Dying Matters

It's a bank holiday weekend. The sun is shining. The world is beautiful. Tomorrow is Whit Sunday. It's not a time to be gloomy.

However....

This is Dying Matters Awareness Week. I wish I'd known about it sooner. I became aware of it yesterday as I was reading the Catholic weekly The Tablet. This always excellent journal leads on the subject, and there is an excellent article by Rosie Harper, an Anglican priest, about helping people talk naturally about death.

This is what the week is intended to be about: recovering the importance of thinking about and discussing end-of-life matters: palliative care, dying, death, loss and grief. I say ‘recover’ because as we know, the difficulty we have in even naming some of these topics seems a peculiarly modern phenomenon. Our forebears did not stumble over facing the incontrovertible truth of the old tag memento mori. To remember the certainty of death and to reflect on dying well is all part of learning to live well, and not just well but happily.

The Dying Matters hashtag is #YODO: You Only Die Once. It’s good. I’m learning late in my life that the things we only do once are supremely worth investing time and effort in. Yesterday I was giving an address to school-leavers. I talked about how they might cross this unique threshold of becoming an adult with thankfulness, hope and joy. I linked it with my own imminent retirement, another threshold that carries significance for the whole of my working life, not just the few weeks that are left and whatever lies beyond. I spoke about (horrid word, but useful) mindfulness. If I’d been talking to fellow clergy or caring professionals I might have spoken about awareness or reflective practice. The words don’t matter. What 's important is that we draw on our emotional and spiritual intelligence to bear upon these life-changing passages we all have to negotiate.  

This year’s Dying Matters theme is Talk, Plan, Live. The website says: ‘During the week, we will be encouraging members of the public to take five simple steps to make their end of life experience better, both for them and for their loved ones.’ These are: 1 Write your will; 2 Record your funeral wishes; 3 Plan your future care and support; 4 Consider registering as an organ donor; 5 Tell your loved ones your wishes.

Here in Durham (and we are not alone), we have encouraged this approach to death by inviting members of the Cathedral Community to design their funeral rite, or as much of it as they wish, and deposit it in writing with the Precentor. We often have deeply-held desires about the shape of the service: where it should take place, who should be involved in it, the readings, music and hymns we would like, what is to happen to our body and so forth. This is of real help to shocked and grieving next of kin and to the ministers who support them. Unless incorporated in a legal will, our funeral wishes are not legally binding, but loved ones will almost always want to respect them. (And if we change our minds subsequently – i.e. not after death but before it! – we can amend as we wish.)

We only die once. It’s an event worth taking seriously. I’m not talking about ‘designer dying’ as if it were a lifestyle (deathstyle?) choice. I mean investing in dying as the culmination of living, a gateway that we hope to pass through with the dignity that belongs to a human being made in the image of God. The seventeenth century Bishop Jeremy Taylor famously called it Holy Dying. Here’s the reason we need to talk about it more. Death is not simply a solitary matter for each of us personally. It is communitarian. Apart from its public and civil aspects – recording it, investigating it if necessary, handling the succession in accordance with law – it’s an event that belongs to all our communities of love, trust and care: our family, our faith community, our neighbourhood and the institutions we have belonged to. In each case, ‘every man’s death diminishes me.’

Nothing can be more important than the way we say farewell and honouring the memories that are left behind. I always feel the chill in the Ash Wednesday words 'dust you are, and to dust you shall return', especially when I say them to children as I impose the ashes on their foreheads. But being mortal, with our existence bounded by a beginning and an ending, is something we can learn to celebrate for the focus it gives to the unique meaning of each precious human life.

It makes me wonder why the Church of England isn’t making much more of it – or perhaps I have missed something? This year, Dying Matters Awareness Week falls at the very end of the Easter season. What better time to meditate on death in the light of these Great Fifty Days, and Christian faith’s sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead?

Even at the grave we sing alleluia!

Hallowe'en is Coming: some thoughts

It’s that time of year again. The shops are full of lurid spectres, ghosts, creepy-crawlies, masks and skeletons. ‘Halloween is almost here!!! Come to Wilko for all your goulish gear and requirements.’ (Shouldn’t that be ghoulish?) The Yorkshire Trading Company in a Durham shopping mall has a tall skeleton attired in spooky white and wearing a black cross. Dangling above is a big red disc promoting a ‘Bloody Weapon £1’. 

The history is colourful. It poked fun at death and the devil by partying and misrule: lighting fires, dressing up, mumming in the streets or taking part in a danse macabre. People play-acted dead souls who returned to knock on the door looking for hospitality. Much of this goes back to primitive atavistic fears about winter and keeping light and warmth alive during the darkest season of the year and threat posed by the spirits of ancestors if they were not treated with respect. To a pre-modern society all too familiar with cold, flood, disease and famine, it was an ominous time of year, this day midway between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice. 

In the Celtic calendar, Samhain marked the end of the harvest and the gateway of another year, though it’s not certain that the day’s mythology included the dead coming back to haunt the living. In early Christian times, the ambiguities of the season were not forgotten. All Saints Day on 1 November and All Souls next day kept the memory of these life-and-death, light-and-dark motifs. The name Hallowe’en is purely Christian, ‘the eve of All Hallows’. But Christians have differed on whether or not to embrace Hallowe’en ceremonies and the permitted chaos that went with them. Yet the tradition has persisted. In Europe and North America it’s seen as a day of parody and irony. Its defenders say that none of it is meant literally, but like all humour it makes a serious point about what lies beyond the familiar horizons of what we can see and touch.  Others add that the psychoanalytic observation that it acts out the deep fears and anxieties hidden in our psyche, our ‘shadow’. Both are healthy instincts that should be playfully encouraged, not suppressed. 

