Tough truths…5 – You are going to die

Perhaps this last Tough Truth is the one no one is going to question or debate.  We are mortal, and one day we won’t be here.  We may be able to postpone that day, but as we know, it catches up with us in the end.  Death may come as a friend, or as an enemy, but it comes.  In that experience the prospect for us depends on various things… whether I have learned the relinquishing of control with gratitude and grace… whether I have that love and trust in God which enables me to leave in peace, what Jews know as shalom… whether I have done the work of sorting out memories and failures in my mind and heart… and of course, whether I am in pain or not, suffering dementia or not, well cared for, and so on.

 

Since we have embarked on this subject, we may as well make the most of it.  In Joanna Trollope’s The Rector’s Wife, the Rector is killed in a car smash.  Talking with his widow after the burial the Archdeacon comments:  The burial service is the most triumphant, the most exhilarating of all the services.  I know no music as resoundingly confident as the English of the burial service.  Perhaps that very confidence is what people shrink from now.[1]  And indeed they do.  People may shrink from what they see, or what they think they see, of God and religion, but I shrink from hopeless secular funerals held in some graceless hall and called a celebration of his/her life… and what we get, often as not, is a sentimental string of stories and memories, more or less appropriate or even accurate, and Amazing Grace on the bagpipes.  A Christian funeral by contrast celebrates the mercy and love of God in this person’s life. 

But this fifth Tough Truth is not about funerals.  It is about here and now, and the fact that, as the writer to the Hebrews put it:  Here we have no lasting city.  Or the Psalmist: …we fly away.  Or Job: …a mortal, born of woman, few of days…[2]  It is also about the fact that death remains obstinately a mystery.  When this life can no longer be sustained… what then?  We live with that question, and it is scarcely answered by dogmatism, whether by atheist or by Christian fundamentalist.  I may understand all mysteries, writes St Paul sardonically …but (if I) do not have love, I am nothing.[3]  The Tough Truth, you are going to die, has one response – in life and in death, faith, hope and love are what matters.

After a lifetime of pondering the fact of mortality, knowing for most of it that I needed more wisdom and sense than is ever to be found in Christian naïveté such as the gospel hymn, When we all get to heaven what a day of rejoicing that will be! When we all see Jesus… or any simplistic stuff about heaven and hell… I find my inchoate thoughts being greatly set in order by teachers such as Richard Holloway in his recent book, Waiting For The Last Bus.[4]  If we live in faith, we also die in faith, the faith of Abraham who went out not knowing where he was going[5] -- the faith of John who says we already have inherited eternal life, when we abide in love[6]. The Cistercian monk Thomas Merton expressed it movingly:

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.  I do not see the road ahead of me.  I cannot know for certain where it will end.  Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.  But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.  And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.  I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.  And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it.  Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.  I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

I am well aware that I cannot end treatment of this Tough Truth with the ringing certainties that so pleased the Archdeacon, and therefore I may have disappointed some.  Faith, hope and love are what we have, it seems to me[7].  Richard Holloway ends his book satisfyingly for me with this quotation from Helen Waddell:

I think it will be winter when I die

(For no-one from the North could die in spring)

And all the heather will be dead and grey,

And the bog-cotton will have blown away,

And there will be no yellow on the whin.

But I shall smell the peat

And when it’s almost dark I’ll set my feet

Where a white track goes glimmering to the hills,

And see, far up, a light…[8]

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[1] Joanna Trollope: The Rector’s Wife (Bloomsbury 1992, ch.16)

[2] Hebrews 13:14; Psalm 90:10; Job 14:1. cf. Psalm 103, in the poetry of the KJV:

As for man, his days are as grass;

as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.

For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone;

and the place thereof shall know it no more.

[3] I Corinthians 13:2

[4] Richard Holloway: Waiting For The Last Bus – Reflections on Life and Death (Canongate 2018)

[5] Hebrews 11:8

[6] I John 3:14, 16-17

[7] I Corinthians 13:13. Paul says these are what “abide”.

[8] whin = gorse.   Helen Waddell (d. 1965) was an Irish poet, translator, playwright, famous for her work on medieval Latin verse, her historical novel Peter Abelard, and her 1936 publication of sayings of the Desert Fathers.