All Souls Day 2011

How do we see death?

The right instinct for self-preservation would see it as our enemy. Much of our physical life and energy is taken up in looking after our bodies and protecting them from harm. There is, alas, little attention given in modern medicine to facing up to death on this account, since, at a natural level, when a patient dies it is seen as a defeat.

As we mature in spirit a new perspective opens up and we ponder death as the stranger it is. In that pondering there lies a quest for meaning, not least when those we love are taken from us. There is strangeness especially in sudden death or the death of a child. Death puts a strange, uncomfortable question to every one of us so that death has become in the 21st century as unspeakable as sex was in the 19th century.

Many stay with death as enemy or stranger. Some though, and here faith comes in, some go on to see death as a friend. If faith means anything, it has to see beyond death to an unseen God who sees all, loves all and desires nothing to be lost. When faith and death meet it is death not faith that is changed. In the words of John Donne Death, thou shalt die.

A Christian is a far sighted one. Someone adventurous. One whose confidence in the victory of Jesus over death spurs them on. One who presses through the false boundaries of unbelief, sin, apathy, fear, sickness and, last of all, death, towards the gift of God in Jesus Christ.

To be a Christian is to be opposed to nostalgia in the sense of wanting to stop the flow of time and change. Christian faith is a forward journey with an eternal perspective that welcomes the challenges and surprises of life with Spirit given creativity since Jesus Christ is ever new.

If you live your life not content with a boring sameness but with what is other than, or apart from, yourself, this fascination draws you forward day by day into the possibilities of God which exceed your imagining.

If you centre in love on what is other than yourself you get prepared to face what is the ultimate strange ‘other’ – I mean death. We come to see death as nothing more than the frame of our earthly life. A frame is the picture’s friend. It shows it off. Without the defining of our life’s duration in time the span of our life would stretch into an infinite void. Without being born and dying we would be ageless beings. No one would be older or younger than anyone or anyone’s parent or child – we would be no one at all!

Who I am in my inner self is what matters ultimately. This is a product not just of heredity and environment but of my own free choices - to love or not to love. By growing love in my life I make of myself, with the Lord’s help, a being stronger than death.

This is what the scriptures are speaking of when they say love never ends. As we heard in the 23rd Psalm if I should walk in the valley of darkness no evil would I fear. You are there with your crook and your staff; with these you give me comfort. To live with love takes us out of ourselves and into the forward movement of He who is love itself.

Hope is not deceptive, because the love of God has been poured into our hearts. (Romans 5.5) Or, as we heard in today’s Gospel, it is (the) Father’s will that whoever sees the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life.

To live a human life is a process of formation that reaches its end in death in a more profound sense than end-finish. All that we are is moulded in us through our life in time so that we can be taken into our end-fulfilment in eternity.

The best preparation for death is through the inner wisdom of faith that presses us forward to live in hope day by day and to give ourselves in love to God and neighbour.

Three things abide – faith, hope and love – and the greatest of them is love.

Love is the best preparation for death because it takes us out of ourselves and shapes our inner self so we see our physical death as no enemy or stranger but the last friend we encounter on earth.

Saint Francis expressed this neatly when he gave death honoured place in his great hymn of creation: And thou, most kind and gentle death, waiting to hush our latest breath! Thou leadest home the child of God, and Christ our Lord the way hath trod.

On All Souls Day the Church invites us to ponder death not as enemy or stranger but as our friend because of this future orientation we hold.

It reminds us that love is the key to facing death.

Beyond contemplating our own mortality and need of God today we are showing love for our own dear dead. To pray for departed loved ones is to enfold them in our love, as we did in their life time, knowing, through the risen Christ, that the love which animates our prayer is stronger than death.

The faithful departed have passed beyond the frame of death into eternal love. The destruction of death destroys everything about us that is destructible but it cannot destroy loving commitment to God and neighbour.

Death, thou shalt die. As we offer prayer for our loved ones at the eucharist on All Souls Day we do so confident, in the love of God, that purifies them and us, building our lives on the unshakeable foundation that is Jesus Christ.