Caregivers of the Dead

     A short while ago, I responded (with my FD crew) to one of the more gruesome motor vehicle fatalities I’ve seen so far in my time as a fire department chaplain. Sure I’ve seen dead bodies before, but not so many that I’ve “gotten used to it.” This one stuck with me for several reasons, mostly due to the time it took to free the victim from the vehicle. Three hours is a long time to stand around in the Florida heat while a deceased human is slowly extricated from an overturned van.    

     Such times can test your internal constitution, and reveal your capacity to stay focused on the job you need to perform. For me as a chaplain, my job has many layers, most of which are intangible. There can be specific functions to the role, but most often my job is to be randomly encouraging with reassuring smiles, human contact, and what is called “the ministry of presence.” So being “present” for my Seminole County fire crew, the Seminole County Sheriff’s deputies and Florida Highway Patrolmen on scene was really what was on my mind.

     That changed, though, when another team arrived on the scene with whom I had not interacted before: the medical examiner and coroner. I was struck by the meticulous detail the M.E. had to document concerning the entire scene, the apparent cause of death, and even the body itself. Photographs were taken from every angle so as to preserve each view of the vehicle and the deceased. Her singular focus was that of capturing every relevant detail so that the story of the victim’s death could accurately be told. Who would later need that story to be told correctly? The victim’s family? Law enforcement? A jury? The M.E. carries a tremendous responsibility reporting to the living how a soul left this Earth; a story that will have a far-reaching impact, and that will endure through all the generations of the victim’s progeny.

     Another “caregiver of the dead” that gave me pause, however, was the man from the coroner’s office whose role was to transport the deceased away. I imagine that such a profession could become taxing. It’s never your job to transport the living or be involved in their rescue. No…all of your “clients” are dead. Your passengers, whether meeting their demise in peaceful or violent fashion, calmly or through much suffering, all have the same state of lifelessness. These keepers of the dead bear a burden which most are uncomfortable discussing. In film (especially westerns) they are portrayed as macabre characters all clad in black, randomly approaching the stranger in town with a tape measure so as to get a head start on building their coffin. They’re never featured as the happy individual with a normal family, a burgeoning romance, and a network of friends they meet down at the pub. We don’t like thinking about the dead, so we imagine their caregivers as someone we’d rather not be. This is very unfortunate.

     I must confess that I, myself, have been guilty of the above misconception before…that is until this encounter. As I observed the gentle care and attention to dignity shown for the dead by this man, I felt myself developing an entirely different view. With great personal alarm I realized how under-appreciated he has been, and others like him with the same job. My great hope is that I was able to be of some encouragement to him on the spot, for it was in the flashing minutes of standing there in the middle of the road that the epiphany of his necessity struck me. Flooding my mind was all the Biblical references to his role that I had read before, and the great need for his role across cultures.

     To some it might have seemed odd that I wanted to help him carry the body to his vehicle, but to me it had suddenly become a great privilege to assist him in any way. Overwhelmed with this new revelation, I wrote the following Prayer for the Coroner (shown below):

Our Father in heaven…

Who gave to our forefather, Joseph,
    faithful brothers that would carry his body
    to his final resting place in the Promised Land;
Who inspired women to care for the body of our Lord
    before He rose from the dead,
Grant, we ask, your Grace upon those that,
    with gentle care and respect for the departed,
    transport the earthly remains of those that have died
    as such souls leave for their heavenly journey.
Comfort those who must examine and report
    on the remains of people now gone
    in order to tell the story of their passing,
    that the living will know the truth how the deceased left this world.
By Your Spirit, remind these workers of respect for the dead
    of the great importance of their profession,
    and fill them with assurance that their example
    inspires the respect and reverence of others as well.
These things we ask on account of Him who first revealed his Resurrection
    to those who came to care for his body, Jesus Christ our Lord.       

Amen.

    Hopefully we all are able to better appreciate what these people do for us. When the dead leave us behind, our mourning process is facilitated by a chain of dedicated individuals that must care for our deceased loved one along the way; from the M.E. and coroner, to the funeral staff and even those that carry out what is done with remains (burial digging, cremation technician, etc.). Care for the dead is one of those bedrock practices that makes us human, separating us from animals and revealing culture in the archaeological record. Let us show our appreciation for these “caregivers of the dead” and consider the great calling they carry for our benefit.

The Theology of a Cadaver?

