With the advent of a new millennium we on the North American continent are anticipating an increase in the average human life span to four score or more years. In this century, the accomplishments of scientific medicine have been truly astonishing. There are many reasons why we should be grateful for these advances. But with these marvelous achievements, come technologies that give us the capacity to control and manipulate life and death processes beyond the wildest dreams of our ancestors. It is no exaggeration to say that a society resembling Aldous Huxley's Brave New World may soon be within our reach and might even suit our desire. In such a society reproductive technologies and eugenics could insure that every human being is "predestined" to be "useful" to society. And what Doctor Kevorkian has named obitiatric and thanatologic medicine might be carried on in hospitals as human beings are dispatched the way dogs and cats are now put to "sleep."

In addition to the available technologies, ideological currents that challenge traditional religious prohibitions against radically altering human nature or medically ending human life swirl through the culture. Today's medicine is not yet consciously antagonistic toward biblical faith, nor does it deliberately seek to subvert or contravene religiously inspired moral and legal limitations on what humans do with their bodies and biology. But the medical profession is under increasing pressure to use new technologies in ways that challenge these limits.

THE CULTURE OF DEATH
In his hilarious and deeply troubling short story, "The Death of Justina," John Cheever introduces his readers to a character named Moses who rebels against our culture's aversion to death and disrespect of the dead. Moses makes this stunning comment at Justina's funeral: "How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?"¹ Moses's unsettling statement is reminiscent of that chilling scene in Huxley's novel when John, the so-called Savage, is called to the Park Lane Hospital for the Dying to visit his dying mother Linda. In this facility, the "patients" are put out of their misery in the pleasantest way possible, with plenty of soma, canned music, perfume mists, television, and other amenities. In Brave New World, care for the dying has been perfected into a clinical and sanitized form of warehousing bodies until they may be utilized by society one last time—as phosphorous extracted by cremation. Love, attachment, and feelings of loss are discouraged in this brave new world as marriage and parenthood have been abolished. Suffering has been isolated and death is not mourned; both are sequestered to places where, apart from the attendants, the living needn't be.

I think Moses is right. At the heart of our culture's moral sickness is a growing aversion to death and the dying. This may be traced to a commensurate diminishment of abiding love in human relations. There spreads through society a willingness to impose death upon the sick and dying in order to cause the least discomfort and distraction to the healthy and the living. With such attitudes in mind, Pope John Paul II has rightly warned that ours is becoming a culture of death.² There is a compelling need for Christians to be far better educated about what the faith says about the meanings of sickness and death.

From the beginning the Christian church understood death as the counterpoint of life within the broad scope of God's providence. God's unbounded and steadfast love in Jesus Christ was the remedy to mortality. In our day, however, the church has not said enough about death, and it is failing to persuade society to guard life and love adequately in the medical environment.

I will present, first, a religious view on the meaning of death that draws especially from Eastern Christian theology and liturgy. Second, I will examine some of the ancient sources of the church's long-standing interest in the healing arts. And, third, I will illustrate with a true story how this theology of death applies in our own day, urging Christian churches to assume a much greater role in and responsibility for preparing people to die well.

DEATH AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF
Not according to God's will, but by sin, has sickness unto death come to define the human condition, says the ancient tradition. Because of sin the entire race of Adam and Eve has been disconnected from God's immediate life-giving energies. We are like run-down batteries that finally lose their charge. All humanity is under this condition of mortality: no one is exempt. Original sin is the intractable habit of making the wrong moral choices and doing damage to the human environment. It is passed from generation to generation, and its effects are deadly. Saint Paul writes in his Epistle to the Romans: "Sin came to life, but I died."³

The fear of death threads through the whole fabric of human life. It drives human beings to desperate and often selfish acts. Sometimes it moves them to end their own lives so that they do not suffer the agony of death's onset. The ancient fathers of the church named the death that we die due to sin "corruptible death." They often cite the Wisdom of Solomon, a Greek intertestamental text included among the so-called Apocrypha of the Old Testament. "God created him for incorruption, and made him in the image of his own eternity, but through the devil's envy death entered the world," says the Wisdom of Solomon.⁴

