Diary of a Theologian

It’s a new book, thus not one of the 40 or so that I have from the Dallas Public Library. Those books, too, I often stumble across and wonder what it was that moved me to request them. Was it a reference in an essay in The New Criterion? Was it a friend’s recommendation? Was it something I heard in a sermon or a class? That, too, happened last week: I stumbled upon a volume of essays by J. B. Priestley from my public library. About Priestley I know next to nothing but that he used to be famous in a middlebrow-kind of way and he wrote essays (as well as fiction) published in the old magazines like the Saturday Review. I enjoyed picking up the volume, but what made me check it out? It had about 30 essays from his career, which concluded in the 1960s, and I started perusing them.

One was amusing. He was complaining about the way the old are treated nowadays. We used to be seen as sources of wisdom, he said; now, we’re obsolete. Part of the problem, he writes (and remember, this was in the Sixties!)—the problem is technology. You can be pretty good through life adopting the latest thing and adapting it to your use, but at some point, it becomes too hard. You just can’t keep up.

I’m reading this, standing at my dining table, wondering what in the world he was talking about. I was in grade school for most of the Sixties, and I don’t recall any technology besides television (three channels) and record players and automobiles. I was wondering: What’s so hard about them?

And then I thought, what will grade school kids today think of me? What are they thinking of me?

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But that wasn’t the new book. It’s called A Time to Die, it's by Nicolas Diat (Ignatius Press), and it’s about monks in Europe, today, and how they die, how they approach death, what they do and feel and fear and think as they take care of one another as they come to death. You may recall I was writing a couple of months ago about “the art of dying,” the skill or craft that derives from the Middle Ages and in particular came out of the experience of the Black Death, the experience of plague. This art, lost in our culture at large, survives in monasteries today.

It’s a relatively new book. The author relates what he learned and saw from visits to a half-dozen monasteries about ten years ago. And it is about precisely what I think we need to recover: what’s good about being finite creatures destined to die. 

So: the monks are wary of hospitals. They don’t want to be sedated so much that they don’t know what’s going on; they want to experience dying. They also fear it, not in a way that denies their faith in the resurrection, but in a way that is real. They know it won’t be easy, not for any of them. Still they want it: they don’t want excessive medication, neither do they want heroic measures that keep the body alive at the cost of life itself. 

Read it, friends. This is precisely what we need to be thinking about as euthanasia becomes increasingly a legal alternative, and as the medical world pushes on with many ways to keep our bodies going. We need to grasp, as the Preacher saith, there is a time to live and a time to die. We need to grasp what is good about being human to the end.

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In the meantime, if you gave me that book, please drop me a line.

My feeble memory will thank you.

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Out & About. This Sunday, January 19, I am to preach at St. Augustine’s Oak Cliff in Dallas; their Eucharist is at 10:15 a.m. Then on Sunday, January 26, I’m to preach at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas, where the Eucharists are at 9 and 11:15 a.m.

Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” will be discussed at “Good Books & Good Talk” on Sunday, January 26, at 5 p.m. at St. Matthew’s. Anyone who reads the play is welcome to the conversation. We meet in Garrett Hall: when you leave the parking garage, it is across the beautiful close and to your right.