Article

Assisted dying

Creed

Suffering

5 November 2024

4 min read

Assisted dying: in praise of being a burden

It's not a reason to end a life, it's the very possibility of our being human.

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

A younger hand holds a wrinkled older hand of someone in a bed.

A lot has been said already about assisted dying. In the raging bonfire of public discourse, there has been a lot of heat, but not a lot of light. But amid all the noise surrounding Parliament’s upcoming discussion around assisted dying, a recent conversation hosted by Prospect between Brenda Hale (former President of the Supreme Court) and Rowan Williams (former Archbishop of Canterbury) served as a reminder that we are, despite everything, still capable of having meaningful and fruitful discussion about even the most divisive of issues.

The conversation is earnest and hard-won throughout; both Hale and Williams each push and probe the other for more detail, more nuance, more outworking of implications. And yet their tenor remains respectful. There is no cheap point scoring, no trite comments or easy aphorisms. These are two people working to understand the other, in full recognition of the gravity of the topic.

One particular moment, however, was frankly spine-chilling. As the conversation progresses, Hale is asked the following: “How do you deal with the pressure questions – pressure from family or financial pressures? What safeguards can you build in?” Her response – in full, for context – is as follows:

“Well, you can build in the safeguards that the decision must be made without undue influence, coercion, duress or fraud. But in the end, it’s a matter of evidence, isn’t it? One of the things I find most difficult is that I don’t think it’s necessarily irrational for somebody to take into account the suffering their suffering is causing to the people dear to them, or the burden that looking after them is placing upon the whole community.

I wouldn’t call that “undue influence”, but it’s one of the questions I find most difficult about all of this. You know, obviously there’s duress, there’s financial abuse, there are all of those sorts of things that have got to be checked against, and there ought to be objective evidence of absence of that. But when it comes down to somebody thinking, “I don’t want to be a cause of others suffering,” that seems to me to be a reasonable thing for somebody to take into account.”

The idea that my dependency or burdensomeness might factor into decisions about whether I continue to live, seems to me to be contrary to the very notion of the Christian message. Let me explain why.

We are made to be a burden, then. To depend on others, to be burdensome to them, is to be human.

We are, whether we like it or not, now rapidly approaching Christmas. At this time of year, Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus; the divine Son of God made flesh and born of a virgin. As the divine Son of God, Jesus lived the perfect human life of joy, grace, and faithfulness; the kind of life I can only aspire to.

Because of this, as a Christian, I look to Jesus’ perfect life of faithfulness as a model for what a truly healthy human life looks like. And I am often surprised by what I find there. For example, it turns out true human flourishing does not involve getting married, having sex, or having children; Jesus’ perfect life of flourishing featured none of these things.

But crucially, Jesus’ perfect life often involved depending upon others; upon being a burden to those around him. As an itinerant travelling teacher, Jesus relied on the financial support of his followers to make his ministry possible. He relied on being made and given food to eat, and a roof to sleep under. He was far from self-sufficient. Rather, he gladly made himself a burden to others in service of his ministry.

But more than this, we often overlook the radical significance of the Christian claim that, at Christmas, we celebrate God’s becoming a baby. For the first years of his perfect life, Jesus was entirely – entirely – dependent upon his parents for all his needs. Here we see God, in the person of Jesus, depending upon Mary and Joseph to feed him, to clothe him, to cuddle him, to clean up his sick and his excrement. This is what human flourishing looks like.

This is mirrored at his glorious death, too. Prior to his arrest, Jesus asked his friends for support; to stay awake while he prays for comfort. The Gospels go on to tell us that, having been mercilessly tortured, beaten, stripped, and interrogated, Jesus had his cross carried by a man named Simon of Cyrene. After his death, having no tomb of his own, Jesus was buried in the family tomb of his follower Joseph of Arimathea. And this, too, is what human flourishing looks like.

Throughout his entire life Jesus lived the perfect life of human joy and faithfulness. And this often involved depending upon others and being a burden to them in every way conceivable. We are made to be a burden, then. To depend on others, to be burdensome to them, is to be human.

To think, then, with Baroness Hale, that my dependency and burdensomeness upon others might somehow serve to underwrite a decision to end my life, is fraught with difficulty for me as a Christian. I simply cannot reconcile her words with the life I see Jesus living in the Bible: a life of joyful, difficult burdensomeness.

There may be many other reasons why people decide they want their lives to end. But a sense of burdening others ought not to be one of them. Being a burden is not a reason to bring one’s life to an end, because it is the very possibility of our being human in the first place. To need others, to place ourselves into their care, does not make us less human, it makes us more human. And therein lies its glory.

Article

Culture

Music

Sin

Suffering

2 December 2024

5 min read

The holy or the broken: Hallelujah at 40

What’s the magic sauce Leonard Cohen mixed into his masterpiece?

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A black and white photo shows, singer Leonard Cohen to the right hand side, eyes closed and head inclined slightly upwards.

