In his life of the poet, John Donne, William Walton tells us that shortly before his death Donne commissioned a life size drawing of himself dressed in his shroud, with knots tied at the head and foot, and the material turned back to show his face. He then kept the drawing by his bed to remind him of what was soon to take place. The drawing is reproduced as the frontispiece of Donne’s last published sermon, Death’s Duel.
It is not an action that would now be regarded as altogether sane. And yet in the 17th century as for many centuries previously, preparing oneself for one’s death was regarded as an essential spiritual exercise. Books were written on dying well. Of course in those days death was something everyone lived with more immediately and had just cause to fear on a more daily basis. What now might seem morbid was then common sense.
And yet, perhaps, death is now, no less than then, something which will always frighten us and which has the power to question the way we live and to touch our feelings and our state of mind in subtle and unexpected ways. Now as then the way we die says something about the way we have lived, as it says everything about the life and mission of Jesus whose victory over death we celebrate once again this week.
The approaches to death are many and varied and few of us I suspect never give a thought to how we want to die. Some of us will fight it out to the end and refuse to think or talk about dying. There is a kind of obstinate courage in such a refusal, which may or may not help those who love us. There are those of us who want to talk about dying but those closest to us, somehow won’t allow it because they think it will be too painful. Some of us, perhaps, welcome death because life has become too difficult death becomes an escape from illness or more sadly from loneliness and unhappiness. Others of us have made sure that we are ready to die at any moment, however unexpectedly it may come. There are those who plan their death in as much detail as they can to spare those they love, but also to give themselves some sense of control over something which threatens to take away their power for action altogether. Some of us experience a kind of paralysis of anxiety, while others arrange their favourite things around them and lie in bed with a view out of the window and a glass of wine in hand, waiting as elegantly as they can. And perhaps most of us will experience or try most of these things and many others at different moments on the way towards death.
The ideal in a situation which can never be ideal would be, as Keats put it, to cease upon the midnight with no pain’, having left all our affairs in order, and having said good bye to those we love, and made peace with the life we have lived, so that we are ready to give ourselves over to God.
That of course is not a picture of the death of the one we think of as having conquered death. The picture of Jesus’ via dolorosa’ towards death begins to be painted almost as his life begins. The gospel story sets alongside his birth, the tragedy of the massacre of the innocents. His mother is told by Simeon in the temple that he will meet enmity and opposition and that her heart will be pierced. Opposition begins almost as soon as his mission gets underway. He tries to accustom his disciples to the idea that this opposition will end in tragedy, but they will not listen. He does not hide from such a possibility and goes to Jerusalem because he knows that he must bear witness to the gospel in the place that lies at the heart of his people’s historic self understanding. He tries to say goodbye to his friends, his last will and testimony bequeaths them bread and wine. He confronts God in the garden of Gethsemane with his desperate wish to stay alive but finally accepts that he must be handed over to all that must happen. It has often been noted how many times the verb to hand over’ or be handed over’ is attached to Jesus at the end of his life. It is so to speak written into the fine print of holy week that as the days pass so Jesus becomes less and less in control of anything that happens to him his passion is entirely passive. He can do nothing but receive and wait, until finally he is pinned down on the cross. And so in Jesus, the stature of waiting’ is fully measured. The one who saves us’ accepts that in the end he can do nothing. And if that is the image in which God most fully shows himself to us then that is the most complete evidence we need for establishing human dignity, even in the extremity of a painful death. That is where God is most transparently in us and so death is not to be feared, in whatever way we do or don’t try to prepare ourselves for it. In the struggle to accept what is happening to us, in the preparedness for death at any moment, in the handing ourselves over to the nurses and doctors who try to ease our pain, and finally in handing ourselves over to death itself we witness to the God who is supremely in the Christ who dies with us and for us on the cross.
Donne ends his final sermon, Death’s Duel, with the same image of Christ on the cross, and his breathing his soul back into the hands of God. There we leave you in that blessed dependency, to hang upon him who hangs upon the cross.’ That sense of dependency arises out of his conviction that the mercies of God work momentarily in minutes’ and his certainty of God’s care that the soul be safe, what agonies soever the body suffers in the hour of death.’
But then of course,
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die.
We can only speak of death in this way, as Donne spoke in his duel with death, in his sermons and poetry, because we believe in the truth that we die to live, now and in eternity. In modern English the phrase. Dying to live’ has a peculiarly appropriate resonance. It speaks of the New Testament conviction that life is stronger than death, and that in this life acts of self sacrifice make for a more profound sense of living the glimpse of what Jesus calls eternal life.’ But in modern English we can also speak of dying’ to see someone or do something, by which we express colloquially a strong desire for something. So in that sense we might use the phrase dying to live’ to express a passion for living. The message of Easter is that the passion of our dying can also be a passion for life.
With my love and prayers for a blessed Easter,
Father Stephen
The Vicar writes
Stephen Tucker