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*** Cross-posted at Anxious Bench ***

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Welcome to this fourth installment of Death Wednesday here at the Anxious Bench. In my last post I described the nostalgic appeal of Trappist caskets and old-time burial practices at the bucolic Abbey of Gethsemani. For me and my students, Gethsemani seemed awfully appealing as we contemplated the likelihood of our own deaths in an antiseptic hospital while harnessed to a machine.

For nineteenth-century Americans, the notion of death outside the home was inconceivable. Historian Drew Gilpin Faust describes this sensibility in her terrific–and grisly–book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. (I highly recommend this book for the classroom—students are fascinated by it.) Faust shows how ars moriendi, or “the good death,” was scripted in several important ways. First, it was important to die at home. Hospitals housed the indigent. Respectable people died in more comfortable surroundings among affectionate family. In fact, as late as 1910, fewer than 15% of Americans died away from home. Second, it was important not to die suddenly. Antebellum Christians wanted to see the end approaching, to accept it, and then declare to friends and family their belief in God and his promise of salvation. This “dying declaration” was accompanied by words of moral guidance for those left behind.

The Civil War interrupted rituals of the good death. Industrialized war was deadly, unpredictable, and excruciatingly painful. Death came far from home and was often delivered by explosive artillery shells, which sometimes left no identifiable remains. The terrifying isolation, inconceivable volume, and painful intensity of modern martial death seemed utterly absurd to nineteenth-century Americans. Armies, of course, tried to cope with this new style of death. Nurses acted as substitute kin by eliciting dying declarations and cueing them through rituals of ars moriendi. Fellow soldiers recorded last words and sent them to family at home. They even read corpses. “His brow was perfectly calm,” described one letter. “No scowl disfigured his happy face, which signifies he died an easy death, no signs of this world to harrow his soul as it gently passed away to distant and far happier realms.” Clearly such a face could not be on its way to hell!

Industrial-style death, of course, only accelerated after the Civil War. The twentieth century was one of the most violent centuries in history as humans found novel ways to kill each other. Consider this depressing litany: a world war from 1914 to 1918 that killed 37 million civilians and soldiers; a world war from 1939 to 1945 that killed 60 million people (nearly 3% of the world’s population); the genocide of two million Cambodians in the killing fields of one nation alone; the annihilation of 140,000 Japanese civilians from a new and awful nuclear weapon; and the deaths of millions because of unhealthy manufactured foods. All this in a modern era that promised freedom and health. The pervasiveness of death and destruction in the early twentieth century was enough to return theological liberals who liked to speak of human goodness back to the concept of original sin.

Even the Trappists, despite slow lives in rural enclaves, have not been immune to the ravages of modernity. Thomas Merton died in a bizarre accident in Bangkok. Attending a global conference for Trappist abbots, he was electrocuted by a five-foot standing fan in his hotel room. Merton’s scarred body was flown back to the United States in a jet alongside American soldiers killed in Vietnam. No one on that plane enjoyed a slow, contemplative death surrounded by family.

Thankful for modern medicine hours after Lisa’s traumatic delivery of twin boys

I don’t want to over-romanticize premodern death. Medicine and more sophisticated understandings of biology and chemistry have given more years of fulfilling life for many people. Just after my wife Lisa gave birth to twins several years ago, she began to hemorrhage blood. I’ve never seen doctors bark orders so loudly, nurses move so quickly, and chemicals get pumped into a person so urgently. It was a terrifying couple of minutes. She almost surely would have died a century ago. Modern death might be unappealing, but I wouldn’t trade it for a nineteenth-century “good death”—at least not while we’re in our thirties!

Nikole Mitchell of Woodland Hill Church (of Greg Boyd fame) offers an unorthdox–but biblical–suggestion this Memorial Day: mourn our enemies’ deaths.

We should mourn the loss of all life. Because our identity and duty is first to Christ, not our nation, we are to give worth and faces and names to our ‘enemies’; therefore, imitating Christ in His love for us, His enemies. And while we crucified Jesus for His scandalous love, His love continues on. What if we believe Jesus for His words and lifestyle and choose to love those our nation seeks to kill? We may lose our lives, but the demonstration of our love would impact someone, somewhere. As paradoxical as the Kingdom of God tends to be, it is often in death that life is born. It is in the moment when all seems lost, we must have faith that love never fails (I Cor 13:8).

