Looking death in the face

Don Siebert

Don Siebert was one of Australia's most highly regarded proponents of adult faith education. He presented the following (edited) homily in St Mary's Parish, South Brisbane, in June 2005. Early in 2006, after several months in the Mater Hospital, he moved back to his home. He died there on 18 January.

At a routine medical check up in January 2005, I was shocked to be told that I had multiple secondary cancers in my liver, in my lungs and in my stomach. Two CT scans and a biopsy confirmed the diagnosis. I asked Dr Paul Mannering, Head of the Oncology Department at the Mater Hospital (Brisbane) how long I had to live. He indicated that without chemotherapy I had approximately nine months to live; with chemo I might last a couple of years more. Four weeks ago I had a violent reaction to chemotherapy, so I do not know what lies ahead of me. Peter has asked me to share my reflections with you: my reactions to being a cancer victim and to facing the impact of an early death!

My reactions are just that—my reactions—and they depend on the context of my life journey. I have worked in adult faith education at an archdiocesan level for over 30 years in Adelaide, Perth and Brisbane. During those years I have met so may people maimed and angry with a childhood experience of dysfunctional family life. By way of contrast, I was blessed with a settled family life, and with parents with incredible outreach to anyone in need: an experience that as a child you absorb and emulate.

I can remember one Easter Sunday when I was about ten years old. The family was having a chicken dinner—a rarity in those days. At the last minute, two extra people arrived unexpectedly, I saw my mother redistributing the food to cater for two more plates. Most of the food on her plate was distributed in the rearrangement, and she had but a few scraps. No words were spoken; however the image, so simple and unpretentious, has stayed with me for the rest of my life. My father was christened Vincent de Paul: this marked him for life. He gave himself unreservedly to the work of the Vincent de Paul Society. For over thirty years, he was State President of the South Australian Society. He was instrumental in establishing a night shelter for homeless men and one night a week he worked at the shelter. Through the Society, he helped countless people. With such a start in life, one has little excuse for not following such parental values.

What then of the death sentence I have incurred? I have lived a life of 70 years. I have never married and have no dependents: I have a loose hold on life. If I die tomorrow, so be it. But if I were 35 years old, married with young children, my reaction would be vastly different.

In her book, On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kübler Ross outlines four stages that most people go through when facing death. First there is denial, then anger, thirdly bargaining and finally acceptance. In my case there was little room for denial, with all the medical evidence. I have been dealt a privileged life, so I feel no anger, and after almost 70 years, why should I bargain? As a frail, imperfect human being, I can honestly say 'yes' to the finish of my life.

I want to share with you a quotation from Thomas Merton that has always been meaningful to me, and even more so now:

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

What then makes me tick? What is my rationale for living my life?

For me there are three motivation points that are theological or religious. The first is my experiential understanding of God. I vividly remember in the 1970s while studying in Jerusalem I encountered one afternoon in the streets of the old city a little child who had just learned to walk with his unsteady steps. He came out to greet his father returning from work. The child was crying out 'Abba, Abba' but then turning back to his mother to cry 'Imma, Imma'. Joachim Jeremias, a distinguished Lutheran scripture scholar, stresses that the most revolutionary insight given to us by Jesus was to tell us to call the unapproachable God Abba/Imma—that is, not father/mother, but daddy/mummy—the inarticulate cry of a child to its parents. This was in a culture and tradition where the name of God was not to be mentioned (Jeremias suggests that 'Yahweh' could be translated as 'You know who we are talking about, don't you?'). So the God I experience is my Daddy/Mummy—my Abba/Imma God.

My second foundation point is the kingdom—please excuse the male exclusive overtones, but I cannot find another word to describe the mystery! In the gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke, the word 'church' is mentioned but once—in Matthew 16:18-20.

But the word Kingdom is used 106 times; in Mark and Luke it is the kingdom of God; in Matthew it is the kingdom of heaven. Clearly Jesus did not come to found a church, but to proclaim the kingdom. Thus the kingdom is the end we are to strive for. The church is a means to promote the kingdom. The church is not an end in itself—it is valid to the extent that it reflects the values of the kingdom.

The kingdom is a mystery delineated in the parables of Jesus and in the Beatitudes. It is not a list of laws, rules or commandments, but a set of mind-boggling ideals that we will struggle all our lives to come to terms with. The kingdom is the reign of God in peoples' lives; it is a gathering awareness, a process, a growth rather than an abstract thing. It is the response to the gift of the presence of God deep with each of us, in all other people and in our world; it is the source of dialogue with the God within us; it is a call to wholeness, to selfless love and service of other people. The kingdom brings hope not fear, prophetic word and action not paralysis, sharing not self-sufficiency, sensitivity not ruthlessness, forgiveness not revenge.

My third foundation point is expressed so challengingly in the Gospel of Matthew (25:31-46) : 'As long as you do this to the least of my brothers and sisters, you do it to me'. This sentence has haunted me and challenged me all my adult life, as does the sentence from the document from the Synod on Social Justice: 'Action for justice is constitutive of the Gospel of Jesus Christ'. You cannot have the Gospel unless you act for justice, not just talk about it.

A well-known Queenslander, Clive Hamilton, has written an interesting book, Affluenza: when too much is not enough. His thesis is that an affluent society never has enough: but affluence does not bring happiness, rather depression and lack of meaning.

'Blessed are the poor in spirit for the kingdom of God is theirs' expresses the opposite value. It means nothing I have is mine, everything is gift from God. It means my possessions are not mine, my abilities, physical, mental and spiritual, are not mine. My life even is not mine but gift from God. I have struggled all my life to live with this radical demand of Jesus. All I have and am is gift from God, not mine to gloat over. As I come to terms with the secondary cancers that are destroying my body and my life, I must accept that these very cancers are a gift from my abba/imma God.

One of my heroes is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran theologian who was disturbed by the rise of Adolph Hitler and facism. He was one of a group of Lutheran pastors that founded a breakaway church opposed to anti-Semitism and facism. Bonhoeffer agonised over his decision to take part in a series of plots to kill Hitler. After their failure, he was imprisoned, tortured and, a week before peace was declared, taken from his cell, stripped naked and hung.

In his book The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer contrasts cheap grace with costly grace. With cheap grace, my only duty as a Christian is to leave the world for an hour or so on a Sunday morning and cling to my bourgeois secular existence with the assurance that the grace of God will cover me. Costly grace confronts us. It is a compelling call to follow Jesus on his terms, not ours.

In the collection of Bonhoeffer's teachings on ethics is this frightening sentence: Ethics is not a matter of principles; it is a radical, all consuming call to discern the will of God now, at this very point in time and to respond totally to that call. Bonhoeffer calls us to a radical discipleship.

I would like to finish with my favourite quotation, from Rainer Maria Rilke:

Be patient towards all
that is unsolved in your heart,
and try to love the questions themselves.
Do not seek the answers
That cannot be given you
Because you would not be able to live them ...
And the point is to live everything...
Live the questions now:
Perhaps you will gradually,
Without noticing it,
Live along some distant day
Into the answer.