Living Fully Until We Die

"The modern hospice movement is rooted in a much older idea of hospitality. Indeed, the term comes from the same Latin root as hospital and hostel. Places of hospitality were not confined to the Latin-speaking world, however. Greeks, Indians, Romans, early Christians, and Muslims all built places where pilgrims and travelers, particularly the sick, could rest and find care. In modern times, Christians showed their commitment to hospitality for the hurting by building hospitals and, at the end of the 19th century, the first institutions dedicated solely to caring for the dying. Called hospices, these institutions lacked the fully formed philosophy that would characterize the modern movement, they but did offer inspiration to the movement's founder, Dame Cicely Saunders.

Saunders established the first modern hospice, St. Christopher's, in 1967. Located in London, St. Christopher's was the result of Saunders' experience treating dying people, her belief that people could flourish even as they died, and her sense of Christian call..."

"Saunders also used St. Christopher's to show how religion could be integrated into the experience of dying. Her hospice was open to Christians and non-Christians alike but had, she said, a Christian foundation. She also claimed that treating physical pain gave patients freedom—a freedom she saw them use "in time for family reconciliations, in deepening relationships, and in all the sorting out of beliefs and memories that can help others say, with Pope John XXIII, 'My bags are packed—I can go with a tranquil heart at any moment.'"

Even after her retirement in 1985, Saunders actively promoted her movement as well as her beliefs about the intersection of faith and dying. She strongly condemned euthanasia. Hospice, according to Saunders, encouraged people to live fully until they died. Convinced that with modern drugs people need not die in pain, she claimed that euthanasia precluded the work of a good death—the reconciliation with mortality, with family, and with God that occurred as people died. "It is not for us to say that the suffering is fruitless," she wrote, "nor that there is nothing more for the patient to do or learn in this life." People were not the own masters, she claimed."

Sarah Johntone for Christianity Today