Leonard Cohen, 2008

Rama, CC BY-SA 2.0 FR, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s summer 1984 – Richard Branson has just launched Virgin Airways, the Soviet Union have boycotted the Olympic games, the miner’s strike is still raging on, and Footloose is pretty much the only thing you can watch in the cinema.

Amidst it all, happening miles under the cultural radar, a songwriter of astronomical talent and middling success walks into a pokey studio in New York. He’s clutching a battered notebook which contains eighty verses of a song that he’s been writing and re-writing for multiple years. A song that has been driving him to utter madness, residing tormentedly in his mind. The metre is running in the recording studio, so the eighty verses are promptly whittled down to just four and the song is finally wrestled into existence.

A barely noticed existence, that is.

Those four chosen verses, the ones lucky enough to have escaped the confines of the notebook, continue to dwell in obscurity for a while yet. This seemingly cursed song is housed in an album that the record company have refused, claiming it to be of no real commercial value. Subsequently, it will enjoy a tiny release in Canada in December 1984, but nowhere else. It is, to sum up, profoundly ignored.

Now, let’s fast-forward exactly forty years.

That obscure, over-looked and under-estimated, little song has been covered by more than three-hundred artists, including Bob Dylan, Jeff Buckley, and Lou Reed. Its lyrics have been dissected and studied by the likes of Bono and Salman Rushdie. It’s a movie soundtrack favourite, a talent show staple, and a part of the furniture at weddings and funerals the world over. Books have been written about it, documentaries made about it. I don’t think it’s a major exaggeration to say that it’s in the cultural air we breathe.

A song that once had its maestro banging his head against the floor in frustration, now belongs to us all. Can you hazard a guess at which song this may be the origin story of? I can give you a hint, if you’d like? It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor falls and the major lifts…

You’ve got it.

This humble tale is the story of ‘the baffled king composing Hallelujah’.

Generation after generation finds itself notably and profoundly moved by this song. We treasure it, we value it, we let far too many people cover it (looking at you, Justin Timberlake).

So, I guess I’m wondering - why?

It’s one of those odd questions to which everyone, and no-one, has the answer. And it’s not that I don’t recognise the outright genius of Leonard Cohen and accredit the success to his mastery, I do. But, apparently, not even Cohen himself fully understood why this song has become such a phenomenon. Its success is an oddity, really. So, we have every right to ask ourselves - what’s the magic sauce that’s mixed into this song?

Cohen... makes a bee line for the deep stuff, the uncomfortable stuff, the stuff we keep hidden – and plants the word ‘hallelujah’ in there.

It opens with Cohen telling the biblical story of King David, who played the harp so beautifully it had a kind of mystical effect – it supernaturally calmed the spirit of the dangerously erratic Israelite king, Saul. David, who himself would go on to become the ruler of Israel, is the ‘baffled king’ about whom and to whom Cohen appears to sing. As Alan Bright notes,

‘He (Cohen) has placed us in a time of ancient legend, and peeled back the spiritual power of music and art to reveal the concrete components, reducing even literal musical royalty to the role of simple craftsman.’

The second verse mingles two further biblical stories together – that of (afore-mentioned) King David and Bathsheba, and Samson and Delilah. Both stories, both men, are brought to despair by abuses of power, moral failure, violence, and death. Their lives are truly toppled by their own brokenness and their own breaking-things-ness. To borrow a phrase from Francis Spufford, their stories act as a signpost for the ‘human propensity to f*** things up’.

These verses are so particular in their subject matter yet so universal in their resonance. Most people have a vague-at-best understanding of the biblical stories its lyrics are alluding to, but a precise-to-the-point-of-painful understanding of the way that old ‘human propensity’ can have its way.

And here is Leonard Cohen, using such despair and brokenness to house a sacred cry. Here’s Leonard Cohen, placing his finger on our vulnerability and telling us that it’s right there – right in the place of pain and shame – where we can engage with the divine. Here’s Leonard Cohen, telling us that if the God of the Bible exists, he can handle the very worst of us.

This song, whether we know it or not, steels past our defences. It makes a bee-line for the deep stuff, the uncomfortable stuff, the stuff we keep hidden – and it plants the word ‘hallelujah’ in there. It tells us that brokenness is inevitable, but it can be made holy. Isn’t that our deepest desire? To know that we’re not too far gone? To be told that we’ll fail, all the time, but never one time too many?

I think, if you were to put that message in any context less real and raw, we’d be suspicious of it. If this song was less gritty, it would have stayed ignored. But it’s just messy enough to have us trust it, Cohen just about honest enough for us to believe him when he tells us that he ‘didn’t come to fool’ us.

So, long may it continue. Long may it sneak past our emotional barricades and wreak havoc in our guarded hearts. Long may the four-minute-long weep-a-thon reign (just, not Justin Timberlake’s version, I beg).