So if Halloween recognises mystery, and parodies death and the demonic, why don’t I care for it? It’s not the commercialism, rampant, plastic and shoddy though most of it is. It’s more about what it means. 

It brings back a memory. One October night over 30 years ago, the front door bell rang during dinner. My little daughter came with me to see who it was. When I opened the door I was faced with the sight of a full-sized open coffin. It took me a few moments to take it in. There was no-one to be seen: its mischievous young bearers were hiding down the street. It was as if it had arrived out of nowhere, a sinister memento mori meant especially for me. When the trick-and-treat kids came running, I found some sweets for them and they went away satisfied, as did my daughter who did not see why she should be left out; she got her fistful of liquorice allsorts too.

I found it eerily discomfiting. That’s the whole point of Hallowe’en, you say: it’s meant to unsettle you. Well maybe. But there’s a bigger point here. In earlier Christian societies, it belonged to a triduum: three days of religious commemorations. Hallowe’en was the vigil, a day of preparation. Next day came the joyful celebration of the saints brought the light of Christ into our world, and after that, All Souls with its solemn memories of the dead and the opportunity to think about dying and death in the light of the crucified and risen One. It would have made all the difference that the rituals, parody and play-acting were firmly held within a Christian framework. Lose that, and Hallowe’en becomes an end in itself, one more occasion of self-indulgence, an anti-game perhaps, laden with an unhealthy aspect that relishes frightening ourselves and others.  

Some churches ritualise Hallowe’en by devising games and rituals that focus not on darkness but on light, not on 'ghoulies and ghosties and things that go bump in the night', but on the wholesome goodness of the saints. My question about that is whether there’s still room to acknowledge the reality of the shadow, all that is threatening, oppressive and demonic in life as the traditional symbols and rituals encouraged. Perhaps what’s needed is a way of ritualising both together within one Hallowe’en ceremony. It could look like a foreshadowing of Good Friday and Easter when we recall both the awfulness of Golgotha, the ‘Place of the Skull’, and what follows, the new life and expectant hope of an empty tomb in the spring time garden. These are the places where truly human beings and saints are formed.

Has this more holistic kind of approach that moves purposefully yet playfully from death to resurrection already been tried? It would be good to know. I can see how it might have the makings of a cathartic ritual and a great party.

Birth and Death In Lent

Jenny and I are like Simeon and Anna in the temple, getting old while we wait for a child to turn up. Not that we are quite ready to say Nunc Dimittis just yet. The child in question is our daughter’s first baby, and our first grandchild. I blogged when we first heard that a birth was on the way. He or she (the parents have opted not to be told which) was due on Shrove Tuesday, so was inevitably nicknamed Pancake. Now it is ten days into Lent, and still there is no nativity. We are learning a lot about waiting.

Meanwhile, a friend and his family have also been waiting in these early days of Lent.  For them, it was the last illness of his mother; the waiting was quite simply for her to slip away peacefully, as they hoped her death would be. We talked about these different kinds of waiting, one of us for a birth and the other for a death. Like T. S. Eliot in The Journey of the Magi, we had seen birth and death and thought they were different.

 

But perhaps they aren’t.  When we keep vigil by a loved human being going through one of life’s sacred passages, when we wait for a birth or a death to come, we realise how similar they are, to people of faith at any rate. We are born, we die, we are re-born in some new and unimagined way. Both usually involve waiting and pangs, and generous helpings of patience, endurance and hope. There is often not much else that we can do than be present to what is happening and to those who wait with us: we must allow things to take the time they take.  

This theme of how we spend time has a Lenten aspect to it. This Lent, a Durham idea about trying to live in a way that is less busy has captured the imagination of a surprising number of people. It was stimulated by Stephen Cherry’s recent book Beyond Busyness. There is a website with resources: www.notbusy.co.uk, and even a red wristband to wear as notbusy people. The Twitter hashtag #NOTBUSY is being well used. All this is to open up space in our lives so that we pay more attention to God and to one another; perhaps, in the words of a slogan we coined in my Coventry days, ‘do less well’ (read those words several times putting the accent on different words).

I’ve found in the first two weeks of Lent that waiting for our grandchild has instilled a keener sense of wanting to be less busy so that I can concentrate on this great event that is about to happen, be present to the experience of anticipated delight and joy.  Of course, everyday life doesn’t stop when someone is born or dies, though it can feel like it – ‘stop all the clocks’ said Auden in a brilliantly observed line of poetry.  For time does change in the way we experience it, which is why we find it astonishing that the world goes on as if nothing has happened to us. 

This different and more sacramental quality is what I am trying to notice.  I want to try and embrace what we might call ‘God’s time’ with its gift of a deeper experience of being alive. And I want to allow this glimpse to make some difference to my ordinary days.  Lent with its intertwining of mortality, springtime, renewal and resurrection hope is an exquisitely rich season. So, waiting and preparing for Easter, and waiting and preparing for a birth or a death, belong together. Lent gathers up so much of life, its shadows and its light and everything in between.

And if ‘death is swallowed up in victory’, then birth too is an act of defiance against all that is deathly and deadly in our world. A birth brings not just delight but hope for the human race: life begins again. The old English word ‘Lent’ means spring. Soon the green blade rises.  

For my recent sermon on not being busy in Lent, see my blog of sermons and addresses at 

deanstalks.blogspot.com.