Dying Without Clergy

Gerald L. Zelizer

In a scene at the end of hit film Titanic, a priest stands on that part of the upper deck not yet submerged, holding hands with a circle of people, his own eyes misty, and recites Biblical passages in order to comfort those who know that within minutes they will be dead in freezing waters.

Apparently, that image would not be conceived if the Titanic had gone down in l997 instead of 1912. A recent Gallup poll "Spiritual Beliefs and the Dying Process" found that at such crisis times, only 36% of those interviewed believe that a member of the clergy could be comforting, while 81% would turn to family and friends.

Americans are more religious than ever. More profess belief in God now than fifty years ago. The percentage of the population that belongs to a church or synagogue is larger today than at the time of the Titanic - 68% as contrasted with 50%. In spite of our reputation as a secular nation, we are a believing one. Why has that clerical function of comforting at the time of death seemingly sunk with the Titanic?

A partial answer is provided in a closer look at the Gallup statistics. Those who would turn to clergy for comfort in dying are, not surprisingly, those who believe in life after death, and that their life belongs to God. Individuals whose faith is the strongest turn to clergypeople to interpret that faith at death.

But if 95% of Americans say they believe in God, why don't even more of them turn to the messenger of God, the clergy, while dying? Some do not turn to clergy because they do not know any. The bulk of the dying are the elderly who have retired to sunbelt communities and severed their geographical ties and emotional with the particular clergyperson who guided them in their younger and middle years. Many Jews are unaffiliated with synagogues. Laypeople have in recent years fled the mainline Protestant churches and their clergy. Even the growth of evangelical Christianity is frequently within a mega parish, where the individual sits among two to three thousand worshippers on a Sunday morning, and becomes acquainted with the minister only from afar. The primary function of the Islamic imam is a lay leader of group prayer. He does not assume the broader duties of an ordained minister. None of these contexts encourage an intimate association with a clergyperson prior to death.

Chaplains David Brooks and J. Mark Spiegel of the Lifepath Hospice in Tampa, Florida are training funeral directors in Florida and New Jersey to conduct a generic memorial service without benefit of clergy. They find that over half of the dying in their hospice are not affiliated with any formal denomination. This, "in spite of the influence of the Bible belt, and the Catholic church on the Hispanic population here," Chaplain Brooks observed.

Another reason for this non reliance on clergy while dying has to do with the nature of American religion. Americans believe but they want to believe in their own way. 64% of believing Catholics in America contend that "one can be a good catholic without going to mass." In a recent poll of Conservative Jews, whose religion tells them that being a Jew is defined by having a Jewish mother, and not a Jewish father, 67% do not support that rule. Why should laypeople who do religion in their own way, turn at death to the spokespeople of religion which does things in the old way.?

Birth, marriage and death are rites of passage. Many laypeople view their clergyperson as facilitating the ritualistic rite and not the emotional passage to the rite. Although clergypeople do study pastoral counseling, most of the time in Seminaries is spent learning the prayers surrounding birth, marriage, and death, and not the complex paths leading up to these events.

Clergy preoccupation over the rite over the passage may be changing. A major Seminary which educates rabbis recently sponsored a series of courses and workshops entitled "From the depths I called Upon the Lord...Suffering and Healing in the Jewish Tradition." Jewish healing services, facilitated by rabbis, are beginning to break out in mainline synagogues both in New York and New Jersey. My own denomination recently distributed to its rabbis a twenty page living will which applies spiritual guidelines to specific end of life decisions such as resuscitation, ventilators, and feeding tubes.

One of my first duties as a young rabbi was to regularly visit a former nurse dying of breast cancer. At those callings, we discussed her former work, her family, her hobbies, but never her feelings regarding death. I was relieved that she did not ask, because I didn't know then what I would have answered. After nearly thirty years in the same congregation, I visited a long acquaintance who also was dying of cancer. Near the end she asked me: "What happens after we die?" "I really don't know, " I responded, "but I do believe that God who loves each of us in life does not cease to love simply because our physical being has ended." With that answer, I assuaged my own anxiety over death as much as hers. She died at peace shortly thereafter. The faith, the life experience, and even the anxieties of a clergyperson invited to bedside can bring solace at this final passage.