Drawing upon this, Saint Athanasius recounts the story of the advent of corruptible death in his tract entitled On the Incarnation:

God set them [Adam and Eve] in His own paradise, and laid upon them a single prohibition. If they guarded the grace and retained the loveliness of their original innocence, then the life of paradise should be theirs without sorrow, pain or care and after it the assurance of immortality in heaven. But if they went astray and became vile, throwing away their birthright of beauty, then they would come under the natural law of death and live no longer in paradise, but, dying outside of it, continue in death and corruption.⁵

Thus, because of sin, human existence comes under the strict determinism of nature's law. In other words, sin throws human existence into nature's cycle of life and death, into the entropy of natural existence that draws every living thing toward extinction. Sin activates our creaturely proclivity to fall into the darkness and nothingness from which we were lifted into light and life by God's creative doing. Corruptible death, therefore, is a profound tragedy that has befallen the image of God. A hymn of the Byzantine Burial Rite lends powerful expression to this: "I weep and I wail when I think upon death, and behold our beauty, fashioned in the image of God, lying in the tomb disfigured, dishonored, bereft of form. O marvel! What is this mystery which doth befall us? Why have we been given over unto corruption, and why have we been wedded to death?"⁶

Only for the human being is death contrary to nature because in man's case mortality is a consequence of sin. At the close of the Armenian Church Service for Burial of the Dead, the priest gives voice to the deceased as the coffin is carried in procession out through the doors of the sanctuary. The deceased laments his fallen and corruptible state and prepares himself to meet "the Righteous Judge," adding the inevitable and strong penitential note found in all Eastern Christian funeral and burial rites.

Let the whole world look upon me and witness my woes . . .

I have sinned and am condemned to oblivion.

I have dug my own grave. I have plotted against myself.

I have betrayed, I cheated . . .

Once I was light and now I am in darkness and the shadow of death.

How shall I recount my sins, they are so numerous . . .

Hurry, O my person, flee from evil, desire goodness.

Collect yourself, before Death's sleep overcomes you.

Commit yourself to the Righteous Judge.

Lord, have mercy.⁷

As reflected so poignantly in this Armenian hymn, the ancient tradition is quite clear that the death we know in a fallen world is not what God intended for human beings. Saint Gregory of Nyssa writes: "From the nature of the dumb animals, mortality is transferred to a nature created for immortality."⁸ God created Adam and Eve for eternal life, not to endure personal extinction, insists Gregory. Had the first couple not sinned, the parents of the race would have passed on to eternal life with God after the duration of their temporal lives. This passage into eternal life would not have entailed the radical rupture of body and soul, and the demise of the person that we see in death. However, Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son and express image of the Father, reversed the entropy and corruption that sin activated in humankind. Only the incarnate Son of God, who lived and died in our human flesh, was capable of renewing human nature by restoring the image of God within us through his sinless life and freely-willing death on the Cross. By these things Christ healed humankind so that all might be whole and inherit eternal life. Christ, by his good death, transformed death back into a passage to eternal life. This is the conviction of the ancient tradition.

THE MEDICINAL METAPHOR IN THE ANCIENT TRADITION
From this theological perspective, we are invited to think of the redemptive act of God in Jesus Christ as a kind of divine therapy. God's love and compassionate care have cured our diseased and mortally sickened human nature. In Georges Florovsky's words: "Redemption is not just man's reconciliation with God. Redemption is the abolition of sin altogether, the deliverance from sin and death . . . The death of Our Lord was the victory over death and mortality, not just the remission of sins, nor merely justification of man, nor again a satisfaction of an abstract justice."⁹ Florovsky's view is rooted deep within the ancient tradition and is forcefully reflected in the liturgies of the Orthodox Church. Salvation is understood as healing and also growth toward perfection. God's medicinal prescription of salvation in Christ remedies the carcinogenic effects of sin and cures the mortal sickness that corrupts our whole being. The fourteenth century Byzantine theologian Nicholas Cabasilas evokes this meaning of healing in his great work of sacramental theology, The Life in Christ. There he explains:

