Life in the Culture of Death

In the past decade it has been discovered that at the moment of conception, at our very beginning, in a phase intrinsic to the formation of the first single cell from which we grow, there occurs an eruption of metallic ions in a brilliant flash of light, or ‘zinc spark’, as embryologists have called it.  As with so many things in life, how we respond to this knowledge depends on how we choose to look at it.  To those to whom the unborn child is ‘just a clump of cells’, this flash of light will be just a flash of light.  But to the thoughtful, humble observer, this zinc spark is a signal, a signal that calls to us and invites us to consider its meaning.  What we conclude may carry certain implications and charge us with certain responsibilities.  But if the signal betokens a reality, and if it matters to us that we live in accordance with reality, then we should be keen to make an accurate interpretation of that signal.

I for one believe that the meaning of the signal is so clear that if I had been seeking merely to fabricate embryological phenomena for the sake of pro-life propaganda, I would have rejected the idea of a ‘zinc spark’ as too obvious, too miraculous, too unequivocal a witness to our humanity.  But there it is: the vindication in empirical and impartial observation of the consistent Christian teaching of the ages.  Of course even these beginnings are often fragile, and in the hands of God, but in so far as these matters are entrusted to us, the sign is clear: the life of the unborn child is not ours to take.

The ends of our lives can, it is true, be more blurred and complicated, but, for the centuries in which Britain’s moral aspirations were Christian in name and nature, the idea of a ‘natural death’ was broadly accepted: that there comes a point at which the soul (the same as once was ignited in a wink of zinc) subsides into embers too cool to revive, and that even if it is sometimes hard for us to tell quite when the soul has departed from the body, this moment is beyond our say-so.  For as long as the Christian faith held gentle sway in these islands, and for all our shortcomings, we knew of our responsibility for each other for the whole duration between these two moments.  That belief has, for the present, it seems, come definitively to an end in Britain, given that a fortnight ago, in a single week, the House of Commons made two decisions that fundamentally undermine this principle, both at the beginning of life, and at its end.

The law’s been passed and I am lying low

Hoping to hide from those who think they are

Kindly, compassionate.  My step is slow.

I hurry.  Will the executioner

Be watching how I go?

Others about me clearly feel the same.

The deafest one pretends that she can hear.

The blindest hides her white stick while the lame

Attempt to stride.  Life has become so dear. 

from ‘Euthanasia’ by Elizabeth Jennings (1926–2001) 

The voting through of these Bills, to say nothing of the immaturity and haste of the debates preceding them, has as far as I am concerned brought disgrace on our country.  We are now going downhill distressingly quickly.  I want to climb to the rooftops and bellow that I had no part in it; I long to carve into clean stone a testament to my bitter opposition and set it into a wall or a crypt, to be found by such of our descendants as we allow to be born.  This Bill represents the direct opposite of the Britain that I consider myself to have inherited and which, in my small corner, I am trying to sustain.  I am filled with grief at the prospect of the suffering these Bills will cause if they become law, and, yes, with anger at the short-sightedness and shallow thought of our elected representatives.  The shame of Britain, her giggling and smirking as she brings herself low, burns me and torments me.

And yet I do not condemn our Parliamentarians outright.  There were many who offered principled and articulate opposition to the Bill.  And even those who voted Yes generally did so with perfectly human instincts, albeit woefully incomplete and ill-formed.  They may have spoken of dignity and freedom and compassion, but I think they were motivated mainly by fear: the fear of dependency, the fear of being depended upon, the fear of suffering, the fear of watching others suffer.  All quite understandable feelings: but by their vote our elected representative have sought to place the sovereign will in the driving-seat in the hope that we can each outrun these things, to allow us to take whichever exit we choose off the motorway of life, rather than to remain all together in the same carriage bound for the same terminus.  (They also fear having to cede their right of way over the new lives joining us off the slip-roads.)  All human beings know these fears, and they are not trivial.  But the pagan solution adopted by our MPs reveals that they simply do not know ‘the perfect love that casts out fear’.  They do not know the true meaning of the word compassion, which is literally ‘to suffer with’, to share the burden of suffering, and to strengthen a bond of intimacy and brotherly love with another person, and thereby to defeat the fear and loneliness that is often a sharper sting than the suffering itself. They do not know that Christianity, and indeed the natural law that undergirds all the world’s nobler traditions of wisdom, offers this vital rejoinder to our sorrows: that our humanity is deeper even than our will and our desires, that it is not diminished one jot by suffering, by pain, by weakness, by imminent death.  It proclaims that our dignity transcends our indignities.  Indeed, our dignity is often found precisely in our response to suffering.

