The Suffering of Love

There is something uniquely eternal about love. After all: "and now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love" (1 Cor 13:13), and "God is love" (1 Jn 4:8). Love, unlike faith and hope, is uniquely conceivable without a temporal dimension. Love cares for what has come to be--what is--and not for the formless possibility of what might be in the future. This is why love is tortured by time, which continually threatens the objects in which it rests. Only love can, and must, suffer, while faith and hope do not.

Human agency is the agency of love, the operation of this most divine longing. Yet the opportunities for the action of love are too often inaccessible to us. The more aware we are of the world, the more love is awakened within us and the more incompetent we find ourselves to be in uniting with the loveliness within objects. There is literally not enough time for our love. We have not the skills needed to enact it. When we seem to have succeeded in some small measure, it is at the painful cost of neglecting some other loveliness. The byproduct of love in the midst of temporality is always grief and regret.

To be temporal is to suffer, not because time is evil but because there is something timeless at the core of our being: "he has placed eternity in their hearts" (Ecc 3:11). This is why the physical ailments we term "suffering" are so insufferable: because they eat away at the already-too-little time and energy we have for love. And perhaps this explains the most suffocating forms of depression: an oppressive sense of dread as our fallen and finite capacities encounter a world of infinite loveliness. Whether diagnosable or not, species of these sufferings are the inevitable price of a life that is lived in a temporal world that is "charged with the grandeur of God". 

The ultimate realization of temporal suffering is the final loss of agency in death, for there the possibility of love is at an end. Death thus makes the task of love infinitely more urgent, but at the same time it renders love's meaning questionable in the extreme."The afterlife," conceived simplistically as an indefinite continuation of this form of temporal existence, would only exacerbate this problem. Love would never find its home. Its sense of loss would mount infinitely with the coming into being and passing away of the objects (and moments) of love. In light of this perplexing antinomy, we must conclude that death itself is some form of mercy, precisely because it is the necessary presupposition of the possibility of some other, better, form of love's existence. 

"Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit" (Jn 12:24). The scriptures speak of death neither as love's total cessation, nor as an intrusive but ultimately temporary obstacle in love's infinite march forward. No, death is somehow the doorway to love's home. One dies in order to live in a new mode, one in which all of love's objects, one's own and those of others, are present to one all at once with their true depth of loveliness, its Source, now apparent. No longer must one object and its loveliness give way to another in a cruel zero-sum game; now all serve as factors in a multiplication whose product is innumerable. This is the hope of resurrection, and this is why love must take up its cross and suffer. 

Melancholy lines upon the death of a dog

No dog lives forever but I hoped he would be the first. Kola, my Labrador. Kola, my trusted friend and confidant these 7 years. Kola who has seen my children grow, almost since they were babies, and has loved them every minute. Kola, the glory of his breed and the friendliest member of his household. Kola, bone-chewer, ball-chaser, beach-swimmer, humper of male dogs and feared destroyer of several chickens.

He was named after a teddy bear that my son had when he was two years old. The bear had come all the way from China with a tag that bore the name of Kola. I don’t know why they called it that. Maybe they were trying to spell Koala. My son loved that bear, it slept beside him and he dragged it around in the dirt wherever he went. He must have imagined that getting a dog was the same kind of thing as having a teddy bear. So the day the puppy came bounding into our lives – the first pet we ever had – my little son declared that the dog’s name henceforth would be Kola. And that is what we called him.

We soon learned that a dog is even better than a teddy bear. Because a dog is not a thing. He is not a person either, I understand that, but he dwells somewhere in the borderlands of personhood. Anyone who doubts that animals have souls has never reckoned with a Labrador. Whether the dog brings his soul with him into the world or acquires it through constant communion with the human soul is a moot point. At any rate the dog is more susceptible to humanisation than any other animal. He feels joy and doubt and affection and cunning and anticipation and contentment and shame – what human ever felt more?

The creature of whom I speak used to sneak under the covers of my son’s bed and lie there on the forbidden mattress, a huge Labrador-sized lump under the covers beside a sleeping boy, hardly daring to breathe in case I found him and banished him to the unwelcoming floor.

Once when I had taken him to the beach he saw me body-surfing and was seized by a sudden terror for my life. He snatched the leash up in his mouth – I had left it lying on the sand – and plunged into the waves and swam out to me, whimpering horribly until I consented to take the leash in my hand, whereupon he turned and swam to shore, pulling me behind him. I thanked him for rescuing me, it was a considerate gesture, and I informed him that I would now continue swimming. But he – he who loved beaches and knew them so well – was very distrustful of the waves that day and sulked mightily when I tried to get back in the water. So I trusted his instincts and lay down on the sand instead and he laid his wet head upon me in satisfaction. And I never drowned that day, so maybe he was right. Who knows how much a dog knows?

Once, when I had left a carton of eggs on the kitchen table, he crept into the room and climbed up on the chair and somehow got the carton open and removed the little unfertilised parcels one by one without cracking the shells or making any mess. One by one he smuggled the eggs outside. I saw the carton right where I had left it on the table and saw that it was empty. I searched the premises and eventually found the crime scene: a black dog, looking rather bloated, lying in an orgy of eggshells in the back yard, licking his dripping whiskers in mournful self-reproach. “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame”: Shakespeare must have been thinking of Kola and the eggshells when he wrote those words.

Today he died.

He left our lives almost as suddenly as he had arrived. They said it was a cancer of the spleen, it happens sometimes they said, the invisible malignant growth advancing secretly and one day bursting and then, before you can say fetch, the Joy of Nature is lying very still and watching you with infinitely patient eyes and telling you in little whimpers that he is sorry but he cannot get up, not today, that he does not feel like playing anymore, that he will not be needing breakfast, not today, not ever again, that you should go along to the park without him and let him lie there in the shade a while with the ants and beetles creeping all around him.

By the time we got him to the vet he was nearly dead. We gathered round him, my children and me, and whispered our sweet nothings in his floppy ears and caressed his good kind face and anointed his gentle paws with our tears.

We did not lie to him. That’s not how we do things around here. We did not tell him everything would be all right. We told him that we loved him and he was dying and we would never see his face again and we would never forget him. He had walked his last walk, he had chewed his last bone, he had fetched his last slobber-filthy tennis ball. He looked me in the eyes and trusted me completely, in dying as in life. He had never died before but he knew I’d get him through it.