In my capacity as a Chaplain for the Seminole County Fire Department, it’s often a privilege to be present when personnel are training, honing the skills they need for any given call and emergency. Such training can include everything from hose and hydrant drills to high angle rescue, to medic emergency procedures. For paramedic practices, various dummies have been manufactured to help train personnel for protocols in CPR and airway intubation, and everything in between. These synthetic dummies, however, cannot replace the value of practice on the “real thing”: the human body.

This presents a challenge for designing training. How much of that can be practiced on a live volunteer? People might willingly be dragged across smooth floor, lifted into a rescue basket, or have their “broken” leg splinted, but they won’t agree to be intubated (airway tube), shocked (AED) or have someone practice drilling into their bones. For those later exercises, willing people have willed that their bodies be donated to science; and for purposes of the medic training, that resulted in the “Cadaver Lab.”

As chaplain, such moments make me question just how much of the fire department’s training do I really want to attend. On the surface, it seemed unwise, but brave the Cadaver Lab I did, and I’m now grateful to have been included. What’s more? I think that such training resources like the Cadaver Lab need to be incorporated into a theology of the body that permeates Christianity.

I’d like to offer a different take on the concept taught among Christians that comes from the book of 1st Corinthians. “Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? For you were bought at a price. Therefore glorify God with your body” (1 Cor. 6:19-20, NET). The context of this statement was the Apostle Paul’s admonition for the reader to abstain from sexual immorality, arguing that there’s no such thing as a “victimless crime;” that sexual sins violate the mandate of your design, and the intent of your body’s rightful owner…God.

This concept of the body as “God’s temple” has, in some circles, been expanded to prohibit other vices indulged with the body as well (i.e. gluttony, drunkenness, and some have gone on to apply to it smoking as well). In any event, the “body as God’s temple” concept has been applied to encourage abstinence; abstaining from sexual sins or any other vice that debases one’s own body from its intended dignity and purpose. This is a good and right message, and one sorely needed in a culture that indulges every appetite and whim.

The discipline of abstaining, however, is only half the message. Studying the spiritual disciplines intended for Lent (the penitential season that precedes Easter in the Christian calendar) will lead you to authors such as Richard Foster and Dallas Willard, who have written about both the abstaining AND engaging disciplines. Abstaining disciplines offer categories of things to DON’T do, while engaging disciplines point toward things to DO. On the one hand, examples of abstaining disciplines are things like fasting, silence, solitude, and frugality. On the other hand, examples of engaging disciplines include things like generosity, fellowship, or study. Some will think that this is a stretch, but I think the complementary categories of abstaining and engaging disciplines also can be applied to the “body as God’s temple” concept.

If there are things to NOT do with “God’s temple,” surely there are things to DO with God’s temple as well. This seems to me an important teaching that, while lacking a clear Bible verse as its referent, permeates the Christian notion of service. The manner in which you serve the purposes of God are all done in the body. In other words, every way you serve God you do so with “God’s temple.” When you show appropriate affection to a loved one, you assure them of their value using “God’s temple.” When you carry a heavy load for someone moving boxes, you serve them with “God’s temple.” Likewise, when you give blood in times of need, you offer life-giving assistance using “God’s temple.”

Imagine offering, in your last will and testament, “God’s temple” for the furtherance of life-saving knowledge for firefighters, paramedics and nurses in training. That is what these people did who gave their bodies for the Cadaver Lab. The instructor took a moment of silence at the beginning of the class to honor those that had donated their bodies for the lab, which I found to be an appropriate and fitting homage. It seemed to me, though, that a Christian perspective can go even further.

As with an organ donor, upon death the body is donated to give life. As for things to DO with “God’s temple” (as opposed to things NOT to do), I can think of few more praiseworthy uses for “God’s temple.” Were any of the people, whose body helped to teach medic procedures, Christians? I have no idea, and it holds no bearing on the nobility of their choice. I do think, however, that Christians, having been taught the “body as God’s temple” concept, should be particularly open to such final acts of service. As one’s final choice with what to do with their body, surely advancing knowledge and giving life should be high on the list of things to do with “the temple of the Holy Spirit.”

Saipan, COVID and the Power of Fear

 

 

In July of 1944, the Battle of Saipan was drawing to a close with the imminent Japanese defeat becoming increasingly obvious to both the Imperial Japanese military and the civilian Japanese population of the island. As US forces drew near, hundreds of panicked Japanese civilians committed suicide by jumping off the cliffs near the northern tip of Saipan. To the US Marines present at the time, the sight of this was mystifying. They watched in horror as mothers and their children leapt to their deaths rather than be captured and subjected to the nightmares that the conquering soldiers might inflict upon them. One mother who had thrown her own child over the cliffs to “save him” from the supposed torments to come, would later mourn her decision after a US soldier stopped her from jumping and escorted her to an aid station where she was cared for, much to both her shock and subsequent shame.

