From the Terri Schiavo case, Good Friday, March 25, 2005 (also traditional Feast of the Annunciation):
“It’s very frustrating. Every minute that goes by is a minute that Terri is being starved and dehydrated to death,’’ said her brother, Bobby Schindler, who said seeing her was like looking at “pictures of prisoners in concentration camps.’’
Michael Schiavo’s brother, Brian Schiavo, strongly disagreed with that assessment, telling CNN that Terri Schiavo “does look a little withdrawn’’ but insisting she was not in pain. He added that starvation is simply “part of the death process.’’
Thursday, a lawyer for Michael Schiavo said he hoped the woman’s parents and the governor would finally give up their fight.
“We believe it’s time for that to stop as we approach this Easter weekend and that Mrs. Schiavo be able to die in peace,’’ attorney George Felos said.
What can one say? I’ll try. Terri’s parents are Schindlers, and their name and reading the comments above about the “concentration camps” reminds me of an encounter just two days ago. I had just finished watching a live radio program on the nearby campus of North Park University with nationally-syndicated talk show host Michael Medved. The first hour of the show was centered around Terri Schiavo. Medved’s guest was Rabbi Daniel Lapin, who agreed, strongly, with Medved that what was being done to Ms. Schiavo was morally wrong.
The show was followed by a Q & A session. Medved, who is Jewish, was asked about what he thought of Schindler’s List. What struck him most powerfully about this “great film,” he said, was the power of goodness on Schindler, who was not a good man, but who increasingly was drawn to something ennobling in his efforts to save Jews from the concentration camps and the gas chambers.
A woman got up and said her mother was a Schindler survivor; her mother was with her and slowly rose to her feet, while the audience of Christians and Jews and unbelievers quickly rose to their feet to pay their respect. Here was a woman who, as a child, was on the road to execution and now stood before us, with a daughter she would have never had except for the decision of a bad man to do something right.
Today is a day on which Christians remember a bad decision made by a Roman ruler (a bad man?) to sentence an innocent Man to death by crucifixion. Mr. Medved respectfully noted this and also that on Purim, which happens to fall on Good Friday this year, Jews remember the courage of a woman named Esther to risk her life in order to save the Jewish people who had been sentenced to extermination by a Persian ruler, not unlike the sentence passed against them in Nazi Germany.
It is a day in which judgments are made, but they are not always as they appear. In the Terri Schiavo case, while it is about her, and her parents, it is also about much more. It is about a culture of death and a culture of life. Can a society that is expanding the “right to die” while at the same time restricting the “right to life” be anything other than a culture of death?
I think it is ultimately a contest between two views. One says that life is a Gift from God, the other that it is not and it is for us to decide by our own lights what to do with life. It is ours to manipulate, ours to end when we want to, ours to create for experimental purposes, in short there is no Divine mystery to Life before which we must in all humility bow.
To bow in humility is portrayed by the enlightened as backward, medieval, or superstitious. To argue for an expansive “right to die” that includes starving someone to death is portrayed as enlightened and modern thinking. But if “the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!” (Matt. 6:23) Much of modern enlightened thinking about life, sex, marriage, and children is rather a great darkening of the mind, a corruption of the intellect and mind.
You see that darkening when a man can say publicly without shame that starvation is simply “part of the death process.” And when a lawyer, without apparently sensing the irony, appeals to Easter this weekend as a reason for finally washing all of our collective hands of the death of Terri Schiavo.
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