Apart from dying, it had been one of the great weeks of his life. For it was only a few days ago that he, Kola, the somewhat fat and lumbering Labrador, caught a young rabbit that had been grazing on the lawn. A hundred years of selective breeding came good at last. He caught it. He brought the rabbit to me. He nursed it in his mouth as gently as an unbroken egg. It hung from his jaws, alive and apprehensive, the two long bunny-ears twitching in dismay. He stood before me: Kola, catcher of rabbits. He laid the bunny at my feet as worshipfully as the Magi bringing gifts. His eyes burned with a holy pride. I paused from washing the dishes and looked at him and told him to take the goddamn thing outside this minute: which he gladly did, and with all ceremony.

I think of him now with that rabbit and I thank God for it. I am glad the dear boy finally got a little taste of heaven before he left this world. He had caught chickens before but that was years ago and it was only practice. The real thing, as everybody knows, is Rabbit. The prophet says that in the world to come “the wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together, and a little child will lead them” (Isaiah 11:6). If that is true, then even as you read these tear-stained lines you must picture Kola curled up with his big face resting on his paws, lazy as ever, sleeping like a dog beside the tender and ever-living rabbit in that peaceable kingdom where cancers never grow, only joys, where all the leashes are lost, and where every hour of the day is breakfast time.

A Month Without Jenson

“Death indeed will terminate my story, but it will not conclude it; for it will make all my hopes into might-have-beens and my fears into never-minds, and so make absurd the anticipatory coherences by which I have lived. If I am to have a conclusion, it will have to be a resurrection.” 

—R. W. Jenson (Aug 2, 1930-Sept 5, 2017)

It’s been a month since Robert Jenson left us to the tasks of Christian life: the speaking and hearing of the gospel. These tasks directed all of Jenson’s theology, and press towards questions of culture and life. Jenson refused to indulge the strategy of cultural retreat that attempted theology as though all the modern philosophical movements had not occurred. All contemporary theology jostles in the wake of Kant and Hegel and Heidegger and the rest. We must ask how we can speak the gospel faithfully, but without simply capitulating to modernity. We cannot be premodern, but neither can we be simply modern. Jens’s theology rescued this student of the tradition more than once from the worst excesses of modern theology.

As a young evangelical student, all of my brightest ideas were merely stolen notions taken from the reactionary and modernising evangelicals: a full-throated endorsement of divine passibility, a commitment to divine temporality (arising from a tendency towards univocity), credulity towards the “hellenisation” thesis, and a belief that divine love required libertarian human freedom. Like the worst kind of young evangelical modernist, I sifted through the tradition cynically, believing the ancient Christians to have been enthralled by pagan philosophies.

When my masters degree led me to my first detailed study of Jens’ theology, I presumed that his raging against certain elements of the tradition was animated by the same scepticism as my own. I had always taken Jens as holding to the Athenian captivity of the Church, but I found that his approach to the hellenisation thesis was more nuanced than I had supposed. In one reflection, Jens playfully dismissed the purity of theology by asserting that the boundary between theology and any other discourse is “blessedly ill-defined”.

The task of theology, Jens shows, is not to find its own peculiar pure discourse, but to evangelise—to speak the gospel and see what difference it makes. It would later become a commonplace statement for Jens: the early Christians did not “hellenise” the gospel, they evangelised their own antecedent hellenism. This single observation completely eroded the thrall of the hellenisation thesis for me. I no longer looked to ancient Christianity to see what was uncorrupted that could be salvaged, but to see just how the gospel had shaped the thought-forms of the ancient world. Jens taught me how to see the gospel as the engine driving all Christian discourse.

Startled from my doctrinal slumbers, I decided to make Jens the object of my doctoral studies. Though his theology is undoubtedly revisionist, my study of Jens’ writings revealed to me a deep commitment to the Christian tradition. I was amazed to find that he was only partially modernising, tending to keep the architecture of the tradition in place, while putting up new signs or perhaps offering a coat of paint here and there.

Sometimes the awakenings to Jens’ subtle treatment of the tradition came slowly. Having swallowed Hart’s assertion that Jens denies simplicity, and having witnessed Jens’ vociferous critiques of Augustine, I mistakenly concluded that Hart was right. Knee-to-knee with Jens in Princeton, I tried to provoke him to some remarks on divine simplicity. Jens began, “Of course God doesn’t have parts”, and proceeded to robustly defend the necessity of simplicity for a thoroughly Christian theology. I went home to Sydney and read all of his books again and finally found my error.

It's been a month without Jens—a difficult month for those of us shaped and supported by him and Blanche (and there are many of us). And yet, as he affirmed again and again, we slouch not towards the grave, but towards resurrection. We are each of us drawn forward into God's enjoyable presence, roused to life by the musical harmony of the restless divine activity. Though death may take us, we are each of us remembered by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. "And to be remembered there is to live" (On Thinking the Human, 11).

Death of a sister

Two days ago we buried Ginger. Good sweet Ginger, who had meant the world to those who knew her. Ginger, who left our lives – but not our hearts – too soon.

Since the first day we met her, my children and I, we never saw Ginger without her sister. The two of them were inseparable. They lived a contented, unassuming life in a little wooden cabin nestled among the sprawling unkempt gardens and the trees. Theirs was a life that seemed to know nothing of the anxieties that come from grand schemes and high ambitions. They had pieced their world together out of a thousand tiny kindnesses, small gestures, shared moments that would have looked like nothing at all to anyone who had not studied the intricate domestic choreography of those sisters.

There is a fellow in our neighbourhood who once had the effrontery to describe the sisters’ life as “dull” – which seemed to me as confused a notion as if he had reproached a German clock for dullness just because it always keeps the time. Certainly there was something staid, almost Victorian, about the manners and habits of those sisters. But the fact that a thing is small and precise, the fact that it follows a scrupulous routine, does not make it empty or contemptible. One can bluster about like the busiest person in the world and yet be fundamentally bored with life – that is the fate of so many of our contemporaries – or one can live richly and well with one’s sister in the confines of a small wood cabin, oblivious to all the world outside. Such was Ginger’s life: a small and uneventful life, perhaps, but a good life too.

And because the life of Ginger was free of all ambition and pretence, it was a hospitable life that always had room for friends and strangers and, most of all, for children. I would like to give you some picture of what Ginger came to mean to my children, but any account will fall far short of the thing itself. Little by little, in her own modest and matter-of-fact way, she welcomed my children into her gentle world. The sisters’ cabin, just a short walk from our own back door, soon became a regular destination. There I would find the children playing, eating, singing, or huddled in a circle chattering away with Ginger and her sister scarcely able to get a word in edgewise.

