Because You've Never Died Before: Spiritual Issues at the End of Life

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Ahmadinejad, The Holocaust, and the Psychology of Denial

Working as a hospice chaplain for many years, I have experienced a lot of denial. Patients, or family members of patients, who can’t bear and refuse to deal with the reality that they or their loved one is dying, are said to be in “denial”. “Don’t tell my husband he’s dying,” says the wife of a patient I am about to visit, “He doesn’t know”. As my visit with the patient ends, he says to me, “When you visit with my wife, don’t tell her I am dying, she doesn’t know.” This is a familiar story to all of us who work in end of life care. Of course, both husband and wife know. They signed their names on papers granting them hospice care, a health care service with an eligibility requirement that patients have a prognosis of less than six months to live.

Denial has its pay-off. When a couple refuses to acknowledge that one of them is dying, they both attempt to live their lives the way they did before. Of course, one of them is very sick, but the language and actions of both patient, and spouse refuse to let on. “You’re getting stronger,” says the wife. “Maybe I can get out of bed and practice walking a bit today”, suggests the husband. “Maybe we can ask the nurse if we can get physical therapy”. “You need to regain your strength!” prompts the wife. “Eat. You can’t get better if you don’t eat.”

The cost of denial is huge. By refusing to acknowledge the truth of the situation, this couple is cheating themselves, each other, and all who know them. By not completing the necessary and healing tasks, conversations, and resolves that are integral to the one dying and to the one(s) who will go on, they are cheated. Healing and growth can only emerge through honest disclosure.

Denial is paradoxically an acknowledgment of the truth. Denial does not have an independent existence. It comes into existence whenever something is desperately wished to not be true. Denial, by definition, is attached to and a part of the truth it cannot bear to face.

Denial is a popular emotional response to reality. Alcoholics, people in prison, persons who are terminally ill, you and me in everyday life, in everyday relations with others, cling to our own actions and words despite the reality they may have created. We are innocent. We are right. We didn’t say that. We didn’t do that. I am amazed at the audacity of the accused to claim innocence even when their crimes are caught on video-tape and aired on TV. We like denial. No, we love denial. We don’t want to be wrong or others to be right. Denial safeguards us from the hard work that facing ourselves or the truth of a situation demands.

We must ask the necessary questions. What’s the pay off for Ahmadinejad if the Holocaust was not? What is it he won’t have to face or deal with, if he can convince himself and others that the Holocaust never happened? Why is he so desperate for the Holocaust not to be true? What does he want to take away from the Jewish people, from Israel, from the perpetrators who have confessed already, or from the world by his denial? What actions or beliefs will denial of the Holocaust justify for him? These are the questions we need to be asking. Not, did the Holocaust really happen? Confessions by perpetrators, documents kept of the Nazis, Christian admission of complicity, survivor testimony, research, dissertations, and technical proofs are readily available.

Denial doesn’t make truth go away. It delays the pain of what needs to be faced and accepted. It delays right words and right actions. It delays healing and moving forward in unexpectedly good directions.

Denial never negates the truth of what is, it just buries it away until enough courage arises within to face whatever it is that needs to be faced. Why does AA make public acknowledgement of one’s alcoholism a prerequisite for membership? Because sobriety’s first demand requires the courage to withdraw denial by stating the truth, “My name is so and so, and I am an alcoholic.” Only this admission, this truth coming from one’s own mouth and rising to the ears of others, this reversal of denial, this facing of truth, begins the process of recovery.

The early confessions of the Christian churches in Europe after the war related to its part in the Holocaust turned the church in a direction it had never faced before and on a theological journey still being unraveled. Destination unknown! Denial would have been easier. No changes would have been necessary. Proceed as usual. But, what the withdrawal of denial and the facing of truth have given the church is beyond its foreseeable theological horizons. It is discovering parts of itself it did not know existed (not knowing Jesus as a Jew has meant he was a stranger to us for centuries), eliminating or transforming parts of itself necessary for integrity (anti-Judaism), living with paradoxes yet to be resolved (God’s continued covenant with the Jewish people and the existence and mission of the church), and trusting in God that what the church will become is what God intended.

We have to see denial for what it is. It isn’t about truth, but about the inability to deal with or cope with the truth. Denial is usually reserved for someone directly affected by whatever it is that is being denied. In the case of the Holocaust, denial could come from the victims, from the perpetrators, or from the bystanders. Ahmadinejad was born in 1956 in Iran. He has no vested interest in the event itself,so we can only guess at what his inner motives really are in denying the Holocaust and inviting other Holocaust deniers to a conference.

Real Muslims--Real Christians: The Seeds of Genocide and Hope

“They want all of us to convert to Islam.” These were the first words, two Sundays ago, out of ninety year old Bob, a parishioner in the church where I serve. “Well,” he continued, looking at the floor quietly, thoughtfully, and even a bit unselfconsciously, as if he were talking not to me but to himself out loud, “I won’t do it, no matter what! That’s all there is to it!”

