A Liturgy for Suicide?

And a time for courage

A task force commissioned by the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada has produced a liturgy for people who want to kill themselves. The euphemism for this particular form of suicide is MAiD, which stands for “medical aid (or assistance) in dying.” It takes place when medical professionals of one sort or another assist people in the act of suicide. The introduction to the liturgy begins, “The purpose of this resource is to provide liturgical and pastoral guidelines for Canadian Anglican clergy and other members of pastoral teams when they are called to accompany the dying, specifically with those who have opted to use Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD).”

A Failure of Nerve

One might rightly ask why a church would create a liturgy for so pagan a practice as suicide. The answer is that this church equivocates on the ethics of MAiD.

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.

Summary: Some Anglicans think MAiD is good. Others think it is bad. Plus, all Canadian Anglican Clergy will have to deal with MAiD. It accounts for about 5% of all deaths in Canada. Somehow these assertions lead the liturgy writers to assert that the church should take a morally neutral stand. One might well call this a textbook failure of nerve.

The introduction to the liturgy continues, “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” (emphasis mine). It’s hard to fathom how neutrality on this matter can be a valid option. Is it not part of the church’s prophetic witness to protect life? Should we not lift up the sanctity of life? The notion of the inherent value of life itself is conspicuously absent from the document.

Further even if we were to agree that terminally ill adults should be able to seek medical assistance to end their lives (a contestable claim), this is not the only category of euthanized people. People with an “unmet social need” (e.g., a place to live) have been euthanized in Canada. The Dutch government has created provisions for doctors to take the lives of terminally ill children ages 1-12. The “social imaginary” of the West is changing. Assisted suicide is increasingly acceptable. Remember when abortion was supposed to be “safe, legal, and rare”? Today that sentiment has been supplanted by cries of, “Shout your abortion!” What was once considered by its proponents to be an unfortunate necessity has now become a point of pride. We are not becoming kinder or more sensitive in the West. We are becoming more callous. Nothing makes this clearer than the rapid embrace of MAiD.

Despite the aspiration to neutrality, however, the enactment of this liturgy cannot be morally neutral. There is an old saying in the church: lex orandi, lex credendi. The law of prayer is the law of belief. In other words, our practices of liturgy and worship shape our beliefs. A liturgy for suicide gives theological legitimacy to the act of suicide. I sent this liturgy to our Dean of the Chapel at Asbury (Tesia Mallory) to get her read on it. Her response:

Liturgy standardizes and provides a prayer language for a tradition's theological convictions. The word liturgy at its most basic level means the work of the people. It is an act of Christian service to and dialogue with God. Liturgy teaches people how to pray and what the church values. Dressing up suicide in liturgical language formalizes the practice as act of service to God. That's pagan and frankly demonic.

For some reason, I get the sense she didn’t like it.

Whether by design or by carelessness, the Council of General Synod has endorsed MAiD by authorizing trial use of a liturgy produced by its own task force, and thus stands self-condemned of theological malpractice.

Photo by Mathew MacQuarrie on Unsplash

Gibberish, in Four Parts

I went to the introduction looking for some form of theological justification for the development of this liturgy. I found none, but I did come across this:

Human dignity and freedom of conscience is not about the autonomy of decision-making alone; human dignity comes from being a creature of God in the image of God. Part of respecting dignity includes valuing the freedom and responsibility of personal conscience. Faithful decision making, similarly, is not about a simple autonomous act, but about faith being exercised in free will. Faith is relational: we make decisions in communion with God and with others. In the end, it is the dying person with whom we are exercising this ministry at the time of their death, in a context of shared faith, in which together we pray for and listen to God’s presence.

If you can discern the meaning of this tortured paragraph, you deserve a steak dinner. It’s expressed in a kind of rhetoric I call “denominational gobbledygook.” It gives the appearance of profound theological discourse while it drowns the reader in a warm bath of ambiguity and vapid affirmations. Let’s break this down into component parts and try to make sense of it.

Part 1

“Human dignity and freedom of conscience is not about the autonomy of decision-making alone; human dignity comes from being a creature of God in the image of God. Part of respecting dignity includes valuing the freedom and responsibility of personal conscience.”

We begin, then, with some grammatical confusion: the verb “is” in the first sentence lacks agreement with the plural subject, “Human dignity and freedom of conscience.” I assume this is a typo. With the help of a good editor, then, the same idea might be expressed as, “Human dignity is rooted in the divine image in which we were created. The divine image involves, in part, the freedom to make important decisions as individuals.” Fair enough.

Part 2

Now for the next sentence: “Faithful decision making, similarly, is not about a simple autonomous act, but about faith being exercised in free will.” It’s not clear what the adverb “similarly” refers to in this sentence. Additionally, the phrase “faith being exercised in free will” is prodigiously murky. Does this mean we freely choose to act in the belief that the promises of Christian faith are true? Alternatively, does it mean that our faith claims affect the decisions we make freely? Does it mean that we may choose to act freely in keeping with the ethical claims that our faith makes on us? Much turns on what the authors mean by “faith,” their notion of what it means to “exercise” faith, and their understanding of “free will.” Without more specificity, it’s impossible to grasp what this accursed sentence might mean.