So with love firmly rooted within us, what if we used the same selfless bravery to save ‘enemy’ lives instead of taking them? And not just during wartime. What if we used our extra resources to help rebuild the hospitals that have been bombed as a result of war? What if we took our vocations overseas and helped bring education to children who have never seen a school, nor know what one is? What if we invited international students into our homes for holidays? What if we made a lifestyle of welcoming others (neighbors, near and far) in? What if we determined to find more commonalities than differences with those we label as enemies? What if everyone committed to loving and getting to know the foreigners on their block? Then, when wars break out or resume, we no longer see ‘enemies’ but we see our neighbors’ families and friends struggling to keep their families safe. Will we let love, and not fear, guide our actions and behavior to those near and far? May it be so.

Check out this fascinating new program on peacemaking that places people in a 3-month Learning Lab which culminates in a 2-week immersion experience into conflict in Israel/Palestine. Read more here and here.

 

If you’re an evangelical supporter of immigration reform, you can join an hour-long Twitter town hall from 4-5 p.m. (EST) on May 30. Here’s more from Sojourners:

On May 2, the Evangelical Immigration Table launched its 92 day Pray4Reform Challenge. They sent a letter to Congress challenging decision makers to pass compassionate and fair immigration reform within 92 days. Throughout the 92 days, evangelical Christians across the country will be showing their support by engaging in thoughtful prayer to support their legislators.

Christians countrywide also are being asked to join by signing up to be “prayer partners.” Each week during the challenge, they will receive an email or text with guidance on what prayer the Table is lifting up that week. Prayer partners are also encouraged to join the National Day of Prayer on May 30 by holding a dedicated time of prayer event in their communities.

Events can take place in the following form (from the EIT):

• A dedicated time of prayer for immigration at your office, school, church, or prayer group
• “See you at the pole” style event where three or more people gather at a flagpole, front of church, courthouse, etc., and ask friends, your local church, or colleagues to join you
• Prayer meeting with one of your legislators [email Josh Breisblatt jbreisblatt@immigrationforum.org for help reaching out to congressional offices]

May 30 is the kickoff day for local prayer gatherings across the country.

If you’re interested in participating as a prayer partner sign up at www.pray4reform.org. If you’d like to organize a broader community event for May 30, please email Rudy Lopez (rudylopez@immigrationforum.org). Any public prayer gatherings will be posted on www.pray4reform.org to show the scope of support for immigration reform among the evangelical community!

And follow the town hall and Tweet along! #Pray4Reform

“The issue of comprehensive immigration reform is just about the only public policy issue on which there is great unanimity across the Christian spectrum. . . . Other issues divide the Christian community, right and left. Comprehensive immigration reform unites us.”

I’m happy to join some distinguished historians of religion–John Turner, Philip Jenkins, Tommy Kidd, Agnes Howard, Miles Mullin, and Tal Howard–at the Anxious Bench blog. Below is my inaugural post:

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This past semester for me focused inordinately on death. I taught a course called “War in the American Memory” and covered the Holocaust in World Civilizations. And then—even though commencement was already over—fellow blogger Miles Mullin piled on with a terrific post on how modern Americans outsource death and dying. It’s the semester that won’t die!

Death even pervaded an annual trip that I take with a group of Asbury students to the Abbey of Gethsemani, located about an hour west of Lexington, Kentucky. One of the main attractions at Gethsemani, of course, is the grave of Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk whose 1948 spiritual autobiography Seven Storey Mountain sparkles with lively descriptions of a boyhood in Europe, a bohemian young adulthood in the bustling streets of New York City, and a new monk’s life of quiet contemplation in the pastoral rolling hills of Kentucky. Ahead of the hippies, he interpreted monastic spirituality and community to the world. In fact, his grave, which rests in a gently sloping hill next to the Trappists’ chapel, bears witness to simplicity and community. His stone is identical to his colleagues’ markers. Death is universal, the modest stone suggests, leveling profound and simple minds.