It sometimes happens that children trespass the boundaries of common courtesy; and there must have been occasions on which the sisters felt that their orderly world had come unhinged in the bustling presence of my three children – not to mention all the times when one of the children would show up, unannounced and unexpected, with a friend in tow. But I never saw anything in the demeanour of those sisters to suggest even a flicker of impatience. They were as indulgent with my children as if they had been their own. Ginger in particular became something of a confidant for my younger daughter. I recall times when, hurt or disappointed, my daughter went straight to Ginger’s place to tell her all about it even before she thought to tell her own parents. Not that Ginger ever spoke of such things to me. Whatever secrets my daughter might have shared with her were sealed up in the impeccable confidentiality of Ginger’s heart, just as they are sealed now forever in the colder confidentiality of the grave.

How suddenly Ginger’s illness came on, and how quickly her frail health went from bad to worse, are matters of which I will not speak here. We had driven her to the hospital – neither Ginger nor her sister drives a car, nor have they ever felt the need of one – and the look on the doctor’s face told us everything. At the very end, we nursed her in our own home. She died around midnight on the night of Thursday December 11th, after those who loved her had stroked her smooth brow and said their last goodbyes. 

Ginger was laid to rest near the the big maple tree. We read a psalm and said the prayers that are reserved for such occasions. We thanked God for the simple goodness of Ginger’s life, and prayed that, following her example, we might be good and true and simple in our own lives too. We looked forward to the final day when Ginger will rise with us and with all the ones we ever loved and lost. When there was nothing left to say we threw handfuls of earth into the grave. 

The other guinea pig, Ginger’s sister, peered out at the proceedings from my daughter’s protective embrace. Her whiskers twitched. Her soft fur, chestnut-brown, was wet with children’s tears.

When the solemnities had concluded we placed fresh flowers on the grave. We went into the back yard and raised the hinged roof on the wooden hutch and put Ginger’s sister back inside. She shot us a quizzical glance and went back to eating an old carrot. There was something sort of bereaved in the way she nibbled at it. For consolation we brought her lettuce, broccoli, cabbage, a sprig of parsley, an apple sliced in two. There is nothing like fresh veggie scraps for the wounded spirit.

Patristic peculiarities: John Chrysostom and the poison eucharist

This is the start of a new occasional series on some of the more peculiar arguments I've come across in early Christian literature. These are the quirky bits that somehow never made it into the textbooks. 

John Chrysostom, the great fourth-century preacher, described Christ's descent into hell as a kind of poison eucharist. When Christ died, his body descended into the ground. Death ingested his body like food. But this was no ordinary food. It was a fatal poison. It brought on violent stomach cramps, worse (Chrysostom assures us) than the agony of a woman in labour. Death could not digest Christ's body. Death writhed in pain, then vomited: "Like those who take food and vomit it up because they can't retain it, so death vomited. He received the body which he could not digest, and so he had to throw it up again" (all this is from homily 24 on 1 Cor).

But after developing this vomiting image in graphic detail, Chrysostom changes his mind. No, he observes, Christ didn't come back out of the mouth of death. He didn't come out the same way he went in. Death didn't merely vomit; it suffered a massive abdominal rupture. After death had ingested Christ's body – I warn you, this is pretty grisly – it suffered violent convulsions, and then its stomach burst open. Everything came out. Chrysostom is thinking here of the story in Bel and the Dragon, where Daniel killed the dragon by feeding it a concoction of pitch and fat and hair; upon eating this vicious recipe, the dragon's stomach burst open and it died. "For Christ didn't come forth again from the mouth of death, but issued forth from the belly of the dragon, bursting it and ripping it open from within."

Thus the body of Christ proves to be a fatal poison. It destroys death from within. When the stomach of death is violently emptied, it's not only Christ's body that is released. Everything else that death had ever ingested is released as well. The contents of death's stomach are completely emptied. Hell is left empty, and not a single one who died is left in the grave.

And Chrysostom's point? "This is the body that he has given to us to hold and to eat!" These grisly reflections come, after all, in a sermon on the eucharist. Chrysostom is reminding his congregation never to come carelessly or irreverently to the table. "Purify your soul, prepare your mind for the reception of these mysteries!" The same body that poisoned death and emptied the grave is now ingested by the believer. It is the same body, the same potent food. "So," Chrysostom cautions, "let us stir ourselves and be filled with horror." When you come to the table, don't forget what you're about to eat!

"Because of this body I am no longer earth and ashes, no longer a prisoner, but free…. This body, nailed and scourged, was more than death could stand against. The sun turned aside its beams when it saw this body sacrificed. The veil was rent for this body, and the rocks burst open and the whole earth was shaken. This is the very same body!" At the Lord's table we hold this body in our hands. We "kiss" it and "bite it with our teeth." (Chrysostom observes that lovers often nibble each other when they're passionately kissing: in the same way we lovingly nibble the consecrated bread.) Death ingested this body, not knowing that it was eating its own death. The same body is life to us when we eat it. By poisoning and slaying all death's power, this food has become "our hope, our salvation, our light, our life."

On birthdays

In my pocket I keep a small black diary. Like any diary it has a spot for each day of the year so that I will know where I have to be and what I have to be doing. I use it for meetings, class times, appointments, deadlines. Even with the diary close to hand, I make my way through life with only the vaguest notion of where I am meant to be and what I am meant to be doing. Without the diary I would be lost: I would never show up for anything: I would never be seen again.

At the start of every year I open the new diary and write my name in the front. Then I take a red pen and write down the names of the dead. Love of the dead is one of the Christian virtues and I have tried to practise that virtue with the aid of a small black diary.

Mostly it is the names of saints and people who have been saints to me. Liturgical saints like St Basil and St Augustine. Activist saints like Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King. Writing saints like Thomas Merton and T. S. Eliot. As well as people I knew and loved and decided not to forget. Ray Anderson. Mr Goldsworthy. My grandfather. My mother’s stillborn child – my sister or brother – whom I have wanted and missed my whole life. John the Baptist. St Francis and St Clare.

They are written in red ink on their birthdays, and I carry their birthdays around in my pocket.

In Christian tradition it is the date of a person’s death that is called the “birthday,” dies natalis, since our truest birth is not entry into this vale of tears but entry into the love of God. There is an Orthodox burial rite in which the body of a deceased monk is wrapped in swaddling clothes like a baby; the other monks gather around singing psalms, rejoicing through tears at their brother’s birthday.

Like all Christians I love the dead. But it is never easy to add a new name to the diary. This month I already had to add one name. And then a week ago I had to add another name because of the birthday of a saintly man from the community where I teach. He was our manager of finance and business.

He was at home when it happened. He had been chasing his little dog because it had run out on to the road. He was fearful for the dog’s safety and so he ran after it, calling it sweet names to make it come back to him. He chased the dog because he loved it. That is what caused the heart attack. The dog was saved; a saint was born into light. The dog was carried home; a saint was carried by angels.