Many are the remedies which down through the ages have been devised for this sick race; it was Christ's death alone which was able to bring true life and health. For this reason, to be born by this new birth [of baptism] and live the blessed life and be disposed to health and, as far as lies in man, to confess the faith and take on oneself the passion and die the death of Christ, is nothing less than to drink of this medicine.¹⁰

This is a wonderful image of salvation in Christ through faith and baptism by water and the Spirit. Cabasilas plumbs the deep etymology of salvation. Its Greek root is sozo from saos, which literally means healthy. The Hebrew equivalent is yasha, which is to rescue from danger. The second century church father Clement of Alexandria leads us in this same direction when he states: "The Word of the Father, who made man, cares for the whole nature of His creature; the all-sufficient Physician of humanity, the savior, heals both body and spirit." ¹¹ Clement maintains that "the whole nature of His creature [man]" needs to be healed. Gregory of Nyssa may exceed all of the Greek fathers in his vivid description of the Christian eucharist as medicine for a mortally sickened human nature, a remedy for corruptible death. In his Great Catechism Saint Gregory states:

Those who have been deceived into taking a poison use another drug to counter its harmful effects. Moreover the antidote, just like the poison must enter a man's system, so that its healing effect may be thereby spread throughout his whole body. Such was our case. We had eaten something that was disintegrating our nature. It follows, therefore, that we were in need of something to restore what had been disintegrated; we needed an antidote which would enter into us and so by its counteraction undo the harm already introduced into the body by the poison.

And what is the remedy? It is that body which proved mightier than death and became the source of our life. For, as the apostle says, a little yeast makes the whole lump of dough like itself [see 1 Cor 5:6]. In the same way, when the body which God made immortal enters ours, it transforms it entirely and makes it like itself. It is just like mixing poison with something wholesome, where everything in the mixture is rendered as worthless as the poison. Similarly the entry of the immortal body into the body that receives it transforms it in its entirety into its own immortal nature.¹²

If we venture to say that medicine has gained inspiration from the Christian ethos, it is equally true that Christian theology has taken from medicine metaphors that help to identify the mystery of salvation in Christ. These metaphors imprint a value to medicine deep within the Christian imagination. In contrast to the juridical and forensic metaphors that have so often been dominant in Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, Eastern Christian writers employ medicinal metaphors to explain salvation; true faith brings about an inner change—or cure—that enables persons to pursue perfection. This perfection is no mere moralism. While it includes good works, it is primarily a process of inner transformation and healing of the sinful self. This process is engendered by faith so the person may increase in divine similitude.

ANCIENT CHRISTIAN ANTHROPOLOGY AND MEDICINE
This medicinal interpretation of redemption is rooted in a Christian anthropology that does not make a sharp distinction between body and soul. Rather, the ancient tradition emphasizes that the unity of the two constitutes the whole person. God breathed the breath of life into the man he made from dust, and the man became a living soul.¹³ The body without a soul is a corpse, and the soul without a body is a ghost. Only when they are perfectly one is the person alive and present.

This notion of the human person as a psychosomatic unity was alien to the Hellenic mind. And my experience in the college classroom and in church parishes leads me to conclude that it is nearly as strange to many modern people, including Christians. Many in the churches embrace the Hellenic dualism that the soul is immortal but the body perishes. My undergraduate students at Loyola College—the vast majority of whom have attended Catholic parochial schools—are surprised to hear that the soul is by nature no more immortal than the body. They have a hard time believing that Christianity defines personal identity as the unity of body and soul.

