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The 122nd Convention of the Diocese of Newark clearly touched a nerve! This relatively small but courageous Christian faith community debated openly the report of a Task Force appointed to study the theological and ethical issues involved in the concept of assisted suicide. It became clear that this debate had gone on in the private consciences of many people for years. Our willingness to open the debate up publicly in a synodical setting appears to have had the effect of pronouncing absolution on those who have already entertained these thoughts, and of giving permission to our people to bring these questions into public discussion. The Task Force report also raised both guilt and fear in some people.
The convention debate was good. It was conducted fairly and people on all sides of the issue had a chance to be heard. One attempt was made to substitute a rather ambiguous resolution for the meat of the report of the Task Force. Where the Task Force had stated that assisted suicide "can be a moral option under certain circumstances," the substitute resolution proclaimed that the material available on this issue is still too inconclusive to allow a vote and thus it called for more study and no action. At this moment in the debate, a Republican member of the New Jersey legislature took the microphone to proclaim that if the Church cannot face this issue, the legislature of this state would never touch it. She called on the convention and the Church to take real leadership. The substitute failed by well over a two-thirds majority.
Next came some amendments. The adjective "assisted" was removed from suicide in the text of the resolution and the circumstances under which suicide could be a moral option were tightly defined. The body was moving toward consensus. The convention wanted no one to think that the Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Newark would encourage a depressed or suicidal person to follow through on his or her desire for self destruction. Then, under pressure from a well-known surgeon of this state, the word "can" in the phrase "can be a moral option" was changed to "may." It was in the mind of this physician the difference between making the resolution prescriptive and making it permissive. The Task Force accepted that change, for making it permissive as a moral option was exactly their intention. After some more fine tuning, the question was called, the debate concluded and the convention proceeded to the vote.
The vote was by a show of hands of the 600 deputies, 25% clergy and 75% laity. From the podium it appeared that the report, with its resolutions, was adopted by more than two-thirds and less than three-quarters of the deputies present. A legislative body of Christians had broken ranks with the traditional wisdom of the Church and declared that assisted suicide may be a moral option for Christians in some tightly drawn circumstances. Applause greeted the Chair's announcement, "The ayes have it and it is so ordered."
Moments later a member of the Task Force came upon a weeping woman deputy in the ladies' restroom. Inquiring as to whether she could be of assistance, she was told a story by the woman of watching her mother die years ago and how she had felt so guilty about allowing the doctors to prolong her pain so unnecessarily. She did that, she said, because of her conviction that any other alternative would have been condemned by her church. Now her church had indicated that perhaps she did not have to carry the burden of that guilt any longer. Her tears expressed the pent-up emotional conflicts of years of feeling compelled by her faith to do what she in her heart believed was neither right nor necessary.
On Sunday morning, the newspapers that cover the Diocese of Newark and major portions of the State of New Jersey carried the story of this action. Both the Associated Press and Reuters International wire services carried the story across the nation and throughout the world.
Leaders of the Diocese of Newark planned to take Monday off to recover from the rigors of the grueling two-day convention, but it was not to be. NBC-TV wanted to do interviews at 11 a.m. for their twelve noon and evening news programs. CBS-TV followed at 1 p.m. for its evening news segment. Radio interviews were scheduled with WCBS in New York and with radio stations in San Francisco, St. Louis and Toronto. The Toronto interview was sent to affiliates throughout Canada. Next a radio syndication out of Chicago did an interview and debate with a right to life advocate which played across the country. Then came the radio and television talk shows where a member of the Task Force or the Bishop responded to questions from the listening audience. Inside four days, the producer of the Phil Donahue Show called. The Co-Chair of our Task Force, the Rev. Dr. Larry Falkowski, fulfilled that assignment on February 8th in a program seen around the world. Next came the magazines and finally, the religious press.
