Spiritual Morphine- The Delusory Hope of Dying on Your Own Terms

This is an excerpt from an article from this month's Touchstone Magazine. It can be found in it's entirety here


by Kristina Robb Dover

....Simone Weil goes so far as to say that in the same way that the natural phenomenon of a sunset reminds us of the order and beauty of creation, so too does affliction—it is written into the delicate structure of the universe to which human beings belong and ultimately must give heed. In her essay, “The Love of God and Affliction,” she writes:
Each time that we have some pain to go through, we can say to ourselves quite truly that it is the universe, the order and beauty of the world, and the obedience of creation to God that are entering our body. After that, how can we fail to bless with tenderest gratitude the Love that sends us this gift?
By agreeing with Weil that even pain can minister God’s grace to us, I do not intend to glorify suffering purely for suffering’s sake. There is nothing redemptive in suffering alone. Nor do I wish to suggest that death is a good. The Bible is clear from start to finish that just as death did not belong to God’s original plan for creation, death will not have a place in the heavenly resurrected life that God promises to those who love him.
My unease is with a Christianity that in a highly therapeutic, health-obsessed Western culture genuflects before the idols of comfort and happiness. A religion that assigns greater value to pain relief in the here and now than to the lordship of Jesus Christ has only succeeded in erecting another golden calf, with the damaging result that health and comfort and a pain-free death are falsely proclaimed as the answer to the riddle of human existence.
Such misplaced worship is a far cry from “true religion,” understood as that “which binds us to God as the one and only God,” in the words of John Calvin (a man, incidentally, racked with illness his whole life). It falls prey to the kind of utilitarianism that Friedrich Schleiermacher once bewailed: religion that exists not for its own sake, but as a means to an end—in this case, the relief of pain.....