Rough Ideas

by Stephen Hough

  He continues: ‘Embodied love is the sacrament of invisible grace that somehow touches the fretful, demented mind and soul, and, beyond all our explanations, works silent wonders.’ Then, quoting Rosalie Hudson’s chapter in the book Ageing, Disability and Spirituality, ‘Perhaps the person with dementia – freed from all pretension, totally incapable of spiritual self-examination – might be an icon of God’s grace in us.’

  Wishful thinking, rubbish, pie in the sky … I hear the reactions. But as we face such a dark place, is not the attempt to go there accompanied with such thoughts of compassionate care worth trying? To let go of our own fleeting, fragile cleverness, our propped-up cardboard images, even as they are forcibly prised out of our feeble hands? Yes, of course, we must be tireless in looking for a cure for Alzheimer’s and for every possible means of prevention but, when the passage is inevitable, dare we go ‘gentle into that good night’?

  Going gentle into that good night: the blessing of hospices

  I was asked a few years ago to become a Patron of St Rocco’s Hospice in Warrington, something especially delightful to me as it is a return to my roots. I lived my young, healthy years (from five to thirty) close by in Thelwall and Grappenhall.

  The importance of hospices in our communities hinges on a number of related issues:

  Care

  Most obviously hospices are places of physical and spiritual relief for the terminally ill and for those who love them. Hospices aim to alleviate pain, fear and despair. To achieve care not cure is already to fulfil their purpose, and their service to the families of the sick is as important as to those who are actually being treated.

  Honesty

  Leading on from this is a burst of bracing honesty: despite the fact that some people do recover and return home, the principal function of a hospice is to be the last stop on life’s journey and not to flinch from admitting it. To stare death in the face like that requires great courage from all involved.

  Value

  Hospices are like beacons in a community, unspoken declarations that human life is important in every moment of its living. They are a challenge to the prosaic, the utilitarian, even to the ‘logical’ in our moral lives. Human life is beyond measure, beyond price, and the healthy person’s life, bursting with vim and vigour, becomes more valuable when he or she cherishes the one who is fading away on the last lap with the last breath. Both are equally precious.

  Perspective

  Hospices alert to us a true perspective on living: life as fragile; success and beauty as a mirage; time, in every one of its luminous moments, as finite. There’s nothing good in suffering as such, but if unavoidable and freed from isolation and shame it can be seen through, seen beyond, in the kind company of others.

  Hospices alert us to the fact that life means more than life. Being born is a terminal illness, to breathe is to face death, we cannot alter that; but we have totally within our power to care daily for those next to whom we find ourselves standing, sitting or lying.

  Suicide? Let me assist you

  I’m deeply aware that thorny moral questions such as assisted suicide involve stepping across minefields – and ones that risk exploding in the face of others rather than ourselves. This particular issue is not an abstract argument that can be teased into unanimity by typing some self-assured thoughts on a laptop. It involves the day-to-day lives (and deaths) of people who are usually in the most desperate situations – by definition beyond hope in their own eyes. So I tap the keyboard gently, cautiously – with the delete and question keys ever in sight.

  I think there are three, delicately balanced and complexly interacting issues involved in this discussion:

  The morality of the act itself: is it intrinsically wrong to take one’s own life?

  The state of mind of those assisting the suicide: is their aid truly disinterested, and what does it mean to have compassion?

  The state of mind of the person ending his or her life: can such a person make a rational, responsible decision if they are depressed or in pain?

  The first point is probably the clearest. Few people think suicide is anything but a tragedy, but there is a logic behind the position: ‘My life belongs to me and I have every right to choose how I live it and how I end it.’ Furthermore, people throughout history have killed themselves, and if the determination is strong there is very little we can do to prevent it. But we risk basing our laws on passing moods as fickle as clouds in the sky unless we can face this question squarely. If suicide is not intrinsically wrong, then say so and have it available for anyone who requests it at any doctor’s surgery. If it is intrinsically wrong, then the law should not facilitate or encourage its occurrence.

  The second point is not so clear and has been much discussed. The two crudest scenarios are the busy, successful son or daughter for whom the parent’s illness is an inconvenience; or the brother, say, who stands to gain financially from the death of the terminally ill sister. These situations exist, if sometimes in an almost subconscious form, and we can easily recognise the wrong involved. But outside these clear cases, what about the thousand permutations of love, responsibility, obligation, guilt and even hatred, that course through every family’s history? Are our relationships with our relatives so pure and fundamentally benevolent that under that stone of compassion there could never lurk a worm of resentment? How do we measure our compassion? Where do we draw the line between alleviating the suffering of a loved one and encouraging them to end it all?