Britain now feels less like Britain than I can ever remember, and not only because of the stifling weather.  My mood is much as it was after the news of Ireland’s repealing of her Eighth Amendment: three parts dismay to one part hope.  There is the grief at the wrong decision, and horror at another advance of the Dictatorship of Relativism, building and pressing down like this towering heat.  Then there is resignation, for none of this really comes as a surprise after so many years of secularisation.  But there is also a suspicion that the Culture of Death has again overplayed its hand — that the victory was too blatant, too hasty, too enthusiastically crowed over, and that, in its very cheapness, the very ease with which it has been achieved, it has sown the seeds of its own defeat.  This article by Sebastian Milbank suggests as much of the Assisted Suicide debate:

Watch the debate.  Search the faces and the gestures, listen closely to the words that were spoken.  Look beyond the specific arguments, and feel the pulse of feeling, sentiment and motivation racing underneath.  The constant back-patting about the good-natured quality of the discussion, the strength and sincerity of feelings, the pure and decent motives of MPs, and cries of “parliament at its best” are not merely the self-congratulations they appear. It is the collective nervous tic of guilty men and women […]  This almost unseemly urgency buzzed at the edges of today’s vote.  Those in favour continually stressed that doing nothing was worse than doing something, that the “status quo” was untenable.  The bill was ideological displacement activity; a release valve for the neuroses of a governing class waking up to a country in crisis, and a public sector on the brink of collapse.

Again, many courageous Parliamentarians have fought honourably against the Assisted Suicide Bill, and their words will remain in Hansard until their final vindication.  Also, many will have seen how the Catholic Church has offered some of the strongest opposition.  But the abortion Bill, meanwhile, was the result of a hijack, an ambush, and rushed through before we could do anything about it.  We may still pray that the Bills are heavily amended, and ideally defeated in the House of Lords.  If not, then we light another long, slow-burning candle in our hearts for their ultimate repealing.  But regardless of what happens, all the while, at the moment of every human conception, the zinc spark will continue to send its signal, a gentle but insistent reproach to those who do not believe in life, and a quiet encouragement to those who do.

Assisted Suicide and the Cheapening of Human Dignity

A quick note to record my dismay and sorrow at the passing through its second reading in the House of Commons of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill last Friday, 29th November, by 330 votes to 275.  Although the Bill is not yet law, it suddenly brings us alarmingly close to permitting assisted suicide in this country for the first time.

I know that many of the Bill’s supporters are motivated by a just desire to alleviate suffering, but the ease with which assisted suicide has been alighted upon as the answer — as opposed to improved palliative care, or sustained maintenance of health provision — is alarming.  The slippery slope, though a cliché, is perfectly real, and there are appalling stories from Canada and the Low Countries about euthanasia being granted on the grounds of treatable or manageable conditions such as depression or anorexia — and of its being extended to children.  Campaigners for disabled people are understandably alarmed by and fiercely opposed to the Bill, and worried about its likely effect on social attitudes.