If you’ve spent much time working in Christian institutions, you’ll know that you don’t get to meet many saints among the clergy or the institutional bureaucrats or the teachers of theology. But you often get to know saints among the workers who quietly support these institutions through their acts of loving service. Our finance and business manager, who devoted half a lifetime to serving our community, was a saint of that sort, a holy and humble man.

Now his name is in the diary. Now he has a birthday. Now every year I will remember him.

He was never the kind of person to seek attention, so he would probably be pleased to know that he does not get a whole date to himself in my diary. He has to share the spot with two other saints. His name is written in red ink underneath theirs: “Titus and Timothy, companions of Paul.” There is something very modest and self-effacing about those saints. The three of them have a lot in common.

I suppose as I get older more and more names will find their way into my diary. If I grow old enough, there might even come a year when the diary is nothing but red ink. No more meetings and appointments written in blue or black. No more deadlines, no more people to please or disappoint. Just a diary with the names of all my dead. Then there will be nothing left to do except to open the diary each day and to read their names (if I can still read) and pray for them (if I can still pray) and ask them to spare a thought for me too. My life would then become one unceasing festival, a wheel of birthdays slowly turning, a cloud of witnesses that thickens even as my own life grows ever thinner, lonelier, destitute of so many companions, so many faces I would love to see again.

And then, one bright day, my own birthday will come.


What that day will bring no one can tell. But I will keep practising for it in the meantime. I will acclimatise myself to the company of the dead. I will celebrate their birthdays. I will carry their names in my pocket.

The monk's toes

Tarrawarra Abbey, All Souls' Day

So it turns out I have feet. Two of them. They squat like white toads on the green grass, wrinkled, sprouting hairs. Every once in a while the toes twitch and sometimes when they do this a blade of grass pops through one of the cracks between the toes. It gives me joy to see the grass pop through so suddenly.

It appears there is something wrong with the toes, for each of them has grown a curious yellowish claw. What are they for? What will the feet do with these sharp protrusions? Use them to catch prey? Dig holes? Peel fruit? They could, I suppose, be used to soothe me if I brought my mouth down very close to chew them. Chewing the nails along my fingers is a thing that I have always liked to do, and I have always found it soothing. But the toes do not look appetising, and besides, a centipede is making his way across one foot and I would never want to startle him or to bite his little legs off by mistake. Walk on, little brother! I will keep an eye out for you and make sure no harm comes to you!

And how did they get so wrinkled, my toes? The rest of me is young, youthful, very fresh and new, a  spring chicken. But the toes are prunes. They look, if I am not mistaken, nearly a hundred years old. There must be some mistake. I check my legs, running both hands from the knees down to the ankles. No, there is no denying it, those feet are definitely my feet, the toes my toes. Well. That is disappointing. I forgive you, toes! I hold nothing against you!

Just think, I must have been lugging these toes around with me all this time but never knew it. Oh, I suppose I might have caught a glimpse of them from time to time. I recall trimming the nails once or twice. I recall showering, toes being washed and dried with a towel. I must have noticed them too the time I cut my toe, for I must have cut it once upon a time, the scar is proof. I am sorry if I hurt you, toe. Forgive me! Let us speak no more about it!

Let us say then that I have seen these toes before, yes, that I have quite definitely seen them, but had never truly noticed their existence until now, until today, until I pulled my shoes off and sat down under this kind wise tree and prayed and stared for one hour at my toes.

The centipede has stopped to take a look around. He cannot decide whether to walk across the toes, five arduous hairy hills, or to go back where he came from. He is sniffing around with his antennae. Perhaps he is trying to establish if this is all dead meat, these feet, or a living thing; he wants to know if he should start eating me now or come back later. A little later, brother! A little longer and I will lie down in the ground and feed you.

The tree's big shade is very good to me. It makes it good to sit here praying and looking at my feet. The branches creak when the wind comes up the hill. Some of the leaves fall down but not too many. I lie back in the grass and look up at the branches that stretch into the sky, a leafy ladder. Sometimes, I have often felt it, a great urge has come upon me to climb the ladder. I would go up to the highest branches and look out from the treetop. I would love to climb your branches, sister, and to look down at the river. Nobody would see me there but I would see the winding river and the bridge and the cows over the first or second hill. One day I will do it, I know I will. One day, sister, when I am younger I will climb every branch until I reach the top. And then I will climb back down smiling at the terrific secret of it and climb down under the ground and rest there in the shade with my toes tucked under your roots for fertiliser, deep down there beside my brothers, and all of us will pray under the ground and feed you and feed the grass and I will be a great feast for the little tickly centipedes which I love.

But not today. I am only resting. This is just the dress rehearsal. Some days, on days like this, the thought of dying grows so big in me that I am frightened that my face will break in two from smiling.

As I sit dying

So it has come to this. I am going to die. I wish I could tell you otherwise. I wish I had something more positive to say. For a long time things were fine. I reassured myself: I will not die. I reassured others, not so much by what I said as by my general demeanour. Don't worry, I always seemed to be telling them, Nothing to be alarmed about, I will not die.

I have been thinking about this since I was a few years old, only a boy. A woman who'd drifted into our home and moved in with us, a real brokenhearted bundle of nerves, ran over her cat one day in the driveway. The cat died. It lay there and wouldn't get up. It wouldn't play or drink milk or anything. It was dead. 

My father explained it to me. He was delicate, careful with his words, almost apologetic when he explained it. Everything dies, that's what he told me. He spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. I could see the embarrassment in his face, as if this whole unseemly business of dying and being dead was somehow his fault. Forgive me, he seemed to be saying, The cat has died because all things die; forgive me.

After he had explained it to me, I gave it a great deal of consideration. I was even-handed about it, I weighed up the pros and cons as fairly as I could, but in the end I decided this sort of thing just isn't for me. Dying – it's fine for cats, it's fine for other people (strangers especially), but it's not the kind of thing for me. 

So I decided I would not die.

Of course there is a lot to be said for dying, I know that. Think of the alternative. Consider the indignity of watching your own children and your children's children entering the slow decline of a second infancy. Think of the endlessness of old age; the terrible strain on a diminishing circle of perpetual carers; the constant expansion of aged care facilities, until finally entire cities would be nothing more than gigantic under-staffed nursing homes, crowded with those who have lived forever but have forgotten their lives and even their names. Or even worse, imagine living forever without ever forgetting, tormented by wounds of regret for everything you ever said and did, so that everything hurts more acutely with every passing year, world without end.

Living forever is not all it's cracked up to be, even as a boy I could see that. In the long run, it makes a great deal of sense for other people to die, for everyone to die. I wasn't naive. I reconciled myself to the fact of death. Yet pondering all this at the age of three or four as I looked into the eyes of the small dead cat, I thought the universe ought to make an exception in my case.

