This evening we have heard the setting of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis which Herbert Howells wrote for the choir of New College, Oxford. The choir and the chaplain of that College are in an unusually fortunate position. In the unlikely event of the College going bust the chaplain and choir will be the last to loose their jobs. Professors, fellows, students of law and politics and chemistry and modern languages all can be dispensed with; but the chaplain and the choir must remain. According to the College Statutes they must be there every day in chapel praying, and praying most particularly three times a day for the founder, William of Wykeham, and for his parents. Prayer for the souls of the dead is of course the primary reason for the existence of all the mediaeval colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. The generosity of founders and benefactors in setting up these places of scholarship was to be repaid by prayer for the release of their souls from the pains of purgatory. These prayers were to help them in the place in which those souls ultimately destined for heaven were purged of the effects of their earthly sins and failures. Men like William of Wykeham led busy, public, and inevitably compromised lives. One of the wealthiest and longest lived men of his generation, William served two kings, Edward III and Richard II, as their Lord Chancellor. From humble origins he became one of the most influential men in the land. And yet the gospel talks of a God who puts down the mighty from their seats and sends the rich empty away. The rich and powerful men of William’s day, if they had any conscience at all, knew themselves to be powerfully in need of prayer. So some of them like William decided that poor theological scholars were the men to do it.
And do the colleges still pray for their founders? Well from time to time perhaps, but not as often or in the way they envisaged. So much of the honour which Oxbridge colleges now give to their founders and benefactors is really a matter of self congratulation – a celebration of their own ancient dignity. We have so little conception of what it means to pray for the dead – for the atheist it is mere superstition, and even for the Christian it can be seen as a dubious activity, like trying to bribe a judge. We lost the understanding of prayer for the dead at the time of the Reformation and it has been hard to find it again. The Reformers did not believe in purgatory because they saw it as a dangerous get out clause in the believers contract with God. They thought that sinners would cheerfully go on sinning on the grounds that they could always get off being condemned to hell for those sins by being prayed for when they came to purgatory. Of course if you were a notorious sinner you would need to be rich in order to pay for all those prayers and masses for your soul. And of course the church would make a lot of money out of you by praying in this way. It could make even more money if during your life time you bought indulgences, documents issued by the church letting your soul off so many years in purgatory.
And so the reformers swept the whole corrupt system away. They weeded any suggestion of prayer for the dead out of their services and they preached lengthy sermons on the topic often taking as their text the words with which I announced for this sermon. ‘As the tree falls so let it lie.’ It might seem an unlikely text for the purpose. In its context it is pointing to the fact that we must accept that there are some things in life that lie completely out of our control. When a great tree begins to topple you can’t affect the direction in which it falls. For the reforming preachers this text could be made to mean that when you die your destiny has already been decided heaven or hell and you can do nothing after death to alter that fact. There’s no half way house in purgatory that will make things come out all right in the end. Now that of course was not what the doctrine of purgatory was originally intended to mean. And of course the Catholic Church tried to point that out to the reformers but the abuse of the system had become so great that the voice of reason couldn’t be heard. In the end the argument between the two parties was about hope and about grace. What kind of teaching would give people the most hope? What kind of teaching would properly show the costliness of the grace of forgiveness revealed by Christ on the cross. The reformers said that all this talk of purgatorial pains after death was too scary; They wanted to reassure the faithful soul that genuine repentance and trust in God was sufficient to assure the soul’s safety as it left this world. The Catholics felt that this cheapened grace, and underplayed the seriousness of sin. Without the prospect of purgatorial punishment the sinner might delay repentance until his deathbed. Catholic teaching allowed you to believe that a merciful God would wipe away your sin through a purgatorial cleansing which acknowledged both the serious effect of sin but also the divine mercy.
Perhaps the best presentation of the doctrine of purgatory is found much later in Elgar’s setting of Newman’s poem the Dream of Gerontius. In the passage which Elgar found hardest to write, the soul comes before the judgement seat of God. The moment is described by an accompanying angel; ‘O happy suffering soul! For it is safe, consumed yet quickened by the glance of God.’ The soul is then taken to the waters of purgatory to be washed clean of sin as another angel sings the beautiful words, ‘Softly and gently, dearly ransomed soul, in my most loving arms I now enfold thee,’
Modern preachers tend to be much more reticent about picturing what happens to us in death. The majority of people, even if they don’t come to church seem to believe in life after death. The papers will occasionally report so called ‘beyond death experiences’. Saturday night television is currently showing an ongoing drama in which a sceptical psychologist works with a medium with a gift she would rather not have for being able to see the souls of the dead who need her to bring about the events that will release their souls into the next world.
Perhaps the main fault in all this is that we will keep talking about life after death and whether we believe in it and what it will be like. Whereas it would make much more sense to talk about God after death. Whatever happens to us as we die there is God in death and before death and after death. So St Paul can say, ‘Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part but then I shall know even as also I am known.’ Beyond death there is God to be known and myself to be known as God knows me. God is the only true last thing and the experience of God will provide the real meaning of the words death, judgement heaven and hell.
Talk of the judgment of God, in the context of a funeral is now somehow regarded as inappropriate, even insensitive. In William of Wykeham’s day it would have been regarded as inappropriate and even arrogant not to have mentioned judgement. For not to call to mind the divine judgment after death which every human life is to expect would be to undervalue the significance of that life. We are each ultimately significant because we are each to be judged; we are each accountable as individuals before our creator. It is part of God’s love for us that he deems our lives significant enough to be worthy of judgment. And not to have prayed for William as he came into the presence of that divine judgment would have seemed to his contemporaries like a failure of human love.
Perhaps the reason why we find it so hard to think of judgement in the context of a funeral is because of its association with a law court; an association which hardly seems appropriate in the sensitive context of a funeral. St Paul’s vision is better perhaps because it implies a more personal encounter with the God who knows me better than I know myself. And only this God can show me to myself in a way that offers the possibility of an honest penitence and a courageous acceptance of forgiveness. But it is that truly honest coming to know myself which has both the pain and the healing which the ancient understanding of purgatory was meant to convey. And in such circumstances I know now that I will, as the spiritual puts it, ‘be standing in the need of prayer’.
In Winchester Cathedral where William of Wykeham is buried there is a little free standing chapel known as a chantry, the place where the priest was to stand to pray for William’s soul. It is a visible reminder of something we all need and which we should all do. It is something which before the Reformation men and women put first and foremost in their last will and testament, that they should be prayed for by the saints in heaven and by the church on earth. Only then did they think about the distribution of their property. However, superstitious their world may seem to us their emphasis on prayer before property shows them in this matter at least to have been more spiritually mature than their descendants today. Amen
Stephen Tucker