The earliest Christian creeds boldly insist that the final resurrection is a bodily resurrection. And it is precisely because the ancient church understood that salvation pertains to the whole human being, body and soul as one, that it valued scientific medicine as an important human art, aiding the process of our temporal journey to God. In the fourth century Saint Basil the Great commented at length on the importance of medicine among the other arts and sciences that God uses to help us sustain our earthly existence and to advance toward our heavenly home. In his Long Rules for monastic living, Basil declares:

Each of the arts is God's gift to us, remedying the deficiencies of nature, as, for example, agriculture, since the produce which the earth bears of itself would not suffice to provide for our needs; the art of weaving, since the use of clothing is necessary for decency's sake, and for protection from the wind; and similarly for the art of building. The same is true, also, of the medical art. In as much as our body is susceptible to various hurts, some attacking from without and some from within by reason of the food we eat, and since the body suffers affliction from both excess and deficiency, the medical art has been vouchsafed us by God, who directs our whole life, as a model for the cure of the soul, to guide us in the removal of what is superfluous and in the addition of what is lacking. Just as we would have no need of the farmer's labor and toil if we were living amid the delights of paradise, so also we would not require the medical art for relief if we were immune to disease, as was the case, by God's gift, at the time of Creation before the Fall.¹⁴

According to Saint Basil, medicine functions within the catastrophic effects of the Fall and is a partial remedy for those effects. Rational or scientific medicine cannot save the human being from death, but it can contribute to a healthy and meaningful life, so long as human beings do not put their whole hope in it. Saint Basil's advice is especially pertinent in our day when so many people mistakenly idolize medicine and expect their physicians to be priests and shamans also. He continues:

So then, we should neither repudiate this art [medicine] altogether nor does it behoove us to repose all our confidence in it; but, just as in practicing the art of agriculture we pray God for fruits, and as we entrust the helm to the pilot in the art of navigation, but implore God that we may end our voyage unharmed by the perils of the sea, so also, when reason allows, we call in the doctor, but we do not leave off hoping in God.¹⁵

HOW EVEN DEATH BECOMES A PRESCRIPTION FOR LIFE
The ancient tradition is able to guard against inflated expectations in the curative power of scientific medicine because it allows for hope even in death. The Cross and Resurrection have transformed death into a medicine of salvation. Nowhere that I know of in Christian liturgy is this more movingly portrayed than in the central portion of the Armenian funeral ritual performed in the home.

We first encounter a compelling series of penitential and intercessory hymns that are dialogical in character. Both the deceased and the congregation are lent voices. The deceased pleads with God for healing because sin—the infective source of all sickness and of mortality itself—requires supernatural cure even after death. By willing submission to the judgment and mercy of Christ the sins of the deceased may be washed away forever.

When my days are consumed, help me, O Lord, lover of mankind.

You, who have assumed the tortures and death on the cross, help me, O Lord, lover of mankind.

Through the intercession of the ever-virgin Holy Mother of God, help me, O Lord, Lover of mankind . . .

As a sinful person, I cry to you, O Heavenly father, help me in my distress, I, who am dead in my sins, help me.

I have been wounded by the invisible enemy, O Healer of the sick, cure my malady. I, who am dead in my sins, help me.¹⁶

These hymns embrace the entire meaning of salvation, understood both as rescue from danger and healing of the whole person. After several more hymns, a litany, and prayers, the deacon chants Psalms 39:5–6 as the mourners are reminded that they share the fate of the deceased under a common condition of mortality. A reading from Saint Paul's Second Epistle to the Corinthians follows and complements the psalmist's meditation on the brevity of our lives. The Apostle invokes God the Father who is merciful and comforts us in our afflictions so that we may comfort others. He reminds his reader of the Son, Jesus Christ, who has shared in human suffering and by his death and resurrection heals humanity of the sickness and mortality of sin.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.¹⁷

These three elements of the Armenian funeral rite, penitential and intercessory hymns, psalm, and Pauline blessing, exemplify the three principal steps of the ancient Christian church's pedagogy of dying well in Christ. The first is to recall our mortality in the light of God's enduring love. The second is to seek meaning in our suffering through the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. And the third is to envision salvation as cure of sin and healing of body and soul, leading to eternal life. If this simple pedagogy were practiced more often and consistently in the Christian churches, medicine might be infused anew with an ethos of healing and life.