And yet here I am, dying after all. How did it ever come to this?

I went to see a doctor and he gave it to me straight. It is my heart, that's what he told me. Apparently I have a condition that makes my heart wear out after the first seven or eight decades of my life. Subtract from that a few years for every unhealthy lifestyle choice I've ever made along the way: smoking, drinking, not jogging, using real butter instead of margarine, too much salt, too much sugar, too much of the wrong sort of fat, not enough of the right sort of fat, too many of the wrong kinds of drugs, not enough of the right kinds, too much sitting in front of the television, not enough rest, not enough vegetables, too many non-organic vegetables with all those nasty carcinogens sprayed all over them, all subtracting year after year after year from an already perilously short life. Taking everything together, I'll be lucky if I get another forty years out of this heart. Less than thirty if my grandfathers' lousy tickers are anything to go by. Bloody genes, can't live with them, can't live without them.

If I knew what was good for me I'd be running around the block right now or lining up for a gym membership instead of squandering my remaining time sitting in a chair (subtract 4 years) having coffee (subtract 1.5) and a butter croissant (subtract 2) and writing down these dying words.

What should I tell you? What can I say for myself? What message should I leave you from beyond the grave? That I should have used margarine after all? That organic groceries are really worth the extra expense, when you factor death into the equation? Or maybe something more personal: 'Dad, you were right about death. I forgive you.' How would that sound? 

No, death and dying notwithstanding, I guess all I'd really like to say is that I'm glad to have been alive. That alive is a very good thing to be, and I have not a single word to say against it. That I have loved songs and food and drink and night time and the way friends' voices sound around a campfire in the dead of night. That I have loved animals, especially dogs and cats, and if I had ever got to know horses properly I would have loved them too. That I have seen whales, have witnessed their rolling bigness, and have loved them very much. That I have loved books and reading, have loved re-reading certain books and remembering what it was like to read them for the first time. That I have loved the faces of my friends (I hope somebody will remember those faces after I'm gone). That I have loved strangers' faces too, old men and old women and beautiful women whose faces I fell in love with and never forgot even though I only saw them once, across a crowded room or in a train or on a bridge as I walked by. That I have loved my wife's face and my wife's words and my wife's skin and the way my wife thinks when she is happy or when she is sad or when she is tired or first wakes up, wide awake and already hatching plans while I am still trying to dream. That I have loved my – 

My children.

As I sit here now, as I sit dying, my heart slowly wearing out inside me, that is all I really want to tell you. I have loved all of it and I don't have a word to say against it. To tell you the truth, I even love the things that I have hated. Doing wrong, being wronged, this whole miserable business of hurt and misunderstanding and mistakes. I have loved all that because I have loved forgiving and being forgiven. Yes, that's what I have loved most of all. If I could do it all over again I would make all the same mistakes and let all the same mistakes happen to me too, if it only meant that I could have the chance, just once, to forgive, to be forgiven.

Life is very wonderful, and the meaning of it all is the forgiveness of sins, that's what I'd like to tell you. I am glad to have learned that. I am glad to have been alive and to have made so many mistakes and to have borne the brunt of so many too. It is wonderful, all of it.

It is thirty years since the day my father explained death to me, since I looked into the wise dead eyes of the cat and understood. I'm trying, but I still haven't reconciled myself to dying, not really. But when that faulty clock inside me stops ticking and there is no one about to wind it up again, I hope I will be able to die just as I have lived: forgiven.

James-ism: on God and death

My four-year-old, Jamie, gets very metaphysical around bedtime. After we talked to him about the eternal destiny of the dog and the universe, he launched into an extended monologue on the meaning of death. Recorded verbatim here:

Mum, when we're dead God won't be dead. Because God always be's alive, he never be's dead. When you're dead and I'm dead we'll go somewhere – to heaven. And we'll see God real. And we'll talk to God and we'll see God, real. [Nodding wisely.] I'm glad to hear that. But I'm not glad to hear we're dead. Everybody in the world isn't glad to be dead.

When I'm dead everybody else will be dead. Not baddies – baddies don't be dead.

All the good people in the world will be in heaven with God. And even bad people? God loves bad things because he turns them into good things.

Mum, can I die holding your hand? Pleeeeease?

The saddest thing of being dead is dead.

At the circus

Today my three children underwent one of life's most important rites of passage. An experience that marks a human life forever. A moment that divides a child's life into Before and After. A sacred, solemn, irreversible ritual. A trial of courage and virtue and strength of heart. A transition from the age of innocence to the age of wisdom and understanding and the fear of the Lord. I am referring, of course, to the circus. For today – I record this so the date will never be forgotten – my children went to the circus.

It all started innocently enough. It was a hot day, and they had gone out for ice cream with their grandmother. Driving down the main highway, they saw rising up in the distance the great tent, big as a mountain, bright as sunrise, gleaming beneath golden spires and billowing flags, solitary and immaculate amid the wild debris of cages and cars and caravans, a giant pinned to the earth by quivering ropes, smiling madly with that cavernous black maw while the people stood nervously all in line and the one-eyed man by the ticket stand muttered prophecies thick with Russian and rum, casting secretive sideways glances at the wisecracking monkey on his shoulder. That is how, an hour later, my three defenceless children found themselves seated ringside, wide-eyed, beside their grandmother, gripping their seats with joy, as the jugglers hurled knives and the boys swallowed fire and the gymnast danced on the rolling globe and the sparkling trapeze artists flung themselves through space like falling stars.

The circus – that institution of joy, that spectacle of ecumenism, that tent of democracy, that circle of sobornost, that festive assemblage of man and beast, sensuality and austerity, laughter and terror, life and death – the circus: is it not one of the great enduring signs of humanity in a world grown bloodless, inhuman, and cold? In a world ruled by the Machine, does not the circus maintain its raucous witness to the joy of Life? In a world ruled by Work, does not the circus uphold the true doctrine of the primacy of Play? In a world ruled by Death, does not the circus proclaim the happy gospel of death's defeat?

It's intriguing to note that some of the most imaginative theologians of recent times have found particular spiritual significance in the circus. Henri Nouwen had a deep attachment to the circus. He likened Christ's followers to clowns – "he who is called to be a minister is called to be a clown". He was spellbound by a German trapeze troupe and followed them from place to place until he had befriended them. Eventually they even let him practise the trapeze himself. Watching the trapeze artists, he said, taught him all he needed to know about the way trust conquers fear. He wrote a book about "clowning", and, in his later years, hoped to write a book on the spirituality of the trapeze – though he never lived to do it.

