Beginning at the End: Liturgy and the Care of the Dying

<span class="paragraphSection"><div class="boxTitle">Abstract</div>This issue of <span style="font-style:italic;">Christian Bioethics</span> brings together essays that offer theological responses to the final question of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Anticipatory Corpse</span>: “Might it not be that only theology can save medicine?” (<a href="#CIT0002" class="reflinks">Bishop 2011</a>, 313). In this essay, I begin to spell out what I had in mind when I asked that final question. For Christians, the right way to comport oneself to others—the right orientation—grows out of Divine Liturgy. This is theology in the most practical of senses. Liturgy is a set of practices, of rituals, that bring people into right relationship with one another. Liturgy tells us that its participants cannot give an account of their own existence, and it tells us that other human animals are not resources to be controlled, or bodies to be overpowered by technology or by their own wills. Thus, with Evagrius Ponticus, we can say that the theologian is the one who prays. It is primarily those faithful people who, by virtue of their faithfulness, understand how they are to comport themselves to others, because they are oriented to the Divine. It is through these Holy people that theology might save medicine.</span>

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