimes giving a blessing to the procedure and the decision, or picking prayers that imply that (which seems dishonest if they don't). Perhaps they mis-spoke.

They consider the possibility of having "Confession and Absolution" as part of the liturgy.

At Lambeth in 1930 the Anglicans "affirmed the permissibility of birth control for married couples who felt a moral obligation to forgo both ‘parenthood’ and ‘complete abstinence’". Shortly after, many other denominations jumped on the bandwagon, and uncounted couples decided that they met the criteria, and the Overton window shifted.

I hope that isn't going to be the case here.

FWIW, a Liturgy on the Day of an Execution doesn't seem to quite fit.

Bodyoids?

First Things has an article on zombies.

The MIT article Ethically sourced “spare” human bodies could revolutionize medicine proposes using lab-grown brainless human bodies for spare parts and testing.

One point jumped out at me:

Recently we have even begun using for experiments the “animated cadavers” of people who have been declared legally dead, who have lost all brain function but whose other organs continue to function with mechanical assistance.

Does that make your hair stand on end too?

Oklahoma City National Memorial

The Oklahoma City National Memorial is a beautiful park--a reflecting pool with tall black walls on each side, a field of named chairs (some appropriately child-sized) that are illuminated at night, a 'survivor tree' that used to be in the parking lot for the Alfred P Murrah building (it caught fire that day, but was rescued, and volunteer teams prop it up every ice storm), a plaza and a museum next door, and across the street a "And Jesus wept" statue facing a wall with little candle-sized niches for all those killed. Parts of the old building are still there.

There's even a marshal there to explain things to people--like the meaning of the numbers on the black walls on each side. It's beautiful, and there's lots of emphasis on the people who died--and a list of names of the people who survived, too.

I'm torn. It's good to commemorate the lost. They do tend to be forgotten. But doing it without memorializing the crime and criminals...

It feels a bit like that time back in 2002 when we were lowering flags to half staff to honor the servicemen killed in Afghanistan. That was wrong--"raise it high and promise to avenge them" would have been right.

This park doesn't seem to have enough of a "We won't let this stop us" feel to it.

Granted, the situations were different, in that one was a war and the other wasn't (AFAIK--I've heard doubters but don't know the details well enough to sort real from speculation).

But there's something to be said for inspirational, even heroic statuary--even if it would have embarassed the subjects. We can be too fastidious.

We can be too mournful too, and too superstitious.

There was a mass murder in a McDonalds in California, and the building was razed afterwards. That makes a kind of sense. Even if there was "closure" over the deaths, there'd remain a perception of risk ("It happened here: why was this place picked and is it still a reason?") and reminder of mortality in a "happy place." The store would have probably gone broke if it tried to stay (it opened a new store not far away).

But is there any land on Earth outside of Antarctica where some Abel's blood doesn't cry out? We just don't remember whose.

A death isn't a finite loss. Hope of the resurrection can help, but until the resurrection it doesn't cure. We have to honor the dead. When a man fell from a balcony at the NY Metropolitan Opera they cancelled the opera that day(*). But not the next. To everything there is a season. And closure, either by ritual or the death of those who cared. And there's a place, and a style for mourning.

A grave is one thing, a pyramid another. The scale changes the meanings.

If we want a large place, maintained in perpetuity, it should have additional purposes--to warn, to inspire.

What do we want people to remember or learn?

Learning who the dead were is important at first, but inevitably it becomes no more than names, as those whose lives mixed with theirs also die. We can "tell their stories", but are the stories true, and who has the time to write or read them?

We can learn the circumstances of their deaths. But why? It's legitimate to make people angry, but what goal is that emotion supposed to serve--to emulate the dead or to avenge them?

The Vietnam veterans memorial seems to be a giant tombstone, and that's all. There's no hope or inspiration or urge to revenge. Somebody decided there shouldn't be, and thereby got a lot of people mad, but most of them seem to have reconciled to a tombstone. Or the complainers died, and those who came after didn't care so much.