The lay theologian William Stringfellow had an even deeper obsession with the circus. He compared the circus to the kingdom of God, and argued that the church would be more faithful if it were less like a religious institution and more like a circus. "Biblical people, like circus folk, live typically as sojourners, interrupting time, with few possessions, and in tents, in this world." Like Nouwen, Stringfellow thought the circus exemplified a Christian vision of Christ's triumph over the fear of death. The circus ridicules death, and so becomes a parable of the coming kingdom: "In the circus, humans are represented as freed from consignment to death. There one person walks on a wire fifty feet above the ground, … another hangs in the air by the heels, one upholds twelve in a human pyramid, another is shot from a cannon. The circus performer is the image of the eschatological person – emancipated from frailty and inhibition, exhilarant, transcendent over death – neither confined nor conformed by the fear of death any more…. The service the circus does – more so, I regret to say, than the churches do – is to portray openly, dramatically, and humanly ... death in the midst of life. The circus is eschatological parable and social parody: it signals a transcendence of the power of death, which exposes this world as it truly is while it pioneers the Kingdom."

Stringfellow filled his home with circus memorabilia. He subscribed to circus magazines. He spent an entire summer – it was the high-point of his life – travelling from town to town with the Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers Circus, until he had blended imperceptibly with the rest of that caravan of prophets, fools, and dreamers. As a popular itinerant lecturer, he used to plan his speaking schedule around circus routes. When asked how often he attended the circus, he once replied: "Not often. About twenty times a year." Stringfellow always planned to write a full-blown theology of the circus – though, like Nouwen, he died before ever completing that great piece of intellectual clowning. During a long illness, he built a huge scale model of the Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers Circus. And when he died, they played circus music at his funeral. (A collection of Stringfellow's writings on the circus can be downloaded as a free pamphlet.) The parallels between Nouwen and Stringfellow are extremely striking. Both possessed by a boundless love of the circus, both homosexual in orientation, both committed to living in community, both privileging Christian practice over theory, both turning their backs on academic prestige to live among the poor, both developing quirky autobiographical styles of theology, both dying before they could write their theological treatises on the circus.

And think for a moment of the desert fathers and mothers, those Christian ascetics who took to the deserts of Egypt and Syria in the third and fourth centuries. You could make a strong case that the desert fathers and mothers were really just a motley crew of wandering circus performers. Half-deranged spiritual clowns dressed in rags, poking fun at worldly wealth and power. Ascetic trapeze artists performing their reckless feats atop high columns. Lonely hermits taming the wild beasts as a sign of creation made new. Contemplative acrobats ascending the rungs of their interior ladders while the world looked on, breathless with suspense. Rejoicing clownlike even in sorrow, they renounced the whole wide world as a solemn witness to life and a gigantic joke against death and the devil.

Today as my children swayed in their seats, clutching their hot dogs for dear life, gazing up into the mighty vault of the Big Top while the fearless liturgy spun its circle high above them, I wonder if they heard distant echoes of another performance, another time and place where weary souls drag themselves in from the dust and heat and huddle in a circle, scared and hopeful, hardly believing their eyes and ears when a clownish figure lifts bread and wine like a juggler and bellows out the great joke that is the exhilarating, momentous, stupendously funny secret at the heart of the universe: "Christ is risen!"

And now something for the kids

Sermon at the service of death and resurrection of a suicide

A sermon by Kim Fabricius (the names have been changed)

Emptiness inside, or if there is anything there, chaos. A sense not only of loss but of waste. Anger, perhaps. Second-guessing for sure, despite your utter helplessness to rescue Susan from the waves of withdrawal and depression, and probably a nagging feeling of guilt. Some recriminations directed at some one or some thing to blame, an understandable but futile rearguard response to frustration. And not to forget the social stigma of – let’s say the word: suicide (naming the demon will help pull its sting). But there it is: that is now the mess that is every stricken soul who knew and loved Susan.

So let me give you a few of faith’s convictions to hang on to at this time, a lifeline in your spiritual floundering. The love of God for Susan, and the care of God for those who mourn, are not diminished one jot by what has happened. And that’s because God is love and care all the way down, because there is nothing that we can ever do to make God love and care for us any less, or any more, than he eternally loves and cares for us. There is no divine judgement here, for Susan or for you, and do not for a moment be tempted to think that the seemingly inexorable disintegration of Susan’s self, her sense of homelessness and hopelessness, or your own sense of perplexity and powerlessness, have been for anything, as payback or testing. No! For though I cannot answer the inevitable, agonising question “Why?”, nor offer any explanation of events as they unfolded, I can tell you this: that God is not behind these events, nor above them, but in, with, and under them, sharing your pain and bearing your burden.

Remember, this is not a funeral. Christians don’t have funerals, we have services of death and resurrection. We meet, we worship, in the name of Christ, crucified and risen. We proclaim that Christ died for us, and that Christ lives for us, and that because Christ lives, no one is beyond redemption. We do not deny death, or the manner of its coming, but we insist that love is stronger than death. We affirm that Susan was, is, and always will be a child of God. And we commemorate, we celebrate, that despite all the darkness, there was light in this life too.

Susan was a Swansea girl. (Don’t we “wish that they all could be Abertawe girls”?) She was born in Waun Wen in 1937. Her father was a steelworker, but the war quickly took him away, leaving mum on her own with the little one. It was hard, and from her early childhood Susan was afraid of being alone. Loneliness …

At fifteen Susan was working in company, in a sewing factory. A few years later she wed her childhood sweetheart Simon, who worked for Birdseye. Their two children, Christine and Martin, recall that the freezer was never empty (and I imagine that fish fingers are either their most, or least, favourite food). Like Susan herself, however, the marriage was a rollercoaster, up and down, down and up, but more or less managing to stay on the tracks through the years. When she was up, Susan was glamorous and outgoing. She kept a tidy house, very tidy, and when Coronation Street was on you knew where she would be; but then you also knew where she would be when the soap’s credits rolled – at the social. Loneliness … and company …

Most of all, Susan loved her kids, and her kids’ kids – they kept her going. But beyond friends and family, sensitive soul that she was, Susan kept company with others who might themselves be alone, latterly working as a warden in sheltered accommodation. She also helped out here, at church, at social events. Susan was a hard worker. But then there were medical problems, they slowed Susan down, and then when Simon finally died after a long illness, she stalled: she couldn’t move on, couldn’t fit in, and, feeling forsaken, finally couldn’t bear her own company. A keen knitter, Susan unravelled; an avid flower-arranger, she wilted. Finally, death broke into the house, and she mistook the robber for a friend.

