Column

Comment

Gaza

Israel

Middle East

2 November 2023

4 min read

“Sometime the killing just has to stop”

Simple calls for peace are often against the grain of power, observes George Pitcher. Many still yearn for it, even when faced with complexities and impossibilities.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A dove rests on a wall in Gaza, 2021.

براء حبوش on Unsplash.

I admire my friend Clive Stafford Smith for two principal reasons. He’s a demon pace bowler for my Vicar’s XI cricket team. And, as a lawyer, he has dedicated his career to defending prisoners on death row. I’m not sure whether batsmen or US attorneys find him the more threatening. But I know I’d want to have him on my side, whether on the pitch or in court.

We always have to be careful how we describe people these days. I nearly wrote that Clive is an atheist; more accurately he is an unbeliever. He’s certainly pleased to have God on his side if it means appealing to the Christian conscience of jury members in a capital trial.

But it’s two very ordinary comments that I remember from hanging out with him, which come to mind now as we witness the hatred of war in the Middle East and which evoke words spoken to me by the principal of my theological college some years ago:

“Be very careful to notice, George, where you encounter the Christ.”

Meaning that it won’t necessarily be among the pious, the faithful and the churched.

The first was a comment I heard Clive make in an interview:

“It’s always been a rule of my life that if someone is being hated, you have to get between the hated and the hater.” I have tried, when I can, to stand in the corner of what we might call the “hatee”.

The second was a phrase spoken by an actress in a play that arose from Clive’s work with the charity he co-founded, Reprieve. It’s a monologue comprising the story and the court evidence given in the US by Lorelei Guillory, whose six-year-old son Jeremy was taken and murdered by Rick Langley.

Lorelei visited him in jail and subsequently appeared as Clive’s witness to plead that Langley be spared the death penalty. Her breathtaking words of explanation, which have stayed with me since, were simple:

“Sometime the killing just has to stop.”

It’s the simplest words that cut through the political noise and sophistry. I believe the voices of western powers should be calling for, insisting upon or even demanding a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. Our Church leaders have done so. But these voices are called naive or simplistic or disloyal, or worse.

In the UK, London Mayor Sadiq Khan has called for a ceasefire, pitching him against his political party leader Sir Keir Starmer. Khan is a Muslim – again, let’s be careful to note where we encounter the authentic voice of peace. Conservative minister Paul Bristow has been sacked by the government for calling for a ceasefire, while prime minister Rishi Sunak continues to mouth that “Israel has a right to defend herself.”

So, the call for peace, against the grain of power, comes from across the political spectrum. Against it are the claims of naivety and disloyalty, which state that the situation is far too complex for peace or that Israel must be left to its own self-determination.

Faced with complexities and impossibilities, both these writers seem to conclude, almost in prayer, with a yearning for peace

But even here the runes read for ceasefire. Take two recent and prominent commentators on the conflict, again from across the political spectrum. And, again, we must be careful, in this febrile climate, how we describe people. These are not Jewish commentators, so much as columnists who happen to be Jews.

One, Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian, writes a superb piece that this isn’t about Team Palestine versus Team Israel and picking which is wrong: “Israeli novelist and peace activist Amos Oz was never wiser than when he described the Israel/Palestine conflict as something infinitely more tragic: a clash of right v right.” His pay-off is devastating: “There are no winners – only never-ending loss.”

The other, Daniel Finkelstein in The Times, writes equally soundly that foreign observers, calling for ceasefire, fail to understand Israel’s roots. He cites 1958’s blockbuster novel-to-movie Exodus to posit that Khan’s call for a ceasefire “was not merely wrong, not merely absurd… it was utterly pointless.”

Yet he concludes with a quote from Exodus’s final scene beside an Arab and Israeli grave:

“... the dead always share the earth in peace. And that’s not enough. It’s time for the living to have a turn.”

Then Finkelstein’s own pay-off:

“May it come to pass.”

Faced with complexities and impossibilities, both these writers seem to conclude, almost in prayer, with a yearning for peace. It’s difficult to see how that peace comes without ceasefire.

I’ve referenced a Muslim and Jewish voices so far. What of the third Abrahamic faith, the Christian voice?

One hopes it joins the others, with the old hymn’s still, small voice of calm. It has to call for ceasefire. Because as my friend Clive puts it, we have to get between the hated and the hater. And as Lorelei said, sometime the killing just has to stop.

Article

Assisted dying

Comment

Mental Health

2 December 2024

6 min read

No, it is not your life to dispose of

What could not be said about the assisted dying debate

Steve Hellyer

Steve is the former vicar of St Matthew's Oxford.

Empty bus seats are lit in dark neon colours.

Vy Tran on Unsplash.

It is 1979. I am aged 23 and have been in great mental and emotional anguish and pain for years. I am on a pointless journey, on Greyhound busses, from the East coast of America to the West, and am presently sitting in a parked bus just outside a city in Arizona; the powerful engine idles as we wait for departure time, giving a gentle to-and-fro rocking motion to the bus. I have not eaten for days, am unspeakably tired of my life, and have made a written list of possible ways to end it.

