It is unusual for the media to be taken by surprise, as they were by the reaction to the death of the Pope. It is too early to know what lasting effect the ending of Karol Wojtyla’s life will have. Nevertheless as a result of the extraordinary response all over the world to the dying of Pope John Paul II we have this Easter been forced to think even more seriously than usual about death and life.
For me one of the most powerfully religious descriptions of a death which doesn’t however, use religious language is to be found Susan Hill’s novel, ‘In the Springtime of the year.’
The story tells of the bereavement of a young women whose husband, a forester, has been crushed to death by a falling tree. Near the end of the story she goes to see the man who had been with her husband at his death to ask him the question which in her grief she has so far been incapable of asking, ‘What actually happened?” Her husband’s friend replies;
I sat by him. Just sat on the ground. On my own with him. It… I’ve never known it like that. I’ve never been with death before, seen it come over a man and take him. I’ve been with it often enough. But I’ve never felt the same. What was true, what was true about it, once and for good. I couldn’t doubt the truth after that. After sitting with him there in the wood. Touching him. It was death and – and life. I’d never doubt that now. Never. It was inside me and all around. And him. A change…… some great change.’
In his own way the dying of Karol Wojtyla was also a witness to that ‘great change’ the triumph of life over death. The preciousness of life does not end in death but it undergoes a great change. In Christian language we say that through death our life enters the eternal or timeless presence of God. But because our language is tied to historical time – words begin to break down in trying to describe what is timeless. But all we have are words and we have to do our best with them. And we have inherited words and actions from the Christian past which try to express something of the nature of this great change. The religious journalist Clifford Longley put it very clearly in his ‘Thought for the day’ last week, when he reminded us that the primary purpose of the Mass in St Peter’s Square on Friday was to pray that God would forgive Karol Wojtyla his sins. However great and significant he may have been as the head of the Catholic Church, he went to God with his sins because he was human and the first stage of this great change is judgement.
Paul seems to be saying something about this when he writes in our second lesson of the day which is revealed in fire (1 Cor. 3:10-17). What precisely Paul means is hard to determine. But he clearly thinks of judgement as akin to the test of fire, which consumes what does not have the durability of graced and inspired workmanship. He also sees that we run the risk of being engulfed by the burning up of what fails the test, though reassuring us that we will come through the ordeal. This might seem harsh unless we hold fast to the idea that this is the fire of love that tests everything by the truthfulness and integrity of love.
And then taking the image of the Temple, which was central to Judaism, Paul presents the believer as a Temple in whom the spirit of God dwells as in the Holy of Holies of the human heart. God’s Temple is sacred and we are sacred. And perhaps this may help us to understand and to trust in what happens to us when we die. St Augustine tells us that God is closer to us than we are to ourselves. God inhabits us. God dwells in us as in the heart of a Temple. God is in me body, soul and spirit. God is in my head and in my understanding; in my eyes and in my looking; in my mouth and in my speaking, in my heart and in my thinking. Therefore when we die, though the physical temple disintegrates God is still in all that the physical temple enshrined the wholeness of who we are which we call the soul. The soul remains God’s Temple and God can give that Temple whatever form or life he chooses. Jesus and some of his contemporaries believed in the transformation of the Temple of the body so that it could live in some new spatial and temporal form. Perhaps that is what the disciples had a vision of on the first Easter day. That is so hard for us to imagine that the effort may reduce us to silence. But it is a trustful and hopeful silence. And finally there is always the poetry of Henry Vaughan
They are all gone into the world of light !
And I alone sit ling’ring here ;
Their very memory is fair and bright,
And my sad thoughts doth clear.
It glows and glitters in my cloudy breast,
Like stars upon some gloomy grove,
Or those faint beams in which this hill is dress’d,
After the sun’s remove.
I see them walking in an air of glory,
Whose light doth trample on my days :
My days, which are at best but dull and hoary,
Mere glimmering and decays.
O holy Hope ! and high Humility,
High as the heavens above !
These are your walks, and you have show’d them me,
To kindle my cold love.
Dear, beauteous Death ! the jewel of the just,
Shining nowhere, but in the dark ;
What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust,
Could man outlook that mark !
He that hath found some fledg’d bird’s nest, may know
At first sight, if the bird be flown ;
But what fair well or grove he sings in now,
That is to him unknown.
And yet, as angels in some brighter dreams
Call to the soul when man doth sleep,
So some strange thoughts transcend our wonted themes,
And into glory peep.
If a star were confin’d into a tomb,
Her captive flames must needs burn there ;
But when the hand that lock’d her up, gives room,
She’ll shine through all the sphere.
O Father of eternal life, and all
Created glories under Thee !
Resume Thy spirit from this world of thrall
Into true liberty.
Either disperse these mists, which blot and fill
My perspective still as they pass :
Or else remove me hence unto that hill
Where I shall need no glass.
Stephen Tucker