A sad story? So sad. But end of story? One final time, no! Because although she may not have known it, Susan was never alone. And though she may have felt, finally, like the only actor in a tragic tale produced by an idiot, she was, in fact – and remains – one of a cast of characters in the love story of God for his people, and though they wander about the stage like lost sheep, the Director is always there, shepherding them to the end. Home – and not “home alone”! – there, we pray, Susan is now. And however benighted she often felt, or however bright she sometimes sparkled, now, we trust, perpetual light shines upon her, and she is safe in the company of the angels and the saints.

As for us, let us weep indeed, let us mourn and miss, but not as those without hope, rather as those more than ever resolved to treasure each other as the people God gives us as precious gifts, to enjoy and to love.

Death in the 21st century

A sermon by Kim Fabricius

There was an old minister who, on his deathbed, asked to see the local MP and a prestigious lawyer who were both members of his congregation. They were puzzled, because they both knew the minister didn’t like them, but, out of courtesy, they came, and sat on either side of the bed. The dying minister, however, said not a word. Getting very uncomfortable, the MP and the lawyer finally asked him, “Why have you asked to see us?” “Well,” replied the minister, “I thought it would be a good idea to die as our Saviour did – between two thieves.”

We joke about death. Some of the funniest stories I’ve ever heard are funeral anecdotes recounted by the drivers of hearses on the way to and from Morriston Crematorium. People have always joked about death, because people have always feared death, and jokes and laughter are a way of whistling in the dark on the way to Hamlet’s “undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveller returns”. But things have changed. When people believed in God, they had a godly fear of “meeting their Maker”, even if the church sometimes exploited that fear in unconscionable ways. But now that most people don’t believe in God, but rather, with John Lennon, “Imagine there’s no heaven / It’s easy if you try / No hell below us / Above us only sky” – now the common fear is not godly, it’s atheistic. You might say that whereas once people were afraid of meeting their Maker, now they’re afraid of there being no meeting at all; not afraid of going to hell, but of going nowhere at all.

Another seismic shift in the landscape of death in the 21st century has to do with dying as much as death itself. How do people want to die? Almost unanimously people will say that, above all, they want to die quickly – in their sleep would be ideal, next best a stroke that kills you before you hit the floor. Traditionally, however, Christians have prayed to be delivered (in the words of the Great Litany) “from dying suddenly and unprepared”. “Unprepared”? Unprepared for what? Again, for “meeting their Maker”. But, again, no Maker, no meeting – and so no need for preparation: no need for repenting and amending, for cleaning up the clutter in our souls, for repairing broken relationships, for letting go. But how can it be that Christians themselves have slipped into this cultural attitude of indifference? Could it be that, for all intents and purposes, we have become practical atheists? Nowadays people don’t talk about preparations before they die, but they might talk about arrangements after they die. Simon Cowell, him of the X Factor, the richest man on television, said in an interview that “Medical science is bound to work out a way of bringing us back to life in the next century or so, so I want to be available when they do.” Thus has “eternal life” morphed into “unending life”, the resurrection of the body into the resuscitation of a corpse. Thus have the heights of the Christian hope been reduced to an abyss of morbid designer banality.

How ironic: we live in what Pope John Paul II called a “culture of death” – war, abortion, capital punishment, assisted suicide – and yet it is a culture in denial of death. We live in a culture of youth and beauty, with the chemicals and the cosmetic surgery to keep us artificially young and beautiful (actually, more like grotesque). Of course when you’re young, you think you’re immortal – it’s called being immature – but now so childish are adults that people spare no expense pretending that they are Peter Pan right into manufactured old age, “living the dream”. And when reality finally, inexorable strikes, well, freeze-dry me today and thaw me out tomorrow.

And with our changing attitudes to death and dying there goes – what else? –the changing face of funerals. Because it’s all about me and mine, funerals are now becoming customised “celebrations”, upbeat, nothing sad, no grief, no frank recognition of the grim reality of death – this is what ministers are hearing more and more when we meet the families of the “deceased”. Coffins are as likely to be draped with photos, flags, or sports memorabilia as with Christian symbols. One minute you’re singing “Amazing Grace”, and the next (never mind the inconsistency!) you’re hearing a CD of Frank Sinatra belting out “I Did It My Way”. And poems are read that are not only – let’s face it – mawkish and banal, but also completely untruthful: “Do not stand at my grave and cry: / I am not there, / I did not die” – but you did, you know. There is mounting pressure on ministers to collude in this make-believe, to direct and choreograph it.

And then there is the committal. Once the committal was the public climax of the service, now it is fast becoming a private affair, a family-only ceremony, in the US even an undertaker-and-minister-only ceremony. Sometimes the committal is no longer even a committal, rather the coffin is left on the catafol for discreet disposal after the people depart. Thus too “services of thanksgiving” are as likely as not to take place after the committal and so without the presence of the body at all. Reasons of convenience are usually given – so we don’t have to watch the clock, so we can take our time with the tributes – but I do wonder that there is a subtext here and it’s got to do, again, with the sub-Christian change of focus in the contemporary funeral. Ministers of course – me too – collude in this cover-up.

As the American theologian Thomas Long observes: “The assumptions here are that the funeral is not about theology but psychology, not primarily about the grand drama of the gospel but about the smaller tale of grief, not about the story of the resurrection but the story of us. The goal of the committal is ‘closure’, and that is best done as a more private matter …, freeing up the public memorial service to be about the business of enhancing grieving without the clutter of the body …” These are unprecedented developments in the history of Christian funerals. Imagine, if you will, a baptism without the baby, a confirmation without a new member, an ordination without a new minister, a wedding without the couple. I am concerned that these are not healthy developments at all. They are signs that not only is society becoming post-Christian, which we know, but also that even the church itself is becoming post-Christian – and we are not even aware of it.

I have often introduced funerals by saying that Christian don’t have funerals, we have services of death and resurrection, the death and resurrection of Christ as the basis of all we say and pray and sing, the death and resurrection of believers for sure, and the death and resurrection of non-believers in the trust that there are no limits to the grace and mercy of God. We do not deny death. We recognise that everyone is mortal, that death is natural, and we pray, with the Psalmist, that the good Lord will “teach us to count our days / that we may become wise” (Psalm 90:12). On the other hand, the New Testament is quite clear that death is, finally, an alien and brutal force, not a friend but an enemy, indeed the “last enemy” (I Corinthians 15:26), who steals our loved ones, breaks our hearts, and shatters our families and communities. “Death is nothing at all”? No one really believes that – and Christians least of all.

