And when we can’t avoid it, we get angry.
Our entire culture seems built around the idea that nobody should ever be in pain. All discomfort is an anomaly and that someone is at fault for it. So then the finger pointing starts. You! You who didn’t wear a mask, you did this to us! You went to a party! You went to Mass on Sunday! You did this to us. And this allows us to warm ourselves with hate. It seems to help. But that furnace grows cold quickly. It needs to be fed. Constantly.
Matthew Archbold over at CMR makes a good point. Read more there.
The reality of pain is a reminder that our sense of control has limits.
I wonder if it’s related to the popularity of “ironic.”
If you do something ironically, you don’t have to admit you actually LIKE it– to love something is to be vulnerable. If you care, you are open to being hurt.
(Also the difference between a hipster and a geek– the geek actually likes what they’re going overboard for.)
Spot on post,
Jonah Goldberg has brushed along these lines multiple times as well, talking about how one of the things that kept religion strong for so long was that it was an answer to death – which touched all lives. He likes to bring up how Calvin Coolidge – the president of the USA at the time – lost his son to a blister from playing tennis. Rich or poor, a lost child united all people.
Now as Death grows more distant from us, religion loses its hold in society. I also couldn’t help but notice that of late, it seems like a lot of panic today is from people being confronted by Death – real death for the first time.
It also seems to prove that Shea’s et al “whole-pro-life” movement is in danger of making an idol of life.
It’s not life that’s being made an idol of, it’s death. Not all devotion to idols is done out of love.
Pre-Covid19, I came across a TED talk on Youtube, The Corpses That Changed My Life, by funeral director Caitlyn Doughty. After viewing some of her other videos, I am pretty sure she has no love of the Church. And I can’t imagine too many orthodox Catholics being thrilled with her. Nevertheless, she does bring up the point Matt A brings up: as a society, we don’t do death well.
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When my father was in the nursing home (basically hospice–but we could not do hospice at home), his roommate had heart attack after heart attack. They kept reviving him, but I never did see him in a conscious state. Neither did my siblings. The family insisted not to let him die, but he did after a few days.
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I am very uncertain of the Church’s End of Life teachings. They come across to me as keep the person alive at all cost, no intervention is a bad one. I read once Mother Teresa said the US was a terrible place to die–all medicine, all mechanical. No love, no human touch. And quite possibly no Last Rites.
I am very uncertain of the Church’s End of Life teachings. They come across to me as keep the person alive at all cost, no intervention is a bad one.
No idea why it would come across that way– the binding, across the board teaching is that you can’t kill somebody for being sick/old/”going to die,” and taking away basic things needed for life (food, water, air) is killing them. The term of art is “ordinary means” to preserve their life.
Beyond that, you just respect them as a human being; you are not required to do absolutely everything to try to maybe extend life every moment possible. (If that were the case, the hero mothers who forego treatment to save their unborn child’s life would be villains, and that’s just wrong.)
Here’s a paragraph from EWTN that says it better than I can; I’ll put the link after the quote:
Treatments that are unduly burdensome or sorrowful to a particular patient, such as amputation, or beyond the economic means of the person, or which only prolong the suffering of a dying person, become morally extraordinary for that person, even if they are otherwise medically ordinary or common. They may choose to use them, but they are not morally obliged to do so.
https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/end-of-life-decisions-ordinary-versus-extraordinary-means-12733
Possibly the quote you’re thinking of is this, or near it?
“The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty — it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There’s a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God.”
― Mother Teresa, A Simple Path: Mother Teresa