Schiavo, the Afterlife, and Christianity

A person who no longer has the ability to experience joy, or remember, or pray, or wish is still a person, I agree. But it seems to be a great evil to me, and to betray a general lack of confidence in the afterlife, to selfishly grasp at the few remaining signs of the life once there, like a pulse, and breathing. The family is often seen as a picture of selflessness. This ought to be questioned: it is entirely possible that they are motivated out of guilt. As the violent reaction of the religious right has shown, there is a great amount of guilt associated with letting Ms. Schiavo die by “starvation.” Remember, this is a death that would have been inevitable only a hundred years ago. It suddenly becomes “murder” to not provide her with a kind of care we only recently acquired the ability to use.
If anything, the biblical witness would encourage us to avoid hanging onto life at all costs; “whoever loses his life, for my sake, shall find it;” or as the apostle Paul wrote,

“For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose, I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account. Convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with you all, for your progress and joy in the faith, so that in me you may have ample cause to glory in Christ Jesus, because of my coming to you again.” (Phil. 1:21-6)

Paul does not wish to remain alive because he promotes a “culture of life” or because he has certain “inalienable rights,” including the “right to life.” Such language is completely absent from the Bible, and for good reason: that language is based on philosophies unknown to the biblical authors, because they originated in the Enlightenment! The emphasis in the Bible, if anything, is on giving up rights, and on sacrificing lives for the sake of others. Paul, in this passage, wishes to remain for only one reason: that he might encourage others!
There is an incredible amount of joy in working with the disabled. This can be a surprise to many people, as it was to me. And yet there is an enormous difference between a person suffering with Down Syndrome, for example, and Terri Schiavo. Disabled people experience emotions, like we do, often more intensely and less self-consciously. They laugh, pray, think, get excited and have hopes and dreams, and experience pleasure and pain. We have evidence that Ms. Schiavo experienced none of these things; consequently, her ability to provide them for other people is next to nothing. Disabled people encourage and love others. Ms. Schiavo does not. Her condition is similar to a (very young) embryo, you might think. But embryos have enormous potential; Ms. Schiavo cannot recover.
Her food and water should not be considered “futile treatment,” because they are not treatments, I agree. It may be true that we generally abhor the thought of withholding nutrients from anyone; but in Ms. Schiavo’s case, it is a mercy on everyone involved. The question is not whether we are committed enough to provide care for life in any form, but whether we should provide care for life in any form. God would ask a great many things of us; but he has not told us to preserve life at all costs. In this case loving your neighbor as yourself may involve mercifully withdrawing care from a life that most of us would not wish to live ourselves. It has been suggested that those who would withdraw care are in “fear” of having to exist in a state like Terri’s. Is it “fear” to want to trade a life that is almost gone for a life of eternal bliss in the presence of God? I think that those who fear, in this case, are those who think it would be “murder” to withdraw care; fear of eternal punishment, perhaps. Fear that although this does not look like or feel like murder it still may be. But fear, nonetheless. We must remember that the God who will be judging us is the same God that gave us death as a divine mercy, barring us from the tree of life so that we would not suffer here forever, and dying for us so that we might spend the after-life with him. We shall be saved by our faith in him, and not, ultimately, by whether we have supported such an ethereal principle as a “culture of life.”