From time to time, when I’m preparing a funeral I’m asked if we can include a particular poem by Dylan Thomas. I always say yes, but I’m always troubled by it. It begins:
‘Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’
My problem is I suspect really just a gut feeling – of course I sometimes wonder whether it’s really appropriate to the person who has died; sometimes it represents just a feeling in the mind of one or more of the chief mourners. But deep down I suppose I wonder whether the poem represents a very Christian attitude to death.
The accepted Christian view of death might seem to be that we should meet it with acceptance and tranquility, thinking more about the life to come than the life that is past. Our approach to death, if it comes towards the end of a full life, should perhaps include a desire for wisdom, for reconciliation, for resolution. Yet Dylan Thomas’s poem seems to encourage something very different. It was written at the time of his father’s death – so there may be personal elements in the poem of which we are unaware. Nevertheless there is something there which we can all respond to, something which the poet is saying as much to himself as to his father. The poet voices regret for the wise men whose words have not lit up the world, good men whose deeds have seemed only frail, wild men who celebrated the wrong thing, grave men who have failed to find joy in life; and at the end, turning to his father, the poet seems to acknowledge that he too has been guilty of these things and that he needs his father’s grief and passion and forgiveness to set him on the right path. The poet is saying that in the face death we should seek to do something with our lives that keeps the light burning fiercely until it dies. The rage the poet speaks of is not a resentful anger but a rage on behalf of the gift of life.
Such rage can take many forms, and can be related to many other feelings – but all of them represent a fractured personal landscape. Here there is no harmony or resolution but intransigence and a staring in the face of irreconcilable experiences, and unresolved contradictions.
I have recently been reading a book which looks at these characteristics under the heading of ‘Late Style’ – a posthumous collection of essays by the Palestinian scholar Edward Said. One of the examples he provides of such late style is Beethoven. And whatever disagreements there may be about what is going on in the music of Beethoven’s later years, it cannot be denied that Beethoven is breaking boundaries at the end of his life. He writes a sonata longer and more difficult than any so far written – the Hammerklavier Op 106. But then his final sonata op 111 only has two very contrasting movements. There is the huge 9th symphony op. 125 and its choral finale about which the pianist Czerny wrote: ‘So much power, innovation, and beauty as ever [came] from the head of this original man, although he certainly sometimes led the old wigs to shake their heads.” Before that there was the even more vast Missa Solemnis – impossible for use in a liturgical setting even though that was what was originally intended. There are the Diabelli variations for piano op 120 about which Alfred Brendel wrote, “The theme has ceased to reign over its unruly offspring. Rather, the variations decide what the theme may have to offer them. Instead of being confirmed, adorned and glorified, it is improved, parodied, ridiculed, disclaimed, transfigured, mourned, stamped out and finally uplifted”
And then again the late string quartets dismissed in their own day, because they went so far beyond what audiences expected. Spohr described them as ‘Indecipherable and uncorrected’. A kinder critic wrote, ‘We know there is something there but we do not know what it is’. In all this music Beethoven is still experimenting – most particularly by going back to the old forms such as the fugue. Massive and difficult polyphonic writing is found alongside the simple and conventional. Beethoven’s late style seems so often to be elusive, bristling, difficult, unyielding, scandalous, assaulting the idea of wholeness, a form of protest or not giving in, seldom achieving serenity or resignation.
But why reflect on all this in relation to Advent ? Advent is a peculiar season of the church’s year, perhaps the oddest and most ambiguous. On the surface it is a season of preparation for Christmas – a season of fasting, restraint and penitence. Advent Sunday is the first Sunday of the church’s year so it is also a season of beginnings and yet it begins as the calendar heads to the darkest season of the year. And that is paralleled perhaps by the fact that this season also looks to the second coming of Christ and therefore also focuses on the themes of death, judgment, heaven and hell, known traditionally as the Four Last Things – the subject of eschatology. And this is a theme which is as it were rubbed in our faces on Advent Sunday – the gospel reading quotes from a strange discourse which Jesus gives to his disciples in the last week of his life and following on from the cleansing of the Temple. This final discourse is notoriously difficult. It is delivered as Jesus and his disciples ponder the future of the Temple. Jesus predicts its destruction and what he did in disrupting the life on the Temple on Palm Sunday can be seen as a prophetic symbol of that destruction. Later as they sit facing Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives the disciples ask when all this will take place and what will be the signs that it is about to take place.
Jesus begins by warning them against false Messiahs who will tell them the time is at hand. He then explains to them that wars, famines and earthquakes are not, as they so often were in the ancient world, to be interpreted as signs of the end. He then warns them that they will be put on trial for their faith but that the Spirit will inspire their answers and so they needn’t worry in advance what they should say. He warns them that their faith will cause divisions in their families, but that will still not be the end as the gospel must first be preached to all nations. The key attitude for his disciples must be patience and endurance. The remainder of the speech uses familiar imagery from the prophets of the Old Testament. These details describe the actions they are to take when Jerusalem is attacked – they are not to take part in its defense but to flee. The imagery of destruction is tragic. The prophecy ends with language drawn from the prophet Daniel about the coming of the Son of man with power and great glory. It is an image of vindication and yet the discourse ends with a repeated statement that no-one can know when it will happen. ‘Of that day or hour knoweth no-one not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father only.’ The disciples’ task is to watch, pray, and to carry on the task of serving God and their neighbour as Jesus has taught them.
In pondering these words we should beware of thinking that their original audience expected literally to see Jesus retuning on the clouds. They were not as naïve as some modern readers seem to think. Jesus’ language is the language of the prophets – symbolic language which provided a pictorial representation of a mystery which couldn’t be talked about in any other way – the mystery of God’s intention for the future of his creation.
What is significant for us in this season of Advent, this time of reflection on endings is the general tenor of what Jesus says. And in some ways it takes us back to where we began. It points to the fact that we are not to expect our own future or the future of our society or of the church to be a tranquil one. To put it somewhat crudely the gospel does not give us the impression that if only the followers of Jesus could be better Christians they would bring about the kingdom themselves through a process of ever more successful moral progress.
Though without wanting to make any kind of comparison between the characters of Jesus and Beethoven it might be helpful to look at this difficult discourse in terms of what we were saying earlier about late style. As we are encouraged by Jesus’ words to think in Advent about endings we might lay aside those probably idealistic expectations of wise, reflective, reconciled and resolved endings to life – and perhaps in a way it might be a relief not to set ourselves such goals – even though we might still have moments of calm, of honest conversations and genuine insight. But at the same time Advent is saying to us that we must be prepared to go on singing the Battle Hymn of the Kingdom. If there is a musical equivalent of Jesus’ words to the disciples it is there in the late works of Beethoven, complex, unresolved, conflicted, combining both rage and patience. As we get older we cannot expect to have all our questions answered, or our doubts resolved. We should pray simply that the Spirit will guide our thoughts and words when we need them.
Of course by comparison the other extraordinary thing about Advent is that it ends with an inarticulate baby. One of the best Christmas paintings is by Veronese – showing the adoration of the Magi. Three old men down on their knees gazing at this baby, while their servants and retainers who have travelled with them all this way, clearly don’t understand and think their masters are mad. The madness of new discoveries can be another aspect of late style for all of us!
The Vicar Writes
Stephen Tucker