  The third point is, in some ways, the most crucial and least discussed. Never mind the motives of those assisting the suicide, what about the mindset of the person wanting to end their lives? If a young person, in perfect health, were to go to her doctor and ask for the means to kill herself, would we find this acceptable? Why is it that we find such a request made by someone who is old, or in pain, or depressed, more tolerable? What is the moral logic of denying suicide for the well and facilitating it for the ill? Is someone better able to make a rational decision when sick and in pain than when twenty-four years old and healthy? Depression is in some ways the state of someone not ‘in their right mind’, and yet it seems to be a central requirement for permitting assisted suicide. I believe we are close to social hell when an old woman in a nursing home who is worried that she is a burden on her family is encouraged in that anxiety with smiling, sanitised legality. Coercion or browbeating can be effectively employed with the lightest touch when we are dealing with those who are weak and vulnerable, and the idea that it is selfish for the terminally ill to want to continue living is diabolical – a horrific turning of the moral tables with frightening implications for every lonely bag of bones sitting in a hospital bed needing only an affectionate touch to light up her eyes. We may want to appear compassionate and morally responsible but we are really making subjective decisions about worth and value. Why not come clean and say what we are thinking … that the old and sick have less reason to live than the young and beautiful?

  It’s not that I’m particularly anxious for spouses and relatives to be placed behind bars, but if we develop a mindset and a legal framework that encourages the idea that, as we get old and ill, the sensible, selfless, courageous thing to do is to end our lives, I think we will have regressed as human beings.

  Dignity?

  Dignitas – the name of the clinic in Switzerland where people can go to end their lives. One of the problems with talking about assisted suicide is precisely this word and the sense that it is axiomatic that someone old and incapacitated lacks dignity.

  I had an experience with my dear old composition teacher, Douglas Steele. He ended up in a nursing home and was pretty mad, but still an absolute delight to be with. The last time I went to see him I opened his door and he was sitting on a commode with his trousers around his ankles. ‘Come in, dear boy,’ he shouted with a laugh. ‘I shan’t be long.’ I was a little shocked at this ultimate example of indignity, but then I saw past the physical aspect of it as I looked up at the imp
ervious, smiling face of my old friend, his extraordinary greatness of spirit unaltered. He dressed himself and, after telling me some confused stories I’d heard hundreds of times, he sat down at the piano and played a piece he said he’d written but was really by William Baines. It was all quite crazy but I left feeling great joy.

  I had also seen him during moods of terrible darkness with an incapacitating depression he’d had sporadically since the Second World War. I can’t help but think that on a bad day, with ‘compassionate’ relatives offering advice and blinded by his own dark mood, he might have been forced to agree that life is worth living only when it is dignified, and thus encouraged to end that life. On the day we met, in the nursing home, on the commode, William Baines resonating from the small upright piano, he flung dignity to one side and we both revelled in the childlike glee that resulted from it.

  But on the other hand … some different thoughts on end-of-life issues

  I’m sometimes suspicious of those who say that they believe in eternal life, Christians who claim that when we die we don’t die – ‘life is changed not ended’, as the liturgy puts it. If they really believed this, would it not make end-of-life issues less anxiety-inducing? If that child with the incurable illness – pain medicated just short of the wire of the unendurable, tubes writhing out of bloody, raw crevices – were a mere hour away from an eternal embrace by the eternal Lover why the panicked insistence on prolonging the last hopeless moments on earth, at whatever cost? Is demanding a sufferer’s month of utter pain (motor neurons’ conscious but immobile torture) really to be pro-life? And (this is dangerous, I know) is a mistake, or even a medical misjudgement, such a disaster if that person immediately enters everlasting bliss? When Christians march and chant and hold placards and accuse and threaten, are they not often indulging in the worst kind of political point-making, promoting an ‘us v. them’ superiority, which is fundamentally, and ironically, contradicting the heart of the message of Jesus?

  God allows death. He could stop it yet, as every second strikes, lungs cease to breathe, hearts cease to beat, vital organs atrophy and rot. We go to the ends of the earth to prolong life; God points down from heaven in destruction. This can seem completely arbitrary and random at times: a universe of cruel chance. But if we buy into a life-giving God, we have to accept the death-dealing Deity too, on a scale more massive than we can imagine. A black hole of slaughter at the heart of the Divine.

  Maybe our clinging on to blood and bone should not be the issue after all. To ‘let go and let God’ is to welcome death and embrace it – Sister Death, as St Francis of Assisi described it, tellingly feminine. Tomb as womb. If the Gospel (Good News) means the destruction of death’s dread, maybe we should stop trying to block something that has ceased to matter. Perhaps the terminally ill are being given a ticket to ride, so who are we to delay their journey?

  Encouragement, falsehood, and Auschwitz

  ‘Encourage’ is a beautiful word, and to give encouragement is certainly one of the most attractive human virtues. Courage is something else. Although we understand that it is not about lacking fear but about doing the right thing in spite of fear, it can still seem intimidating. Its assertive strut of strength, action and risk can appear terrifying for all but the most self-confident among us. But encouragement is gentle, non-threatening. It looks outside itself; it raises another’s hopes without raising its own profile. Good parents, good teachers (good confessors) know all about this. I’ve had all three.