But not on that list is one possibility I have not previously considered, but which is now before me. As I look out to my right, up into the Arizona desert hills, I realise that here is an option which perfectly fits with my desire, not so much to do away violently with myself, as simply to drift into a passive oblivion; I realise that I could simply rise from my seat right now, get off the bus, stumble off into the desert hills, lie down, and wait to die. I need not shoot or poison myself after all. I know I can do this, and fairly easily; to die will take time, but no matter. No-one knows where I am, no-one will know I am missing, no-one will come looking for me, and probably no-one will find me. It is suddenly an immensely attractive prospect, and I am seconds away from rising up from my seat...

There is one thing, one thing only, that makes me hesitate; it is what other people would call ‘a religious belief’, but to me it is simply a truth.

It is this; I am absolutely sure that there is a God. And suddenly there is something grimly, darkly humorous even, in what I thus believe will follow my death; I will find myself, not in peaceful oblivion, but in the presence of God. I will, as they say, ‘meet my Maker’. And what then will I say to God? I will say: “Apologies: I could not go on, there was no other way out for me”. But what, I reason, if God were then to say: “You are wrong. There was a way forward. Look: you could have stayed on the bus, and had you done so, let me show you how your earthly future would have panned out…” And I will listen, and I will watch, as the film rolls on, showing me an alternative future. But of course, by then it would be too late…

And suddenly, sitting on that bus, in a moment of cold clarity, I realise, with a kind of desolate logic, how I am caught. In a very real sense, my belief in God my Creator means that I am not in fact ‘free’ to dispose of myself; more, that what I refer to so glibly as ‘myself’ is not in fact MY self. The bus ticket in my pocket may be ‘my’ ticket, my rucksack ‘my’ rucksack, but my life is not after all my possession, mine to dispose of; it is a loan, a gift, from a Giver, to Whom I am responsible, answerable…

I remain in my seat. The bus continues its gentle rocking motion a while longer. The driver gives his familiar 1970s Greyhound driver’s recitation, the various admonitions and prohibitions I have heard so many times as I have crossed America, I could give the speech myself (ending with the words ‘and no marijuana’, which always raises a smile) – and the bus pulls out onto the freeway. I look back over my shoulder at the desert hills as they recede, and feel I am leaving more than the desert hills behind; I am still in deep pain, but know I have left a possibility behind me, for good. Months later I will reflect on this moment and realise with a smile that the name of the city where I had put death behind me by not rising was Phoenix.

And so my journey has continued – on, in due time, to a return to England, to a measure of healing, to getting ordained as an Anglican priest, to thirty-four years of Church ministry, to marriage to a very remarkable woman, to fatherhood of two children - and, at some future moment, to my own death: all in God’s time.

How shoddy, shrunken and lonely, is our much vaunted and trumpeted vision of the autonomous individual.

The word ‘God’ was probably used very little, if at all, in the MPs debate on assisted suicide - and this debate has really been about assisted suicide, not ‘assisted dying’, given that people will be given drugs to self-administer. Even the Christian MPs who spoke, did not mention God, as they knew what could be said, and what could not, in order for them to be heard at all. The public arguments for, and against, the legalisation of assisted suicide have almost without exception had to be premised on one agreed assumption, apparently the only one now permissible in a post-Christian, liberal humanist, agnostic/atheist society: the assumption that my life is mine. The arguments used for assisted suicide resolve down to: “It is my life: I should be allowed to decide when to end it”. Most of the arguments used against resolve down to: “Yes, of course, granted, agreed, it is your life: but there may be unintended consequences for others in allowing you to end it, others may feel obliged to end their lives”, etc. At no point could anyone say, as I so passionately would claim: “No, it is not your life to dispose of”; there is now, it seems, no public place for the apostle Paul’s blunt statement in his letter to the Church in Corinth: ‘You are not your own.’

Yet this is now one of the most fundamental beliefs of ‘my’ life: and I have found it to be totally liberating and beautiful. I think of those glorious sculptures on the outer walls of Chartres Cathedral, including the representation of the creation of Adam, presented as emerging from the very mind of God. I think of the glory of man and woman made in God’s image as stewards of creation. I think of the extraordinary wonder of the Incarnation, of God embodied in Christ. I think of the sufferings of Christ on the cross; and I think, yes, of course I think, of the sufferings of my fellow men and women and children, and of my own sufferings, and of the call to me to shoulder the burden, both of living, and of dying, in God’s time.

And, alas, I think I also see something of how shrivelled, how wizened in comparison, how shoddy, shrunken and lonely, is our much vaunted and trumpeted vision of the autonomous individual – “my life, my rights, my body, my choice” - in the dominant contemporary Western mindset, eating away steadily like a corrosive acid any wider conception of community and the social institutions that enshrine it, and any sense of a deeper accountability to God.

Where will the current assisted suicide decision ultimately lead? What is the destination? It is difficult to predict, but the signs from other countries who have gone down this road are not good.

But what do I know? Do I have answers to all the questions around assisted suicide? I confess I do not. But one thing has become clearer to me: I am on a very different journey from the one my nation is travelling now.