I HAD not entirely made up my mind about the assisted dying Bill. We had a helpful seminar at Portsmouth Cathedral the previous week, conducted by the philosopher and ethicist David Carpenter, which had sharpened the issues without quite persuading me either way. But I was struck by his observation that the Bill had been designed to pass: short on detail, full of ambiguities, and so difficult to object to. The debate was well conducted and respectful, but, in the end, personal choice won over the warnings of what such an ambiguously drafted Bill might lead to.

But, when I heard that it had passed, I knew what I thought, viscerally. A shudder of terror went through my whole body. I saw my future self, ill and struggling, with the only goal in my mind to depart this life quickly on a numbing cloud of drugs. And I knew that, for me, the Bill, however well meant, was designed not only to prevent a painful and undignified death, but to limit the extent to which death can yield meaning. It is hard to write this, because I have friends, some of them Christians, who support assisted dying, and will probably go on to support the greater liberalisations which will follow in the wake of Friday’s decisions.

I have visited hospices, and once made a film in one. I remember filming a nurse tenderly responding to a request for bed-socks from a woman who was near death, and a young man with terminal cancer dreaming of setting out on a long sea voyage. Those near death can tell us much about humility, gratitude, and reconciliation. Yes, it is true that some deaths are hideous, but, for many, good care allows for meaning to emerge in the night shelter before the next world. Last Friday, though, “my body, my choice” prevailed. We prefer to do things “my way”.

I wish we could use the term “assisted suicide”, rather than assisted dying, because suicide involves a deliberate rejection of the cycle of obligation and gift that makes life tolerable. To refuse suicide is to refuse to accept that our bodies are ours to dispose of. Instead, it affirms the body as the visible, tangible sacrament of selfhood, which is only true selfhood because it belongs as much to others as to ourselves.

There is no denying that this very conviction makes us vulnerable, which is why I shuddered, recognising that I might come to believe that I had a duty to die to free up a bed, or save “our” NHS. We need to reclaim the value of passivity, to recognise that there is a grace in caring and being cared for, and we are always being prepared for that greater communion to which our troubling bodies point us. “For we look for the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come.”