The tack taken by the interviewers from the media was interesting. "You have stepped outside the boundaries of the religious teaching of the past 2000 years," they began. They produced a variety of religious voices, Catholic and Protestant, to assert the Church's traditional wisdom and to counter these new ideas. It has ever been so in the life of the Church. "But every new conclusion violates traditional wisdom," we responded. That is the only way that growth can occur. We suggested that these questioners might examine the life of Galileo or Charles Darwin or interview a freed slave in the 19th century, an emancipated woman in the 20th century or a no longer oppressed homosexual person in this generation. Each of those people would illustrate a situation in which the Christian Church had been forced by new knowledge and new insights to step beyond what was once called traditional wisdom to embrace new conclusions. "Traditional wisdom," once abandoned, seems arcane, ignorant and prejudicial in a very short period of time.
Next the reporters and interviewers pointed out the dangers found on "the slippery slope," as they referred to it, when any bulwark that has traditionally upheld the sacredness of life begins to be eroded. Is not the Diocese of Newark encouraging people to embrace inappropriate suicide or even criminal murder, they wondered? They pointed out the vested interests that relatives sometimes have in the early demise of an elderly person who might be burdensome or whose death might be profitable to the heirs. They wondered if we would be encouraging a large scale suicide industry or be in danger of replicating the Dr. Kevorkians of the world. We pointed to our carefully nuanced conclusions and to the fact that modern medical technology has succeeded, not just in prolonging life, but also in postponing death and sometimes far beyond the boundaries of meaning. It has created a new state that might be called "unnatural life." Again and again we sought to define life as bearing the image of God and therefore as consisting of so much more than just a biological process. Human life is found in a Self having the capacity to enter enhancing relationships, giving and receiving love and meaning, and thus creating life in others. That is what we will struggle to affirm and to hold, we asserted. When the capacity to do and to be that kind of Self is irreparably gone, then real life itself is also gone, we contended. A breathing cadaver with a beating heart is not the person we have known and loved. Terminating biological processes is not terminating life as we Christians understand it. And so it was that the debate reverberated in ever widening circles.
Some people also raised one other inevitable question. Why does this diocese so regularly engage such controversial issues in debate in our convention? That was not the first time we have faced such a query. Some people even suggest that we must chart and plan a public relations campaign to enhance our controversial reputation. Nothing could be further from the truth. We do try to engage the issues that really matter to our people and to the society in which we live. The leaders and people of this diocese are not so arrogant that we believe we can permanently solve these great questions inside our faith community. We are not so delusional that we believe that the whole world waits for the Diocese of Newark to come to a conclusion before others know quite how to act. It was amusing to note the words of one newspaper reporter who announced that this decision on the morality of assisted suicide was "effective immediately." It was as if this reporter assumed that the people of our diocese were waiting for this decision to be made by our convention before a rash of assisted suicides would be carried out. Our convention makes no pretense even to speak for the Episcopalians of our diocese, to say nothing of the people beyond our boundaries. What we seek to do is to speak to the people of our diocese and through them to the whole Church and then to the world at large. Our goal primarily is to raise consciousness, to create an awareness of new aspects of reality, to call these concerns into public debate, and to legitimatize these issues for discussion. Our task as a church is the same that it has always been, namely to seek the mind of Christ amid the changes and chances of our mortal lives and in the midst of a powerful and ever expanding revolution in human knowledge. That, we believe, is the vocation which the whole Christian Church must embrace if Christians are to be part of the post-modern world that is being born all around us. For in the words of the old hymn time has a way, again and again, of making "ancient good uncouth." In such a world our task as the Church is to find an entryway into the midst of the radically new and ever changing circumstances in order that we might be the body of Christ, serving faithfully the one who promised to give to all people the gift of life, and to give it abundantly. The Christians of this diocese will continue to walk such a path, to touch the nerve ends of controversy, to engage the issues and the knowledge available in our day and to expand the edges of that which people call the traditional wisdom of the Church. That is the only way we know to be faithful disciples of Jesus Christ at the dawn of the third millennium.
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