  Is it acceptable to lie in order to encourage? In the striking and moving novel The Last of the Just by André Schwartz-Bart, we hear of the Jewish tradition that in every generation thirty- six just men are born, the Lamed-waf, to take the burden of the world’s suffering on themselves. The novel begins in York in 1185 when Rabbi Yom Tov Levey’s martyrdom so moved God that he promised the rabbi’s descendants a just man in each generation. After a few chapters, hurtling through history, we reach the extended story of Ernie Levey, who was killed at Auschwitz in 1943. During his final harrowing train journey, packed tight into a sickening, excrement-thick carriage of death and despair, he tries to comfort the terrified children who are still alive about their dead companion, assuring them that he is only asleep and repeating to them in rhythms matching the train’s forward movement that in the Kingdom of Israel everyone will be happy and parents will be reunited with their children. A woman in the carriage confronts him in anger, digging her nails into his shoulder, asking him how he can tell them that it’s only a dream. He replies, through tears: ‘Madame, there is no room for truth here.’

  Of course the theological question arises as to whether he was in fact, if unknowingly, speaking the truth, but beyond that perhaps there is a ‘truth’ in human compassion that is greater than ‘facts’. The invisible bonds that join us together in society can be, should be, stronger than the material world we can grasp and measure and destroy. To bring healing to a soul, especially a child’s, is to conjure up the fire of creation itself. ‘Let there be light!’ The Big Bang, the first First, might well have been, above all, an explosion of love: the universe’s orgasm.

  … AND RELIGION

  Rock or tree?

  People think of faith as something solid, a rock against which a tempest can rage, a fixture of stability when all around is in turmoil. ‘You are Rock and upon this Rock I will build my Church’ (Matthew 16:18) was Christ’s response to Peter’s confident affirmation of belief. But to me faith is more like a tree. It is mostly stable and supporting but it is alive and changeable and unpredictable too. And it gets damaged in the storm sometimes. And it can lose its leaves. Mine has undergone many autumns over the years.

  I have gathered in the following section some spiritual reflections, written across different periods of my life, sometimes buoyed up with confidence, sometimes shaken up with questioning.

  Empty hands

  How wonderful that we can give others that peace which we do not possess. Oh, miracle of our empty hands.

  This quotation from the novel Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos goes to the heart of the matter for me in matters religious. Any spirituality begins (continues and ends) with an overriding sense of our permanently empty hands. It has been said that the most important condition for being able to pray is a profound awareness of our inability to pray. In some ways any peace I myself might have (my neat solutions confidently arranged and ready for quick dispensing) is the worst thing to offer someone whose heart is riven with suffering. It is too often cheap, ready-made wisdom. It’s not that if I’m sad I need someone equally sad to sympathise; I just don’t want a smug, smiling face beaming at me, trying to cheer me up.

  I’ve been to Confession countless hundreds of times all over the world. If nothing else, I have probably saved thousands of pounds in psychiatrists’ bills! The overwhelming majority of these priestly encounters have been positive – brief, sensible, understanding and genuinely encouraging. One memorable occasion was in New York when I popped into the Franciscan Church on West 31st Street. ‘I’m an alcoholic,’ said the priest in the midst of one of the most humane, gentle and uplifting five minutes I have ever spent. A few years later this particular wounded healer, Father Mychal Judge, would become world famous as the first certified fatality on the morning of 9/11, killed in the midst of service as chaplain to the firefighters.

  Sometimes having nothing to say enables us to be living sacraments, outward shells containing (who knows how?) inward grace, conduits for blessings we do not possess ourselves. It’s not dissimilar to playing a concert, perhaps: re-creating sounds I didn’t write; moving an audience when I’m not in the mood; heart speaking to heart without the need for words.

  I am not a Catholic pianist

  Julien Green once wrote that he was a Catholic and a novelist, but not a Catholic novelist. I think the distinction is more than merely a way to prevent limitations of subject matter and moral judgement; it has to do with the difference between God’s responsibility and
ours in the creative process.

  Music’s abstraction removes that specific dilemma facing the believing writer, but when asked about the relationship between my musical and spiritual life my initial reaction is that there is none. My faith shapes me (although not as much as it might), and then that ‘me’ plays the piano or composes. Faith does not work directly on the materials at hand. Whether I play a good concert tomorrow night, or whether settings of religious texts I’ve written are inspired, has nothing to do with whether I prayed before or during the process. This relates to an important insight of Catholic spirituality: the entire material world, after the Incarnation, is now forever infused, perfumed with God. This is a step beyond seeing the goodness of Creation: yes, everything is made by God, but, after Christ, all that ‘good matter’ has had Hands of benediction extended over it in a new way. After Emmaus, every crust of bread is sacred; after Cana, all water can become wine.

  Caravaggio’s religious works are greater than Holman Hunt’s not because he was a firmer believer than the good Englishman but because he was a better painter – and his notorious case is, delightfully, the exception that proves the exception: ‘God makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends his rain on the just and on the unjust’ (Matthew 5:45). Artistic genius and our delight in what it produces is an example of the profligate overflow of God’s grace and goodness, given without limit or condition. In fact, an artist’s complacent confidence that his faith and good behaviour will lend him God’s help in a special way is likely to find that the very obstacle that gets in the way of greatness – a log in the artistic eye preventing him from seeing the ‘world in a grain of sand’.