Even the Welcome Center features death. A film replays the burial of a Trappist monk, whose unembalmed body wrapped in a simple white shroud, is lowered by ropes into a deep hole. Next door to the film room is a gift shop. What drew me first was the Trappists’ amazing bourbon fudge. But the shop also sells caskets. They start at $1,000 for the “Simple Rectangular” model and top out at a still-reasonable $3,400 for a “Premium” cherry model. No worries—if you live outside Kentucky, you still can buy your very own Trappist casket on the Internet. They can deliver it within two days in the continental U.S. (Or if you plan ahead and want your furniture to pull double-duty, you might consider the Coffin Table. I love the ad copy: “Not only can it store books and other knick-knacks like personal mementos, but its ultimate goal is to store YOU – or what remains of you – when you pass on to the next life.”)

The aura of death at Gethsemani did not feel unduly dark or foreboding. It rather felt like a reprieve from the sterility of modern life and death. Even the roads that took us to Gethsemani testify to the monastery’s unmodern sensibilities. The winding, idiosyncratic Monks Road on which the monastery is located contrasts sharply with the road we took out of Lexington: the Martha Layne Collins Blue Grass Parkway, an efficient four-lane divided highway that cuts an unnatural path straight through rock. The feeling that I was leaving the twenty-first century for the nineteenth century evoked a kind of nostalgia in me–even though I’ve never actually lived any golden age. Nevertheless, Gethsemani’s practice of death as a natural part of life, instead of an artificial thing to be cordoned off in a hospital morgue, has striking appeal for postmoderns drawn to earthier approaches such as this. My students certainly expressed a lot of enthusiasm for our trip.

Conservative evangelical Michael Gerson makes nice with progressive evangelical Jim Wallis. Check it out here.

The book has broader value in challenging a variety of shallow modern ideologies.

• Contra libertarianism: The common good is not identical to the triumph of market forces. Constructing it is the shared duty of communities, corporations and government.

• Contra modern liberalism: The common good is not identical to the triumph of autonomy and choice. Humans flourish in the context of binding moral commitments such as marriage and family. And the most vulnerable members of the human community deserve special concern and protection.

• Contra secularism: The common good is not achieved by banishing religion from the public square. Religious institutions perform works of mercy, carry ideals of justice and should be sheltered by a generous interpretation of religious liberty.

In a political era of rights talk and special-interest pleading, a greater emphasis on the common good would make American politics more civil, admirable and humane.

Nice little piece–“The Fiction of Evangelical Friction”–by Wheaton’s Noah Toly on evangelicals and immigration. In recent weeks several analysts have criticized articles in national publications that have highlighted shifting evangelical views. Mark Tooley, for example, says that evangelical elites are misrepresenting rank-and-file evangelicals in the pews who remain opposed to immigration reform. But PRRI/Brookings research really does show an overall softening on immigration due to “generational differences, social class, educational attainment, and party affiliations.”

Toly further notes that:

evangelical Protestants are making connections between their core commitments and the plight of many immigrants. As Martin Marty writes, evangelicals “’believe their own eyes’ when they look, are dumbfounded, and are then motivated to change attitudes about the plight and agony of ‘illegal aliens’ and so many others. And they also believe their own eyes when they look at their scriptures, which put the need of the strangers, exiles, aliens, and newcomers first as bidders for consideration and change.” Typical evangelical Protestant convictions are being expressed in new or unexpected ways.

Check out a new book by Brayton Shanley entitled The Many Sides of Peace: Christian Nonviolence, the Contemplative Life, and Sustainable Living. Here’s the description from the publisher Wipf and Stock, which is putting out some fantastic books these days:

The Many Sides of Peace comes out of thirty years of living in a Catholic lay community, attempting to understand and practice the compelling ideas of gospel-centered nonviolent love. The book attempts to speak to the signs of these times for those who seek peace and liberation from both war and the looming ecological Armageddon. It is a faith based on the revelation of Jesus and the conviction that a love that is nonviolent will save this environmentally threatened planet and its warlike people from an “at risk” status to a more peaceful and sustainable one. This is a message of hope, a “how to live” spiritual manual for human/earth survival that can help create a bold and beautiful world.

World Vision is launching its most ambitious campaign to date. “For Every Child” seeks to raise $500 million by October 2015 to save the lives of 10 million people in countries around the world. The money will go toward reducing child death rates and keeping children safe from exploitation.

World Vision began as a kind of evangelical Marshall Plan for Southeast Asia. In the early 1950s they sent evangelists and relief workers to Korea with the hope of saving the world from commies and atheism. Since the 1970s the organization has been a favorite of moderate and progressive evangelicals and has broadened its scope and intent, now focusing primarily on development work.