Part 3

Moving on: “Faith is relational: we make decisions in communion with God and with others.” I take this to mean something like, “We can’t live out the Christian life simply on our own, and we make important decisions with God and other people who share our beliefs.” Despite the insistence on the importance of autonomy above, I believe the authors of this introduction have stumbled on to something true here: our decisions as Christians are bounded by the ethical vision of our community of faith. Our autonomy means we can choose to abide by that ethical vision or to live in some other way. One might thus reason that a decision about something as important as whether or not to commit suicide requires more than the judgment of an individual Christian. It should take its reference point from the community’s vision of human life and its sacred nature.

Part 4

Finally we reach the other side of this muddy swamp: “In the end, it is the dying person with whom we are exercising this ministry at the time of their death, in a context of shared faith, in which together we pray for and listen to God’s presence.” I think the force of this sentence is to indicate that it is the individual’s choice whether or not to commit suicide, but also to communicate that the individual does so in a context of shared faith with the minister and others in the Christian community. Those present in this act should also listen for God’s presence, which is good, since God will surely tell them to repent of their intention to commit/bless the act of suicide.

Whew! Glad that’s over. The purpose of trekking through this linguistic atrocity is to highlight language that has the form of theological reasoning without the power. If I were to say to you, “I convene my ballast on the Bolshevik lampshade,” I have uttered something with the form of a sentence. It has a noun and a verb. It even includes a prepositional phrase. The words, however, do not relate to one another in such a way as to create meaning. Likewise, simply platooning together words and phrases like “the image of God,” “faith, and “free will” does not constitute a theological rationale.

A Crucial Missing Piece

It’s worth noting that, with all this talk about dignity, free will, autonomy, and faith, no reference to the sacredness or sanctity of life appears anywhere in the document. To affirm the sanctity of life means that life has intrinsic sacred value. The liturgy in three instances mentions sacred space, but never sacred people. It’s telling that the liturgy and its introduction reference the image of God in which we are all created, one of the key underpinnings for arguments for the sanctity of life. The authors clearly want the imago Dei to be one of their operative principles, but while they draw out its connection to human dignity, they stop short of its obvious connection to life’s sanctity.

The conspicuous absence of any affirmation of the sanctity of life explains how a liturgy for suicide came into being in the first place. The operative principles in the liturgy’s introduction are dignity and autonomy. “Faith” also pops up from time to time, but its meaning in this document is so nebulous that it can’t do any real work. In this scenario in which we so emphasize dignity and autonomy with only a thin veneer of something called faith smeared on top, suicide might begin to sound like a compelling option for those who no longer wish to live. I can die when I want, where I want, in the way I want. When we begin to understand, however, that our lives are of sacred value, and that this value is derivative of God’s image and creative intention, we begin to see the true gravity of the act of suicide. The value of my life is not based on my desires, my autonomy, or my sense of dignity. It is assigned by God, and there is nothing I can do to diminish it.

The Slippery Slope

This is not to say that the entire document lacks any coherent theological reasoning. Take, for example, the next paragraph:

Human relationships are vulnerable to misuses of power. Use of coercive and manipulative power by others to sway decisions (in any direction) and actions stands against the dignity of the human creature created in the image of God and given with free will. This is in part why we decry systems that make MAiD an option where it ought not to be – where there is poor access to proper health care, for example, rather than being a potentially faithful, conscience-led turn towards death.

This is exactly why, rather than constructing a liturgy for people who wish to kill themselves with medical help, the Anglican Church of Canada should use what voice it has to oppose MAiD. Medically assisted suicide is already being used in situations such as when there is poor access to healthcare. As I argued in a 2022 Firebrand article, the slope here is very slippery, and not just in theory. Numerous real-life examples support this claim.

Blessing Self-Will

The liturgy itself seems like a standard liturgy for a person who is dying. There is no sense that this person is taking his/her own life. There is no acknowledgement that the church, whether it admits it or not, is tacitly blessing this act. I was struck in particular by one section of the rite:

In the name of God most high we lay our hands upon you. Receive Christ’s healing touch to make you whole in body, mind and spirit. The power of God strengthen you, the love of God dwell in you and give you peace. Amen.

The incoherence of a prayer for healing in the midst of the act of suicide is stupefying. Suicide is not an act of healing. It is an act of self-will. It is at times an act born out of mental illness. “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter” (Isaiah 5:20). If the world that does not know Christ wishes to facilitate the deaths of the sick, the disabled, the poor, the depressed, the hopeless, that is one thing. In fact it is entirely unsurprising. Such a world is not unlike the pagan context of the pre-Christian Roman world. For the church to take a stance of neutrality on such an important issue, however, is a different story. God help us if this is all the moral courage we can muster.