A MODERN STORY OF DEATH AND DYING
Medicine needs better patients, and the church can and should help provide them. In contemporary medical ethics the character of the patient is often ignored. All too frequently medical ethics is fixed in quandary ethics that focus on the decisions, agency, and acts of the physician. Even when issues of character are taken up, the professional care provider is usually the focus of attention, not the patient. Much good could be accomplished if the church were to attend to the rest of us—who may never be professional care providers but will be patients at some point, at the least when we are dying.

In a recent book, The Measure of Our Days: New Beginnings at Life's End, physician Jerome Groopman tells a disturbing story that illustrates the importance of character and internal resources when facing the prospect of personal demise.

Kirk Bains was a highly successful businessman who made a small fortune in speculative investment ventures. Before coming to Dr. Groopman, Bains went to the top cancer treatment hospitals and was told repeatedly that nothing could be done for him. But Bains was a fighter. He told Groopman on their first meeting: "You've seen my records from Yale and Sloan-Kettering . . . They think I'm too sick for their research studies. So you cook up some new magic. Make me a guinea pig, I take risks all the time. That's my business. I won't sue you."¹⁸

Groopman decided to run the standard tests. But he also trusted his intuition, believing that it is at least as important to know the story of the patient as to know clinically what he suffers from. The test results were as grim as the records said. He explained to Bains the difficulty of his case. And the conversation turned in this direction:

"I had hoped it would be a replay of The Exorcist," Kirk painfully quipped. "Remember how the priest took the demon out of the child, a bloody, ugly creature? I thought the surgeon would do the same. Maybe I'd have been better off with a priest than a doctor. Never thought I'd need the clergy. But that's what everyone is recommending now."

"Are you affiliated with a church?" I always try to learn the scope of religious feeling, the ties of the patient and his family to faith. God, whether positive, negative, or null, is an essential factor in the equation of dying.

"Episcopalian. I celebrate Christmas. The food. The music. Decorating the tree. Giving gifts. That's fun. But the religion—I can't take much stock in a church founded because Henry VIII wanted a younger wife."

My response was a skeptical look.

"Let me put it in my own terms. I'm not a long-term investor. I like quick returns. I don't believe in working for dividends paid in heaven."¹⁹

Dr. Groopman decided to try a radical and unorthodox combination of treatments. The night before the surgery, Groopman visited Bains in his hospital bed and noticed that he was troubled and agitated:

"Are you thinking you could die tonight? . . . You won't, Kirk," I said confidently.

"So you're a prophet, not a wizard. Shall I call you St. Jerome? . . . I didn't expect to be so afraid, Jerry," Kirk paused, reaching for his thoughts . . . "Maybe it's because I know this is my last chance and I'll probably die, and after death . . . it's just nothingness."

I absorbed his words and tightened my grip on his hand. I now understood why he had insisted on treatment, and I realized it would be wrong to readdress that decision tonight.

"So then it would be the same as before we were born?" I softly replied. "Is that terrifying, to be unborn? That's what my father used to say to comfort me as a child when I asked him about death."