The OCNM has been a great expression of what people cared about 27 years ago. What will visitors 27 years from now now think of it? They'll have fresh tragedies of their own.

---

(*) Would it have made a difference if he was obviously a suicide? I'm not sure, but I think it would, and the show would go on. It's not as though opera is a "happy place" all the time.

Lutes

I was looking up Hungarian composers, and got distracted by Bakfark "While Bakfark almost certainly wrote an enormous amount of music, very little was printed: a commonly given reason was that it was simply too difficult for others to play." and "As was common practice at the time, all the possessions of plague victims were destroyed by fire, so most of his manuscript music was lost."

Plagues cause irretrievable losses.

I leave it to lutists to say how complicated the surviving works are.

Life and death

Suppose a patient explained firmly to Dutch doctors that he was not interested in euthanasia and wanted to live his life come what may, but contracted dementia and begged to be killed. We all know what they would do--it happens--in the name of compassion, they would say that now he understood the situation and kill him. On the other hand, someone who, when of clear mind, said she wanted to be euthanized but "that she wanted to determine the right time", when she resists, may be legally held down and poisoned.

Only one choice seems to be respected, and it has nothing to do with your state of mind.

Remind me not to get sick in the Netherlands.

Gene Wolfe

Died at age 87. The obituary says his wife died a few years ago of Alzheimers. That's a lot to endure, and to be kind through it all...

Some of us can tell stories wonderfully well--I wish I could write half as well as he did. Some of us compose great melodies--I'm listening to Strauss as I write this.

We all live a story. We all live a song. Sometimes we're too close to hear it.

Funerals and connectedness

AVI has some thoughts about funerals, inspired by a funeral that went sour that Althouse posted about. I gather the whole story isn't available. There are other points to think about anyway.

We say the funeral is about the mourners, not the dead. But that's not the whole story: consider what the words of the traditional rites say. Part of it is about us "Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy and merciful Savior, deliver us not into the bitterness of eternal death." But part is very explictly for the dead person: "O God, who by the glorious resurrection of your Son Jesus Christ destroyed death, and brought life and immortality to light: Grant that your servant N., being raised with him, may know the strength of his presence, and rejoice in his eternal glory; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen."

We're not praying to make ourselves feel good. We're asking God to take care of our dead loved one. Granted, some people don't think prayer is effectual, but they can arrange their own rites.

And what we do with the dead matters. You can holler yourself hoarse that it shouldn't matter; that the body is just the temporary housing of the soul; that the dead don't feel anything anymore. We still feel that it makes a difference.

The traditional Christian understanding of the human person is that we are body and soul--when the body dies the human person is broken, not Platonically "released." Jesus wept about this, so we needn't feel ashamed to do the same, even if we know the loved one is "absent from the body and present with the Lord." What we see before us isn't good, though good can come.

We cling to the particular. This field is where we played pirates, that ring is merely a substitute for the lost wedding ring, that person, and not a generic person is our spouse. The particular is connected to us somehow. Part of us is there--not incarnate, exactly, but really there, really connected. These things can fade, but they feel very real. A two-year-old wants his ball, not a substitute. You feel a loss when someone builds a garage over the ditch where the "pirate cave" used to be.

The particular gets meaning from those connections. Another Althouse post quotes LLosa: "At the same time, love is a private experience. If it's made public, it becomes cheap, shoddy, full of commonplaces. This is why it’s so hard to write about love in literature." In its place sex can seem holy and funny at the same time; displayed to the world is seems merely animal or even obscene. The family jokes and traditions seem empty and banal when broadcast to strangers, but the family's loves make them live. Something intangible makes a vast difference. Strict materialists have to work hard to explain it away.

We sense that the dead body is still connected to the person. The past isn't entirely past. We can't keep the body and the link is too deeply broken for us to restore the person, so we use the prayers and the burial to respectfully recognize the breakage.

A "celebration of life" ignores that breakage. It's probably harmless, but we need more.