At coffee hour, another parishioner, Alice, of the same generation as Bob said, “Who would have ever thought that we would face what we only knew about in history, being asked if we believe in Christ and being forced to convert to Islam or be persecuted if we don’t.”

I felt like I was living in another century too when I watched the same young bearded man they watched, wearing a turban, speaking on an al-Qaeda videotape calling for all Americans to convert to Islam. Bin Laden recently called non-Muslim lands apostate and subscribes to bringing the rule of Allah to the Earth. Amadinijad has said the same. Like Alice, my mind went back in history to Christianity’s adolescence, when during the Crusades, the cross was turned into a sword, and Jews and Muslims were given the choice to convert or die. I felt a chill go down my spine. Is this really happening? Will it happen in my lifetime? Images of a church burning in Gaza this week and massacres of worshipping Christians in Afghanistan some time ago came to my mind. It was happening elsewhere. It could happen here.

This week Pope Benedict said something very negative about Islam during his visit to Germany. He quoted from a 1391 text of a dialogue between the Christian Byzantine Emperor Manuel Paleologos and a Persian on Christianity and Islam. “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” The Muslim world was offended and outraged. Real Islam, they said, is a religion of love and peace. This is a false Islam.

It had happened in the past with Islam. Omar and his successors brought Islam to many parts of the world through bloody conquests. Churches were desecrated and turned into Mosques. The blood of the “infidels” both Jewish and Christian ran like rivers.

Today we see Muslim homicide/suicide bombers throughout the world, huge disasters with 9/11, Madrid, London, and elsewhere. Kidnappings, beheadings, and millions of Muslims calling for the death of infidels. I would hate to be a loving and peaceful Muslim too, who cringes at the debacle, fears death threats by extremists calling themselves Muslims, and floundering in how to move forward with integrity and faith. But which Muslim today would criticize Omar or say that he was not a true Muslim?

I teach the Holocaust. When my audiences are Christian, many are deeply offended when I say that the Holocaust, which took place in Christian Europe, would not have been possible without the help of Christians and Christian theology, particularly Lutheran and Catholic. John Roth says it like this. “…while Christianity was not a sufficient condition for the Holocaust, nevertheless, it was a necessary condition for that disaster.” It’s a hard bullet to swallow for sure. It is for me too. A common reaction is to defend Christianity with the rationalization that a Christian, by definition, cannot murder. Therefore, they say, they weren’t real Christians. But they were, just like those who espoused to be Christian during the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Pogroms were real Christian. And their actions were backed by Christian theology. The Crusades are part of Christianity’s history. The Holocaust is part of Christian history too, not just Jewish history. Saying they aren’t real Christians doesn’t make it so.

Robert P. Ericksen points out in his book "Theologians Under Hitler," that Paul Althaus, Gerhard Kittel, and Emanuel Hirsch were three very influential Protestant theologians in Germany who welcomed Hitler and his antisemitic policies. We must claim them as Christian. They were real Christians. Oh, we cling to the Bonhoeffer’s too, knowing only too well that history has yet decided our attempts at faithfulness in the challenges we have been called to and are blessed to live in now.

Both Christian and Muslim estremists teach us something important. They have found the seeds of genocide in each of our faiths, and they have acted on them. One thing is for sure, neither of us can remain scriptural literalists any longer. These deadly passages, the theology that flows from them, cannot be ignored. The long theological and scriptural investigation, which already began in Christianity after the Holocaust, hopefully will begin for Islam now. That is our only hope!

Yes, extremists are ours. Both Christians and Muslims, both past and present, whom we would love to disown, but cannot. They are ours then and they are ours now. Only by this claiming can we repent. Only by this claiming can we change. Only by this claiming can we become whole.


Until next time. Thank you so much for reading.

A View from Before I was Born: What it Means for Christians, Jews, and Muslims Today (Part I)

It was over dinner that Marianne said, "Isn't the antisemitism just awful?" I wondered how many people sitting in the dining room of her senior living community in Massachusetts knew that she had been through this before? That she was a living monitor of how bad things could get for Jews.

Marianne was a teenager in Germany November 9-10, Kristallnacht, when the Gestapo came to her front door. I was sitting and eating with a person who had actually experienced the Gestapo! The Gestapo. The Nazis SS of my history book. Black uniforms, hats with high shiny visors, pants tucked into Jack boots loudly and rythmically approaching. Pounding at her door. Storming in. Ransacking her home. Kicking, screaming, terrorizing, and later returning to take her father, whom she never saw again. She had seen the hatred in their faces. Felt their loathing. Experienced their agenda. I tried to imagine them knocking at my door. I couldn't.