Why the civilian suicides? History has spoken often and loudly of the “kamikaze” spirit of Japanese soldiers, sailors and pilots who would rather die than suffer the shame of defeat. In some instances, this resolve has been even revered for its show of total commitment. The civilian suicides off the cliffs above Marpi Point Field, however, were a shocking mystery until historians pieced together how much they had been influenced by Japanese propaganda regarding the “bloodthirsty” and amoral “barbarians” the US soldiers supposedly were. Japanese propaganda had convinced these civilian mothers and fathers they would be tortured and their children likely eaten by the advancing US forces. In light of this, their actions, albeit shocking, make a little more sense. They simply were gripped with that much fear.

Fear is powerful motivator that can supersede many other cognitive faculties. It’s like an “airborne virus” that can sweep across a landscape and produce unimaginable behaviors among people seemingly reasonable and lucid the rest of the time. Fear is not an entirely unproductive emotion. There are many self-preserving benefits to reacting with caution or alarm to actual dangers. Fear of perceived dangers, however, can often produce behaviors far worse in their outcome than what was, in reality, lurking to pounce (i.e. the suicide cliffs vs the US forces aid station). The art and science is in distinguishing actual dangers from seemingly scary aberrations.

While people are fully capable of conjuring unreasonable fears on their own, a little propaganda to help it along certainly can be effective. Messaging from authority figures, especially in the case of the Japanese where the Emperor cult creates a culture of absolute authority, is where propaganda gets the best results. Propaganda effectiveness varies across cultures depending on the relationship of the populace to the power structures. In Imperial Japan, it would have been a strong connection, as well as in Nazi Germany. In the Allied west, propaganda still existed and was effective, but not used with the same destructive ends. No nation is exempt from the use of propaganda though. As much as the West would like to declare itself exempt, we’re not. It just falls to us to be vigilant about its nature, messaging and the ends that it promotes.

COVID has revealed that much of the western world has, in its luxurious complacency, abandoned the ability to navigate the difference between actual dangers and alarming “jump scares.” In our avarice and luxury (not evils in an of themselves) we so lowered the bar of acceptable risk, that anything less than immortality became an existential threat. As result, fear of a virus with an originally extremely low mortality rate, that weakens with each new variant, still is able to incite fear and indefensible behaviors among the fearful. As I travel the streets of my town, I still see many individuals wearing a mask outside far and away from the nearest structure or any other people. While my first instinct is to declare them morons, there’s also a side of me that retains some compassion for them. They are truly gripped with fear.

It is also out of what compassion I have for them that I’m angered at the purveyors of propaganda. There are many. In the US, there are both official and unofficial sources of this since we do not have an officially “State-run” media; and the coordination of some media outlets with the apparatus of the State makes me wonder how “unofficial” they actually are. Sources published in substack.com or in scientific journals concerning masks and “vaccine” effectiveness reveal that the ones screaming “follow the science” have, themselves, abandoned science altogether. The State utility of this anti-science messaging keeps alive the legacy of Trofim Lysenko. Nevertheless, the propaganda is rampant concerning COVID-19 and its subsequent variants, producing citizens moved with fear into behaviors that they cannot even stop to self-evaluate. Fearful of horrific unknowns, they step off the cliff like terrified “lemmings” wearing a comforting talisman to their face, hoping to be protected from the unseen dangers in their air as they plummet to the watery rocks below. It is out of hatred for these outcomes, and the destruction it rains upon the beloved uninformed, that the appropriate response is…

No quarter. No compromise. No civil dialogue. The propagandists have preyed upon the civility of the skeptical citizenry to advance messages promoting the downfall of our neighbors, friends and family. No more. We must make those uncomfortable who are otherwise willing to jump off the cliff because “Hirohito wills it.” Eventually, one discovers it is not loving to be silent and “polite” to those approaching the cliff. Indeed the propaganda may say that the dangers are horrifying and primordial, but many areas of western society (such as Florida and other states) have revealed the “US aid station” just away from the battle lines. The “dangers” are not real, at least not nearly to the degree you’ve been told. Resistance is loving…and we must must love our neighbor as ourselves in this time.