"See if you still find that enough comfort when you're the one in this bed. Nothingness. No time. No place. No form. I don't ask for heaven. I'd take hell. Just to be."²⁰

Kirk Bains's imagination is strong and vivid; and it terrorizes him. The church he neglected or which neglected him might have helped form in him a religious imagination better equipped to cope with the futility of his physical condition. Dr. Groopman himself is aware of the importance of imagination and how it is formed. He comments: "I thought about how we all develop our inner pictures of death and an afterlife, from stories and words we hear as children, which form our first image. As we pass through life, we redraw these images, hoping that at the end we will be prepared for what awaits."²¹

My friend Rev. Charles Kratz, an Episcopal priest, first brought Dr. Groopman's story to my attention. Rev. Kratz commented that he has seen many like Kirk Bains in his fifty-plus years as a priest, and he also knows how miserably his church has failed to address matters of mortality and personal demise in the pulpit or at the bedside. "I couldn't help thinking," he said, "that we clergy are to blame. Look at what kind of a person and patient we left for this doctor to deal with."

The conversation Dr. Groopman cites constitutes a crucial moment in the life and death of Kirk Bains; he is open to counsel, but Dr. Groopman's father's religious views do not allay Bains's fears or satisfy his needs. Of this scene, Rev. Kratz said, "Maybe something might have been accomplished with the right religious counsel at that moment. But we rarely get to be there at those moments. And by this time, it is almost too late for people like Kirk Bains, short of a divine act of grace."

Dr. Groopman is himself shaken by this conversation with Bains. He spends several paragraphs ruminating over it. He recalls his father's death. And he acknowledges that probably the reason he rarely visits that memory is that it is a nearly unbearable reminder of the personal nature of death.

After he died, it was impossible for me to imagine my father as disintegrated into nothingness . . . It was too painful, too stark an image in my mind, that his body, the warm expansive body that had snuggled me in bed when I was fearing the shadows of the night, held me in the water when I learned to swim, embraced me with surprising strength when I succeeded, and embraced me with even greater strength when I had failed. That that body was now inanimate matter . . . And nothing more . . . I hoped I would not lie terrified in bed, like Kirk.²²

The radical treatment prescribed by Dr. Groopman worked for a time. The tumors shrank, and the cancer went into temporary remission. Kirk Bains was given four months of relatively comfortable living. How did he use this gift? Dr. Groopman stayed in touch with Bains and his wife during this period of time. When the cancer came back, he visited Bains in the hospital after an initial radiation treatment:

"I'm sorry the magic didn't work longer," I finally offered to Kirk.

"It did more than anyone expected, Jerry. But you shouldn't feel sorry. There was no reason to live anyway . . . You read newspapers?" Kirk asked abruptly . . . "I don't read newspapers anymore. I don't know how to. Or why I should," Kirk paused and his voice lowered. "Newspapers used to be a gold mine for me. They're filled with what to you looks like disconnected bits of information. A blizzard in the midwest, the immigration debate in California . . . For you, Jerry, those articles are about the lives and fortunes of individuals and nations. For me, they mean nothing beyond information for deals and commodity trading. I never really cared about the world's events or its people. Not deep down inside . . . And when I went into remission I couldn't read the papers because my deals and trades seemed pointless. Pointless because I was a short-term investor. Like I told you Jerry, I had no patience for the long term. I had no interest in creating something, not a product in business or a partnership with a person. And now I have no equity. No dividends coming in. Nothing to show in my portfolio," Kirk grimaced with pain.

"How do you like my great epiphany? No voice of God or holy star but a newspaper left unread in its wrapper . . . Jerry, you realize I'm right. The remission meant nothing because it was too late to relive my life. I once asked for hell. Maybe God made this miracle to have me know what it will feel like."

Groopman says he felt "the crushing weight of Kirk's burden." He continues pensively, "There is no more awful death than to die with regret, feeling that you have lived a wasted life—death delivering this shattering final sentence on your empty soul."²³

It's a terrifying tale of modern death. The story is a challenge, not primarily to medicine, but to the Christian faith. There will always be patients like Kirk Bains who believe in nothing or very little and who come to the medical practitioner with the demand: "Save me! Save me in whatever way you can!" But in the future there may well be increasing numbers of others who will come to physicians with the equally ferocious demand: "If you can't fix me, then put me out of my misery!"