There is also, as ever, an emphasis on the idea of dying ‘with dignity’, which is taken to mean on our own terms, within our own control, while sentient and in possession of our faculties.  This is perfectly understandable from the perspective of secular society, but it misses the wisdom of the older, Christian vision that we are losing: that our human dignity has a deeper, firmer, more reliable foundation than we readily perceive; that it is not diminished one jot by suffering or infirmity.  The fading of this belief will have consequences graver than our leaders now realise.

Robert Jenrick MP put it like this:

My last point is not about how we can improve the Bill; it is about something that we can never resolve as a House.  The Bill is not so much a slippery slope as a cliff edge.  When we walk out of this Chamber, or out of the gates of this building tonight, we will, in a way, walk into a different country if the Bill passes.  There will be different conversations around kitchen tables.  There will be different conversations had by couples lying in bed at night, or on quiet country walks where people talk about difficult things.  They will not be conversations that make our country a better place.

More important, there will be people who do not speak about these things at all.  There will be imperceptible changes in behaviours.  There will be the grandmother who worries about her grandchildren’s inheritance if she does not end her life.  There will be the widow who relies on the kindness of strangers who worries — it preys on her conscience.  There will be people — we all know them in our lives — who are shy, who have low self-esteem, who have demons within them.  I know those people.  I can see them in my mind’s eye.  They are often poor.  They are vulnerable.  They are the weakest in our society.  And they look to us, to Parliament, to represent them, to support them, to protect them.  In their interests, I am going to vote against the Bill today.  Sometimes we must fetter our freedoms.  We the competent, the capable, the informed sometimes must put the most vulnerable in society first.

Once again I feel this sense of a great cheapening of everything around us: of language, of our sense of the value of human life, of the bonds of duty and of love that exist between us.  The journalist Tim Stanley quoted a ‘very clever’ friend of his who pointed out that the Bill divides the ‘libertarians from the conservatives and the progressives from the socialists’.  Certainly, the proponents of the Bill seem as keen on promoting individual liberty as on lessening suffering: the idea that we must always be able live life on our own terms, even to the point of death, seems to come foremost.  That so many of our political leaders seem to believe human life to be negotiable or mutable at its end, as well as its beginning, is profoundly dismaying.

I am very grateful to my own MP for having voted against this Bill, as she has against similar Bills in the past.  And the Catholic Church, led from the front by Cardinal Nichols, has upheld the sanctity of life very strongly.  It has been pointed out that that a significant number of MPs were undecided when they voted ‘Aye’, wanting to have a longer debate, and that only twenty-eight MPs need to change their minds at the Third Reading for the bill to fail.  It is to be hoped and prayed for that this comes to pass.

I might as well say that I am proud to belong to a Church which stands up for all human life without question, even inconvenient human life — especially inconvenient human life; which says, to those who worry that they are a burden, who feel undignified, who question even their own worth, ‘No.  Your God-given dignity is absolute and inviolable.  We will defend it if all others deny it, even if you deny it yourself.’  My hope is that others will see the wisdom and love that underlie this stance, and will be moved to adopt it.

Bishop Philip Egan of Portsmouth has put things very frankly, in a pastoral message to his diocese: 

This legislation […] makes one thing crystal clear.  Britain is no longer a Christian country.  To be a Christian in future will not be easy, if ever it was.  More and more, as in ages past, we will stand out from the crowd and from others in our society who see human life, its dignity and value, in a radically different way. 

It is my hope that God will give us the grace to live our discipleship ever more authentically so that the true beauty of our Catholic faith might become even more evident.  I pray that the splendor veritatis, the beauty of the Truth, the hope it gives, especially to the vulnerable, and the Gospel vision of the human person — fallen but redeemed, an incarnate spirit called to live a good life here on earth and one day to be with God for ever in Paradise — will shine out for all to see.

Prayer, then, that the Bill will fall in favour of greater care of the sick and dying, and for courage in any case.  And please write to your M.P.!

Sir James MacMillan: the Kyrie from his 2000 setting of the Mass, sung by the choir of Westminster Cathedral under Martin Baker.