Lessons from A Place Called Forgetful Green

Wanting to satisfy my appetite with a new subject of reading and a bit nostalgic, on a morning a week or so ago, I went to my bookshelf and drew out: Retrieving the Natural Law: A Return to Moral First Things by J. Daryl Charles. It has been at least five years since I first read the book. A morning or two later, reading further and deeper, I began to reflect of years gone by, to a time participating in chaplaincy ministry and having the privilege of dealing with bioethical issues. I began realizing, most poignantly, today, that there is truth in the idea that the moral values I truly live by, remain best discovered when acted out over the highest cliffs —those thresholds of life, death, and weighted decision—or else the very lowest bluffs, those places where comfort lures boredom and indifference.  In the spaces where it is hardest to remember doctrine, standards, and philosophy, I discover the battles of moral decision are truly waged.  In other words, it has always been far easier to secure my ethical moorings in the university or in church than it has been in the turbulent hallways of the Emergency Room, alongside the Hospice patient or the consuming distraction of affluence.

This aspect of memory is one that Christian ethicists address and the God of scripture lauds.  "Fix it in mind, take it to heart... Remember the former things, those of long ago; I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me.  I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come" (Isaiah 46:8-10).  Remembering is to be an active pursuit:  "These truths I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children.  Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.  Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.  Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates" (Deuteronomy 6:4-9).  Not only is it true that what I remember affects who I am, but what I remember deeply, what has been ingrained into my very identity, is far more likely to be recalled when crisis, pain, or comfort make it hard to remember everything else. 

In John Bunyan's abiding allegory, Pilgrim's Progress, Great Heart points to a place called "Forgetful Green" and says to Christian's son, "That place is the most dangerous place in all these parts."  Building on this imagery, Allen Verhey in his writing Remembering Jesus: Christian Community, Scripture, and the Moral Life; describes the temptation of forgetfulness in "the Forgetful Green of health and in the great medical powers to heal," as well as in the "Forgetful Straits of pain and suffering and in the final powerlessness of medicine." That is to say, if I will not actively remember the story in which I participated—the moments where God has acted mightily, the times I have learned in tears, the reality of my immortality and the autonomy of God even in this—then in sickness and in health I will forget.

It seems to me, much of the secular world, and God forbid, the church world has already forgotten and actually bids me to forget as well.  In an article of Christianity Today, Leon Kass argues that "victory over mortality is the unstated but implicit goal of modern medical science." Having experienced the unwelcomed surrender to Hospice in the medical treatment of hundreds of individuals, I can relate to the sentiment. Though I stood, sat, knelt with them in their home or care facility where death was a daily reality and the prognosis grim, all of us were devastated and even angry at the doctor's recommendation of Hospice care.  I remember, so well, at the one word, “cancer”, we were forced to admit what we were trying to ignore.  Yet this was arguably one of the last gifts any of us received.  I, personally, was forced to remember the hope I had long professed but altogether misplaced in the halls of medicine, the classroom of theology, studies of Clinical Pastoral Counseling, or corridors of church.

In a conversation with recently retired registered nurse about medical ethics, I was surprised to hear her comparison of her work as a nurse in the hospital as opposed to work in a nursing home.  She said surprisingly there really was not much of a difference in the attitudes toward death and dying. Though in a place where patients were far more openly facing their final days, death was still ignored by patients and families, care was not addressed in terms of providing for a good death, and aging and dying were realities slow to set in.  In fact, even the terminology and goals of treatment were still focused on curing as opposed to palliative care.  As nurses they were required to write up plans for improvement for each resident, and despite illness or age very few had "do not resuscitate" orders. 

I’ve come to the conclusion that if I spend the rest of my life trying to forget the reality of death, it follows that being near death would not necessarily change my vision or jolt my memory.  As Kass observes in his writing, Go Gently into That Good Night, "In parallel with medical progress, a new moral sensibility has developed that serves precisely medicine's crusade against mortality: Anything is permitted if it saves life, cures disease, prevents death."  But, in my opinion the incoherence of this medical philosophy shouts of the need for some hard questions and a call to memory.  Is any part of my obsession with youth a celebration of life or a denial of life's end?  What does a good death mean for me?  Does it involve acceptance of my immortality?  And one who professes to live as a Christian believer, one who follows the One who died and was buried, how am I living counter culturally?

In this world confused about life and death, am I a person who can mourn and lament, who can weep at gravesides of friends and with grieving families, who can decline treatment when it ceases to give life, and embrace death when it draws near?  How do I look at living and dieing as one who follows the one who rose above the seeming victory of the grave?  I think this is the image I would do well to remember with all that is in me, from where I stand today at turning 70.