But they had returned. Different uniform. Same hatred. In every country, terrorists, facists. Convincing others of that old refrain, "The Jews are our misfortune."

The July, 2006 failed political campaigns of Lieberman (CT) and McKinney (GA) are still fresh in my mind. Fox news read an email that they had received in which the writer tries to remember Lieberman's wife's name, saying it was something like Haggadah, "or something you eat at Passover." McKinney lost her relection to congress, and television showed the horrific antisemitic, anti-Israeli, and anti-Jewish comments made by her staff to reporters. How easy it returned. To see what the Jews are doing wrong. Not to take their side. They are guilty. Jews are aways guilty!

I was shocked. It is an understatement to say that we Americans are intolerant of racist, antisemitc, and prejudical expressions about anyone. How easy it returned then. Some of the countries in the EU protesting against Israel in its war with Hizballah were holding signs boldly calling for the destruction of Israel. Others stating Israel was using aggressive force and acting illegally in its destruction of Lebanon's infrastructure, its bridges, gas stations, roads and airports. These widespread anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli sentiments explained to me why the sudden outbursts of antisemitism in America were expressed with strength, hatefulness, cynicism, and in relative safety.

I'm beginning to fear the boots slowly approaching my door. Your door. Who speaks out for Israel? For Jews? Only America? It seems so, and for the world, that seems too much. And the church, except for Christian Fundamentalists who have their own religious agenda for supporting Israel? The church didn't speak out for the Jews in the 1930's either. In fact, the German Lutheran church became Nazified. An underground church, The Confessing Church formed, and even in this movement only a minority were for Jews. The heroes of that movement are well known among scholars and many lay persons. Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Martin Niemoller, even though he admits that he was an antisemite. Bonhoeffer is known and lifted up as the one who from the beginning could see clearly amidst a church and clergy that were so blind to Nazism and the plight of the Jews. How lonely he must have felt, I thought, even as he wrote his book The Cost of Discipleship, in 1934. I am beginning to feel lonely too, as I experience mainline Protestant churches focusing almost exclusively on the Palestinians and their situation, buying their view of the history of the Middle-East, without batting an eye, without an urge for Israel's survival.

Bonhoeffer was hanged by the Nazis. Niemoller spent time in Sacksenhausen and Dachau concentration camps, and survived. Both are recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous among the Gentiles. I do not know of one fellow clergy-person today that would not wish, had they lived during that time, to aligned themselves with that faithful remnant. Of course. But we haven't learned. Oh, we look back and see our mistake...then! It looks so obvious in hindsight, how we should have tried to stop the extermination of the Jews. Protested at least. But not if you lived then. Not if you were deeply absorbed in the anti-Jewish politics, culture, and theology of the day that was considered default. But then, and back in 1967 when Israel was threatened with annihilation, and now, the church at large has not been the protectorate of Israel, and Israel is quite aware of this.

My friend Judy, whose mother was one of the Warsaw Ghetto Fighters, asked me recently, "Why do gentiles hate the Jews?" Her question reminded me of Anne Frank, who in her diary while in hiding from the Nazis in Holland during WWII, asks her father the same thing. A friend in Israel, Tanja, a Sabra, whose parents survived the Holocaust, emailed me during this last war stating, "Why don't they just leave us alone!" I thought about The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that forged hateful document of the early 20th century, widespread today in all Arab countries and used by Hitler himself, that accuses Jews of conspiring to take over the world. Why didn't Anne, and Judy, and Tanja know about their own conspiracy?

It wasn't the first time I had ever been in the company of a survivor. Yet, everytime, I was acutely aware of how open, accepted, and justified anti-Jewish language and behavior were back then--a history I didn't think ever would be repeated--but were living memories for many Jews. I suddenly felt alone and realized how alone Jews must have felt in Germany and Marianne was beginning to feel again. I had overheard comments in passing conversations stating that if there just wasn't an Israel, we would all be safe. People were not planning on helping them this time either.

I hear what the respected mainline churches in the world say, and the professors at respectable academies say. If Israel would just give back the territories it won in the Six Day War. If we would just realize that peace is possible if we address all the greivances of the Muslims against America's policy in the Middle-East and against Israel. One otherwise caring and open clergy colleague said to me. "I feel so bad for the Palestinians. Who had the right to give the Jews a country anyway?" These words are not too far from the President of Iran's words that Israel should be wiped off the map. I remember my history and the voices of the churches and the academies in Germany too.

I am reminded of the words of Martin Neimoller in the October, 1945 Stuttgart Confession of Guilt that emerged from the Protestant Churches following WWII: "We accuse ouselves that we did not witness more courageously, pray more faithfully, believe more joyously, love more ardently." This was the first Protestant response to the Holocaust, even without mentioning the Jews to whom it refers. In fifty years, will we be confessing these words again?


Until later. Thanks for reading!