Annie Lamott Yells "JUMP!"

You've seen or heard about those few spectators in every crowd watching a suicidal person standing on the ledge of a building. You know the ones I'm talking about - the ones who egg on the suicidal person by yelling "JUMP!".

Well, apparently The Los Angeles Times has one of those types writing Op/Eds for them in the person of allegedly "Christian" progessive Annie Lamott. Amy Welborn has the details:

THE MAN I KILLED did not want to die, but he no longer felt he had much of a choice. He had gone from being tall and strapping, full of appetites and a brilliant manner of speech, to a skeleton, weak and full of messy needs.

He and his wife still loved each other very much, but he'd lost the ability to do the things he had most loved to share during their 30 years together: to cook and overeat, hike and travel. He had always been passionately literary, but he was losing the ability to read and write, which had defined his life. Both elegant and down-to-earth, with lifelong depression and a rich, crabby sense of humor, he was 60 when he was diagnosed with cancer.

***
Mel and Joanne (that's what I'm going to call them) told me about it one night over dinner. Their grown kids wanted him to do chemo, but aggressive treatment might buy him six months, or maybe not, and he had decided against it. He wanted to feel as well as he could for as long as he could, savor his family and friends and the beauty of life, on his own terms, in the strange basket of sickness. And if the fear and suffering got too great? Well, they'd deal with that then.

That night was the closest I came to drinking in all the years I'd been sober, but somehow I didn't. I believed that God would be close to us all no matter how things shook down, even though Mel was not a believer. And the next three months were sort of lovely, a mosaic of beauty, love and his body breaking down. He could no longer hike, and he wasn't ever hungry. He was, by turns, depressed, fascinated, scared, fine, exhausted, sad, accepting, enraged, grateful and amazed at the love and support that surrounded him. If you have a body, you are entitled to the full range of feelings. It comes with the package.

***
So I offered to help Mel if he ever needed me. We talked about it briefly. What did I think death was like, he asked? I didn't have a clue, but I'd heard an Eastern mystic say that it was like slipping out of a pair of shoes that had never fit very well. Then we moved on to what we were reading, and how our kids were. I knew for a fact, though, that Mel believed in assisted suicide. We had discussed a story in the paper once, about a local man who gave his wife an overdose, and then sealed her upper body in a plastic trash bag with duct tape. Then he had done this to himself, and they died holding hands. What love!

Mel was sort of surprised that as a Christian I so staunchly agreed with him about assisted suicide: I believed that life was a kind of Earth school, so even though assisted suicide meant you were getting out early, before the term ended, you were going to be leaving anyway, so who said it wasn't OK to take an incomplete in the course?

My Comments:
Sick. Remember this whenever the so-called "Religious Left" or "Progressive Christians" or whatever rail against the "Religious Right" or "Christian Conservatives" for their misplaced priorities, especially our emphasis on pro-life causes.

When you hear religious liberals - who apparently think Annie Lamott is the bees knees - talk about their vision of the Gospel and of the Christian calling, think about this very ill athiest man who reached out to a friend he knew to be a "Christian". And think about the "Christian" who, instead of offering him Christ, offered to kill him.

"Progressive" Christianity, indeed.


See also
Albert Mohler's commentary

Maclin Horton's commentary


UPDATE
Now that I've thought about this a little more, Annie Lamott did a hell of a lot more than yell "JUMP!" She went up to the roof of the building and gave the jumper a strong shove.