Leave Mother and Father


The Terri Schiavo situation has many twists and turns for considering how
we are connected to each other and to God. As I watch TV and read about how
this entire episode has been handled I wonder how I, as a pastor and family
therapist, would counsel any family in a similar situation. (We faced it at College Hill Presbyterian. The pressure was awful.)

First, we need to think about how enmeshed her family of origin was to her and
she was to them. Eating disorders often imply a person who is trying to "leave
mother and father" but does not know how. To be differentiated is a basic part
of God's plan. Emotional enmeshment makes good decisions almost impossible.

Second, the conflict between Michael Schiavo and his in-laws makes resolution
very tough. Their traingled conflict pulls us into our own unresolved conflict.
Perhaps a private counseling session could help. However, since there is so
much unresolved emotion counseling would be tough.

Third, there are several vicious triangles involving Terri, her illness, Michael,
the Shindlers, the medical establishment, religious leaders, the media, etc.
Wow! It is so difficult to think about this without encountering rabid
emotional reactions on every side. Interlocking triangles make peaceful
discussions very difficult. Trying to resolve such issues in the public eye
with lawyersmakes it even more daunting. They are pulled in and so are
we so our unresolved issues get projected onto Terri. Michael, the parents,
etc.

Fourth, what is the nature of a person who cannot speak or respond? The
article below is an interesting meditation on the nature of humans. He
illuminate what I try to say about the Hebrew-Christian way of thinking.
We are connected somehow to God and others. This is why it is best to
think systemically about illness, prayer and other ways to bring health.

Fifth, we who minister have opportunities to bring peace and resolution to
families in crisis if we can stay peaceful and focused. This means that privacy
is essential. Themedia always raises anxiety levels and people do stupid things
when they are anxious. Thankfully, the risenMessiah always says, "Peace" to
those who are anxious.

Shalom,

Gary Sweeten

Wall Street Journal

http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110006500
April 1, 2005
HOUSES OF WORSHIP
The Soul of a ControversyAfter Terri Schiavo's death, questions remain.BY DAVID B. HARTFriday, April 1, 2005 12:01 a.m.

Terri Schiavo has now died, but of course the controversy surrounding her last days will persist indefinitely. Most of the issues raised as she was dying were legal and moral; but at the margins of the storm, questions of a more "metaphysical" nature were occasionally raised in public. For instance, I heard three people on the radio last week speculating on the whereabouts of her "soul."

One opined that where consciousness has sunk below a certain minimally responsive level, the soul has already departed the body; the other two thought that the soul remains, but as a dormant prisoner of the ruined flesh, awaiting release. Their arguments, being intuitive, were of little interest. What caught my attention was the unreflective dualism to which all three clearly subscribed: The soul, they assumed, is a kind of magical essence haunting the body, a ghost in a machine.

This is in fact a peculiarly modern view of the matter, not much older than the 17th-century philosophy of Descartes. While it is now the model to which most of us habitually revert when talking about the soul-- whether we believe in such things or not--it has scant basis in either Christian or Jewish tradition.

The "living soul" of Scripture is the whole corporeal and spiritual totality of a person whom the breath of God has wakened to life. Thomas Aquinas, interpreting centuries of Christian and pagan metaphysics, defined the immortal soul as the "form of the body," the vital power animating, pervading, shaping an individual from the moment of conception, drawing all the energies of life into a unity.

This is not to deny that, for Christian tradition, the soul transcends and survives the earthly life of the body. It is only to say that the soul, rather than being a kind of "guest" within the self, is instead the underlying mystery of a life in its fullness. In it the multiplicity of experience is knit into a single continuous and developing identity. It encompasses all the dimensions of human existence: animal functions and abstract intellect, sensation and reason, emotion and reflection, flesh and spirit, natural aptitude and supernatural longing. As such, it grants us an openness to the world of which no other creature is capable, allowing us to take in reality through feeling and thought, recognition and surprise, will and desire, memory and anticipation, imagination and curiosity, delight and sorrow, invention and art.

The fourth-century theologian Gregory of Nyssa calls the soul a "living mirror" in which all things shine, so immense in its capacity that it can, when turned toward the light of God, grow eternally in an ever greater embrace of divine beauty. For the seventh-century theologian Maximus the Confessor, the human soul is the "boundary" between material and spiritual reality--heaven and earth--and so constitutes a microcosm that joins together, in itself, all the spheres of being.

I doubt even the dogmatic materialists among us are wholly insensible to the miraculous oddity that in the midst of organic nature there exists a creature so exorbitantly in excess of what material causality could possibly adumbrate, a living mirror where all splendors gather, an animal who is also a creative and interpretive being with a longing for eternity. Whether one is willing to speak of a "rational soul" or not, there is obviously an irreducible mystery here, one that commands our reverence.

Granted, it is easiest to sense this mystery when gazing at the Sistine Chapel's ceiling or listening to Bach. But it should be evident--for Christians at least--even when everything glorious and prodigious in our nature has been stripped away and all that remains is frailty, brokenness and dependency, or when a person we love has been largely lost to us in the labyrinth of a damaged brain. Even among such ravages--for those with the eyes to see it--a terrible dignity still shines out. I do not understand exactly why those who wanted Terri Schiavo to die had become so resolute in their purposes by the end. If she was as "vegetative" as they believed, what harm would it have done, I wonder, to surrender her to the charity (however fruitless) of her parents?

Of this I am certain, though: Christians who understand their faith are obliged to believe that she was, to the last, a living soul. It is true that, in some real sense, it was her soul that those who loved her could no longer reach, but it was also her soul that they touched with their hands and spoke to and grieved over and adored. And this also means that it was a living soul that we as a society chose to abandon to starvation and thirst--which should, at the very least, give us cause to consider what else we may have abandoned along the way.

Mr. Hart, an Eastern Orthodox theologian, is the author of "The Beauty of the Infinite" (Eerdmans). Copyright © 2005 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.