FEED MY LAMBS:

Gov. Bush's power too little, too much: Though Gov. Jeb Bush jump-started the state's effort to keep Terri Schiavo alive and has fought for her for two years, some religious conservatives said he hasn't done enough. (LESLEY CLARK AND MARY ELLEN KLAS, 3/25/05, Miami Herald)

Gov. Jeb Bush set out two years ago to keep Terri Schiavo alive. He cajoled a reluctant Legislature to grant him the extraordinary ability to overturn a court order and reconnect her feeding tube.

When the courts rebuffed him, he tried again. And when state legislators balked at intervening a second time, he turned to a higher power: Republican leaders in Congress. The result: His brother roared back to Washington, D.C., from vacation and gave the presidential imprimatur to the efforts.

Yet Thursday, as options for Schiavo dwindled and her death seemed imminent, Bush's efforts were not enough for religious conservatives whose cause he has taken up. Some of them scorned him for letting them down.

''He raised the family's hopes but he still hasn't acted,'' said a furious Randall Terry, a spokesman for Schiavo supporters outside the Pinellas Park hospice where Schiavo is dying. ``This, in our opinion, is reprehensible.''

Whether Bush launched his crusade for personal or political motivations, his tireless effort to keep Schiavo alive has left him defensive and under fire, not just from the religious conservatives who want more from him, but from moderates in his own party who resent his efforts to drag the Legislature along.

Late Thursday, Bush, even as he directed his child-welfare agency to push the case to the Florida Supreme Court, pleaded with Schiavo supporters for understanding, saying his hands are tied.

''My powers, they are not as expansive as people would want them to be,'' Bush said at the Capitol. ``I understand they are acting on their heart. I fully appreciate their sentiments and the emotions that goes with this, but I cannot go beyond what my powers are and I'm not going to do it.''

It is well that if this must happen it happen on this weekend when we are reminded of just how imperfect Creation is. In this regard the most radical and least appreciated moments of the Crucifixion come with the passages from Mark, " My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? [Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?]" and from Luke, "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do."

Consider for just a moment that in the first Christ (God) is brought to the point of despair by the reality of how humans experience His Creation and that in the second, though it is placed prior in time in Biblical accounts, Christ instructs God that Man does not know any better, or at least can not do any better, than to behave the way we do. It's easy enough to see why we don't pay more attention to the implications of these lines, after all, a fallible God is even more bizarre and terrifying in its way than one who can be killed. But in that second line, when Christ intercedes on our behalf, Man is finally reconciled to the God who had judged us so brutally throughout the Old Testament. God at last is forced to recognize that the damage done when we ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil but not from the Tree of Life was far greater than even He had understood.

We can hear and understand His Commands for how we are to live and can know that each of us is endowed by Him with a dignity that we ought not trespass against, but we are simply incapable of meeting these standards because of our Fallen nature. The human dilemma is summed up by Paul in his letter to the Romans: "For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do." And yet, this propensity to evil we are to be forgiven through the intercession of Christ. If this is just myth then it is quite the most extraordinary and beautiful myth we can imagine, the one that rounds out existence and makes it comprehensible, and it's no wonder that pretty nearly every story we've told ourselves subsequently just re-enacts it--from Don Quijote to Cool Hand Luke.

With this as background we can approach the killing of Terri Schiavo and those like her with no less sadness, but perhaps some greater wisdom. Among the bitter truths we're forced to reckon with:

* Even if Jeb Bush or George Bush had it within their power to intervene and prolong Ms Schiavo's life for however long, it would not redeem us and despite our and their best intentions could end up doing more harm in the long run than good. A single killing is a tragedy, but the destruction of civil order could be calamitous.

* Were any of us in Michael Schiavo's position we'd not be unlikely to do exactly as he is. Recall that, for all the accusations that he was blaming the Jews, Mel Gibson in his film The Passion intercut his own hands driving in one of the spikes with which Christ is crucified, a healthy reminder that if any of us had been there we too would have joined the clamoring for His death or at least denied Him. What then could make any of us certain that we'd do the right thing where a burdensome spouse was concerned?

* Most importantly though, while saving the most vulnerable among us will not redeem Creation and while the evil within us will not be overcome by us alone, we know that this is not the way God wants us to treat one another. We can not perfect the world but we are obliged by our Creator to try and make it better. The good that can come of Ms Schiavo's killing is that we re-examine how we treat people as they approach the end of life and that we build safeguards against ourselves, so that we come as close as we are capable to treating them with the dignity they deserve but which we know we are all too likely not to grant them otherwise because it inconveniences us.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 25, 2005 10:04 AM