This issue of Second Opinion includes articles designed to help readers discover resources that they or their contemporaries may overlook. We have all experienced occasions when, after we looked to all the predictably promising and obvious places for help, we find it serendipitously or in locations we had written off as irrelevant. The best way to illustrate this theme in the present instance is to frame the first two articles in this issue.
The first resource is the past. Vigen Guroian takes us there in an effort to find lessons for dying well. He not only takes us to the past; he has the remote past in mind. He chooses the ancient church, Christianity as of many centuries ago. As we pile on additions to our list of "unlikelies," note that he draws us to the Armenian funeral rite. Expect yawns from the major media. They have it all figured out: the present, the near, and the immediately relevant are all that matter.
I had an early experience with the issue of remote and near pasts, remote and near places. On my first day as a teacher at the University of Chicago, which means my first day as a teacher, I chatted with Langdon Gilkey, a theologian who was also beginning at Chicago. He asked me what course I was offering. I told him I was not offering it; the powers that be had assigned it—"History of Christianity 303: the Modern Period."
Gilkey had come from Vanderbilt and knew a good deal about Christian history and about course numbering. Why start with 303? What happened to 301 and 302, on ancient and medieval eras? They are usually met up with first by anyone who has chronology in mind. I told Gilkey that the curriculum planners reasoned differently. The times were, after all, the sixties, when academics had to be relevant above all else. And they assumed that by teaching the modern period first we would grasp students where they are, and could then tantalize them to go backward. Gilkey said he could buy that logic as soon as we could show how American Puritans influenced Tertullian, one of the puritanical Christian ancients.
After that smiling response he and I got serious. We agreed that for historians of Christianity, the study of heresies, orthodoxies, councils, expansions, and persecutions in the first four centuries would reveal more about life today than might many stops along the way in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We are shaped by many pasts, and these dead pasts, as novelist William Faulkner reminded us, are neither dead nor past. They live in us.
Today more women graduate students are writing theses on medieval women mystics than on modern spiritual leaders. Hildegard of Bingen, Margery Kempe, and company are more relevant to them than women of our time. They study these figures of long ago not to turn medievalist but to find better ways to live in our own time.
I remember a paraphrase of something in conversation uttered by Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism. Asked why he spent his life on obscure medieval texts, he justified it only by saying that he thought they knew "back there" something that we do not know "as yet." Guroian hypothesizes the same about the ancient Christian world and informs our own.
Now, not everything in the past is full of potential. Much of its leavings are inert, and nothing we do can make them "ert." It takes discerning scholars and practitioners to help isolate the best prospects, and that is what Guroian does.
The other illustration is contemporary. Joseph J. Kotva Jr. finds resources in a profession and a context. The profession is pastoral ministry, and the context is the congregation, the local community of belief.
To most pastors their relevance to health care, care of the soul, and care for the good, is so obvious that it hardly needs selling. They are constantly positioned at bedsides or family gatherings where people have to make decisions about the good and the true. Most of them are trained not only in theology and ministerial practice but in specialized versions of practice, for example through Clinical Pastoral Education. Many are formed by undergraduate training in philosophy and philosophical ethics.
The professional bioethicists who are not at home with pastoral and congregational life pursue their disciplines and crafts in different fashion than do ministers. Even those trained as ministers before they specialized in medical ethics often slip into another mode of perception and discourse when they put on their bioethics coats. Kotva gives us good reasons to ask whether such a division of disciplines, practices, and labor are best for patients. He offers cases and examples, ones that we will not now anticipate.
Before one even explores the equipment of those trained as pastors, it is useful to probe their congregational contexts. Some years ago Don Browning, mentioned in Kotva's article, wrote at book length on the moral context of pastoral care. He could as well have spoken of the pastoral context of moral care. What might we mean by that?
Chaplains, perhaps more of whom see these pages than do parish ministers, may love their work. But they know its difficulties and limits. When ethical issues come up as they tend to do in most circumstances, they find it hard to speak of the good and the true when they cannot find a context. This does not mean they are all relativists or mere improvisers. It does mean that when they understand philosophically and religiously where a patient derives resources, where she or he is "coming from," it is easier to help lead them to the place where they can make judgments. Chaplains on their own often cannot discern what might be the roots of good decisions by families, those close to them, and physicians.
The rich resources of pastoral and congregational worlds are by no means automatically available. These worlds can represent routine, unreflective, boring, tired ways of life. But at their best they are attentive, offering communal help in times of loneliness and substantive approaches to ethics on their own. Let Kotva make the case.