So much of what constitutes dying a good death depends not on the health care setting or the medical skills of care providers but the religious and moral resources of the dying. Sr. Sharon Burns, R.S.M., taught theology for many years, but for the past fifteen, she has worked as a chaplain at Stella Maris Hospice in Towson, Maryland. She told me how much it helps if her patients have religious formation, equipping them with beliefs that can carry them through. She says these people can be healed deeply during their dying.

At Stella Maris the stories, symbols, and rituals of the Christian faith are brought to a prominence in the daily routine that secular culture does not permit. Much in the way of penance and forgiveness, reunion and reconciliation can be accomplished in the lives of Stella Maris patients in a relatively brief period of time. Love, too often hindered and sometimes discouraged in more typical health care environments, is given and returned by staff and family. Suffering is not isolated, but shared in a manner that reflects the great pastoral counsel of Saint Paul in 2 Corinthians.

Churches need to more conscientiously prepare people for dying. Indeed, the ancient fathers of the church considered the unremitting remembrance of death a principal virtue of Christian life. This is a virtue long neglected in Christian teaching and sorely needed today. "The unremitting remembrance of death is a powerful trainer of body and soul," wrote Saint Hesychios of Sinai. "Vaulting over all that lies between ourselves and death, we should always visualize it, and even the very bed on which we shall breathe our last, and everything connected with it."²⁴ While a secular world might view this as a call to morbidity, Christians should receive this advice in the joyful light of their resurrection faith. Death and resurrection are inevitably and necessarily woven together in the Christian imagination. This pedagogy of the remembrance of death is already present in the liturgies of the church. I mean especially the theology and spirituality communicated through baptism, the Eucharist, and the rites of burial. Thus, for example, near the conclusion of the Byzantine rite of burial, the mourners are asked specifically to exercise this remembrance of death. "As we gaze on the dead who lieth before us, let us all accept the example of our own last hour."²⁵

Care of the dying has been a deep concern of the church from the earliest centuries, but so too has the preparation of Christians to meet their deaths. Much has been written in the annals of medical ethics about virtues that physicians and health care professionals need in order to care properly for the terminally ill and dying. Yet surprisingly little has been said about the character the church must cultivate in persons so that they make good patients.²⁶ If there is a lesson to be learned from the story of Kirk Bains, it is that medicine cannot cure our mortality. We must be prepared, with courage and hope, to accept that this is true in order to be best served by our physicians. The resources that Christianity has to help people live toward their dying cannot be instantaneously transmitted to the sick person waiting for death. The meaning for living and dying supplied by faith must be claimed over a lifetime.

Physicians have always needed good patients to be good healers. The situation has not changed in our day and may, in fact, be more necessary than ever before. How else will physicians feel free to shift their goals at the appropriate time, from cure to being present for their patients as death approaches. The physician's most important obligation is to be present throughout for the sick or dying person, to never abandon them. This can only be accomplished successfully if doctor and patient collaborate. As Christian ethicist Stanley Hauerwas wisely said in his book Suffering Presence: "It is important, then, that the one who is dying exercise the responsibility to die well. That is, the person should die in a manner that is morally commensurate with the kind of trust that has sustained him or her in life . . . A good death is a death that we prepare for through living because we are able to see that death is but the necessary correlative to a good life."²⁷ Good care for the terminally ill and dying begins with care for the healthy and living. Through the church's own best standards, that care is the fundamental responsibility of the church, not of medicine. By the example of Christ and all the martyrs and saints, it is the responsibility of the church to prepare people to die well, while they are still living, through the sacraments, prayer, and preaching. If the church and those of us who are its living members could look to this pedagogy and preparation more conscientiously, then we might make a great contribution toward strengthening the humane ethos of medicine.

NOTES
1. John Cheever, "The Death of Justina," in Stories of John Cheever (New York: Ballantine Books, 1980), 515.