Part One: Death
About twenty years ago or so, a priest-monk of the Community of the Resurrection in England came to this country and gave a series of teaching missions in various parishes. His name was Fr. Augustine Hoey, CR, he was well in his eighties, and none of those who heard him speak could ever forget him. I never heard him, but I know several people who did. The sessions took place on successive weekday evenings over the course of a week; and as word spread of his remarkable talks, attendance grew and multiplied from one day to the next.
His presentations were highly dramatic and theatrical, making use of lots of elaborate props. On one evening in particular, the congregation would arrive in a church that had been decorated as for an old-fashioned Victorian funeral, with black crepe draperies, black altar vestments, unbleached wax candles, and somber music quietly played on the organ. At the front, in the crossing, was a bier flanked by six bier lights, but no coffin.
Then came a loud knocking on the back doors, which had been closed; six pall bearers entered carrying a coffin on their shoulders, processed up the center aisle, and laid the coffin on the bier in the crossing. The tension would mount. Finally, the lid of the coffin would open to reveal Fr. Hoey himself lying within, in full mass vestments, his hands clasped and his eyes closed.
After another few minutes in which the tension became almost unbearable, Fr. Hoey opened his eyes, sat up in the coffin, surveyed the congregation, and announced: “Ladies and gentlemen: this evening I would like to speak about that moment to which we all look forward with joyful anticipation: our death!”
Unfortunately, I haven’t been told what he said after that, but what an attention-getter! His techniques were typical of some of the Anglo-Catholic preaching missions of the early twentieth century, and borrowed much from vaudeville and the music hall. But the shock of that particular opening lay in its direct challenge to our death-avoidant culture.
We don’t like to talk about death. In my first year in my previous parish, as a brand new rector, I thought it would be a clever idea to organize a Lenten teaching series on Christian preparation for death. I invited a series of speakers to address such topics as Episcopal funeral customs, options for burial versus cremation, and estate-planning. To the surprise of my neophyte naivety, there was a good deal of grumbling and complaining in the parish, and a bit of pushback as well. One lady summed it up by declaring: “I come to church to feel good; I don’t come to hear things that depress me.”
Yet, one of the duties the Church lays on the clergy is that of instructing the congregation in the Christian understanding of and approach to death. And one of the traditional times for doing so has been Advent. It used to be the custom on the four Sundays of Advent to preach on the “Four Last Things” – Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. And this year it occurred to me for the first time in my priestly ministry to tackle this traditional course of Advent sermons.
The paradox is that while the Church challenges our death-avoidance, she unequivocally affirms the value of life against what has been described as a culture of death that has made ever greater inroads into the contemporary world. From medical ethics to the ethics of war and peace, and crime and punishment, the Church bears consistent witness to life as a gift of God to be received, cherished, and embraced with joyful gratitude. The Gospel imperative is to choose life. Death is never to be deliberately caused or hastened while life remains a viable option.
And yet, when death becomes inevitable, as it ultimately must for all of us, the ideal Christian response is a spirit of resignation and acceptance. The Christian spiritual tradition commends the practice of praying for the grace of a holy death: that is, a death that we’ve had adequate opportunity to prepare for by repenting of our sins, forgiving our enemies, setting our affairs in order, and arranging for the responsible and charitable disposal of our worldly possessions. It was in this spirit that Saint Francis of Assisi was able to sing, “Praise to you, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death, from whom no one living can escape.”
Certain modern philosophers rightly point out that the reality of our death is always present to us in the background of our awareness as a kind of “limiting horizon.” In other words, if we could expect to live indefinitely, we’d lose a great deal of our focus and sense of purpose. The knowledge that we have only a finite amount of time to live concentrates our minds and motivates us to make definite choices about what to do with our lives. If we could expect to live indefinitely, it would likely not matter much to us which goals we failed to achieve or which projects we failed to complete because we’d always have more time to get to them later. But the horizon of death limits that time and so impels us to try to respond to our callings and fulfill our vocations in the limited time that God gives us on this earth.
The readings, prayers, and hymns of Advent testify to the reality of the Lord’s coming in glorious majesty with anticipation, longing, hope, joy, and maybe also a little fear and trembling. Just so, for each of us, our death represents our own personal Advent of the Lord. What the Second Coming of Christ will be to the entire cosmos, our death will be to each of us personally: the end of our present world, and the gateway to the world to come.
It follows that all the Season of Advent bids us do together as the Church in anticipation of the Coming of the Lord at the end time – all the traditional practices of watching, waiting, praying, and preparing – the season also bids each one of us do in anticipation of our own personal meeting with the Lord in the hour of our death. And to aid in this preparation, we shall continue next week by considering the second of the Four Last Things, namely judgment.
No comments:
Post a Comment