It's not fair.

Good Morning God,
When did we stop being human and start being body parts? 3706 organ transplants were performed by the NHS this year, but apparently this is still not enough, people are still dying for lack of suitable organs. To borrow the phrase of the  TV campaign designed to shame us into signing the donor register - It's not fair!


No, it's not fair.
It's not fair on the whole human race that one gene pool, sick and diseased though it is, can come to dominate the species gene pool through the direct application of medical science simply because it can afford to do so..

Here in the West, our bodies have become the essential but uncomfortably fragile vehicles that we travel around in through this journey of life. It's not fair that our life-style and social evolution results in our bodies becoming diseased or broken, but we can generally find some way of patching them up - for a price. Life and health are commodities, the must have accessories to 'being' who we really are. They are a costly luxury for the sick and the poor, but the sick can harvest what they need from the poor - if they can pay.

Money is effectively halting the genetic and spiritual evolution of humanity - and we will all pay the cost later. Leave aside for one moment the sick irony of the growing market in organs which results in some of the poorest people world-wide selling their body parts to donor banks in order to survive. What is really happening here is the ultimate in the commodification of life. People get the life that they can pay for.


YES - of course, I would want to see those I love live longer lives - but only because I am selfish, not because I believe it is right for them - or for me - or for society. Grief is the bitter-sweet side of love that we do not want to taste. But we can't have everything we want - no matter how badly we want it, usually for good reasons!

So, even though I know that good people, even young people and new born babies, friends and family members might otherwise die, I still struggle with the idea of organ donation:

Firstly there is the inequality of it all - the cost of one liver transplant could pay for millions of newborn tetanus vaccines... whose life is more important - why is it the one who can pay? Where is the justice in this? Where in the gospel does it say that only those who can pay can have life?

Secondly there is the subtle but insidious signal that it sends to humanity that 'death' is the devil which must be defeated at all cost, that sickness and dying are not 'normal', and that it is imperative that we do everything we can to 'keep people alive' - as though dying is not a normal part of living. Dying is so normal that even you did it God, to show us it is not the end of us. We need have no fear of dying.

Thirdly there is the presumption that all that is necessary for us to live are bodies that work.  We start treating bodies as something separate and distinct, which fail us or let us down. We stop thinking of ourselves as whole human beings with a physicality and spirituality which are intended to combine to create a reality which transcends both.

Fourthly - and perhaps most importantly, we start behaving like gods - making decisions over who lives and who dies according to the organs that we have. We start convincing ourselves that we have life sussed, we don't need your help. We can now create life in a test-tube, clone it when we need to, educate it, milk it for its worth to society, mate it and when we deem it necessary or expedient to do so, heal it or fix it when it breaks and kill it humanely if we must. But what we create and manipulate is but a shadow of life in all its fullness.

Lastly, keeping people 'alive' in this way stops humanity evolving, growing, changing, developing. It keeps the diseased genes in the gene-pool, whilst we kid ourselves that it doesn't matter - we will find a medical fix for that too!

I am aware that what I have written is not confined to organ transplants, but transplants epitomize the problem underlying the demand for 'right to life' medical care. They are at the pointy end of a very sharp and pressing pair of questions which will in the end define us all...

What is the price of a human life?

And what is the real cost to humanity?


Personally, I think these questions were answered over 2000 years ago, by someone who paid the ultimate price so that we could learn how to obtain real healing, and gain life in all its fullness.