So no denial! Comfort and consolation? Yes, certainly. But what kind of comfort and consolation? – that is the question. And the answer to that question turns on the recognition that, fundamentally, our services of death and resurrection are not about us, they are about this particular person who has been a part of our lives and, if a fellow Christian, a part of the life of the church. Which is why of course the service of Christians should take place in the church, and why of course the body should be there. Christians do not believe that the body it is just a “shell”, a quite pagan idea, which is why Christians have always treated the dead not only with respect but with tenderness. Have you ever loved a “soul”? Of course not! You have loved this embodied person. In heaven, when we meet again, will it be as ectoplasm? Of course not! It will be as what St. Paul calls a “spiritual body”, which means that, while unimaginably transformed, we will still recognisably be the people we were. Here in church the dead was baptised, indeed baptised into the death and resurrection of Christ. Here in church the dead was made a member, and perhaps married. Here to church the dead came to worship week by week, to celebrate Communion month by month, to hear the Easter message.

And here, I conclude, in church the dead should be brought on the last stage of his or her earthly journey, that the church family may mourn, yes, but more, that our mourning may be transformed, not just by memory but by hope, as in worship we accompany the dead as God draws them through the thin space between time and eternity. Funerals may be for the living, but they are about the dead, and they are in and through the dead yet living Jesus Christ. If we ever forget that Christian services of death and resurrection are about the management of our mourning only insofar as they are about the meaning of the message, then we of all people, in self-pity, are most to be pitied.

The world is in denial and confusion about death, dying, and the afterlife. The Christian Church should not be. Our teaching is clear: in the words of the Nicene Creed: “We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” The church is not a public service industry. We are not here to meet people’s felt needs, to give their Jack or Jill a “good send-off”. We are here to proclaim the gospel that “Christ has died! Christ is risen! In Christ shall all be made alive!” – to show the world the way out of its fear and muddle and into the truth. The truth is often hard and always odd, but only the truth will set people free.

An Easter dying

A funeral homily by Kim Fabricius

After surgery in May 2008, followed by chemotherapy and a promising prognosis, a scan disclosed that Gwyn’s bowel cancer had spread, incurably. Early in 2009 his decline accelerated, and by March Gwyn was confined to bed. He died at home, just after Easter. For the homily (given after tributes from Gwyn’s two sons), the names have been changed.

Several times a week earlier this month I shared in a rare and poignant experience: the dying of Gwyn James. But while T. S. Eliot called April “the cruellest month,” this year it was also an inspiring one.

Rare and poignant, because nowadays personally nursing the dying is the exception, usually we wait for the phone call from the hospital or care home; while preparing the dying for death – well, our modern obsession with youth and health has turned that venerable ministry into an embarrassing oddity, thanks but no thanks.

A rare and poignant experience, then, but also an inspiring one, because though Gwyn knew that he was dying, he approached his earthly end only with gratitude for what had been and serenity for what will be; and indeed an awesome experience, because in the puny presence of death, the immense presence of God, the room silent and still, as if the world were pausing, paying its respects, and angels were holding their breath, waiting… And the bond between us: reading scripture – psalms, and, latterly, Holy Week and Easter narratives; shared prayers of loss, of letting go, and, as we held hands, of embracing the promise of life, not just beyond death, but in the very midst of dying. No fear, total trust, and the peace of Christ. Around noon on the day Gwyn died, Rachel [Gwyn’s wife] joined us. It was a holy moment. In the verse of Rainer Maria Rilke:

O Lord, grant each his own, his death indeed,
the dying which out of that same life evolves
in which he once had meaning, love, and need.

These were especially precious times for me as Gwyn’s minister. Gwyn always denied that he was a “spiritual” person. Well, so much the worse for “spirituality”, with its now fashionable veneer of enchantment. All at chapel knew Gwyn, quite simply, as a Christian, a man of a simple, (if you like) flat-cap faith, one on whom the only spirit that matters – the Holy Spirit – rested: a person of scrupulous integrity, straight yet not stern (he relished a good French vintage!), whose Yes was Yes and No was No, who took both his promise as a church member “to live in the fellowship of the church and to share in its work”, and also his promise as an elder “to perform [his] duties … faithfully”, with the utmost seriousness, and who deployed his considerable practical gifts on behalf of the Synod as well as the local church.

But the incident that I will never forget, and that for me captures the measure of the man, was a visit I paid to Gwyn almost twelve years ago during the URC’s discussions on human sexuality. Gwyn had very strong views on the matter, and it was more than just a disappointment to him that after a thorough debate the URC in general, and Bethel in particular, took an inclusive view. Indeed he searched his conscience as to whether he could remain an elder, or even a church member. So I went to see Gwyn for what I hoped would be a conversation but what I feared would be an impasse issuing in a resignation. We talked frankly, but amiably; we disagreed implacably, but respectfully. And the result? Unlike other church members that I’ve lost, for demonstrably insupportable theological reasons, Gwyn, with tradition on his side, yet saw that the local church is bigger than the minister, or even its present membership; but even more, and most significantly, (as Rowan Williams puts it) he saw that we must “turn away from the temptation to seek the purity and assurance of a community speaking with only one voice and embrace the reality of living in a communion that is fallible and divided … in the trust that … the confronting of wounds is part of opening ourselves to healing.” It was like, Wow! This is what being members of the body of Christ is all about – speaking the truth to each other in love, seeking the truth with each other in love, and, despite dispute, continuing to recognise each other as friends of Jesus whose divine grace is stronger than human disagreement.

That incident remains, for me, a parable that helps to sustain my ministry. But I’m sure you could all write your own personal parables, which begin: “The kingdom of God is like this: there once was a man named Gwyn James…”

Nobody knows who I am till the judgement morning

A funeral homily by Kim Fabricius

John, a former primary school head master, mentally and physically vigorous, died at the age of 72, within 18 months of being diagnosed with a form of dementia. He had nursed his wife Alice, now in a care home, for several years as she too succumbed to dementia. David, who gave the main eulogy, is their elder son. (The names have been changed here.)

A funeral is a time – perhaps the best time – to ask an important question – perhaps the most important question: Who am I? And perhaps at this funeral more than most, it’s a question that has quite poignant significance.

In the first act of King Lear, as the king’s two elder daughters take cruel advantage of their old father’s weakening state of mind, Lear asks, painfully, “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” It’s a question that then haunts the unfolding plot as the king descends into the madness we would now call dementia. And the Fool’s answer rings true to all who have known and nursed the dementia sufferer: “Lear’s shadow.”

David has painted a detailed portrait of his dad before he had become a shadow of his old self. In Sketty we too knew John, if only in his so-called “retirement”, as a man who knew only one way to live – with energy and enthusiasm, greeting each day, like the children he used to teach, as a gift to unwrap and enjoy. Take an interest in other people, be an attentive listener and a good neighbour, keep your curiosity keen and your sense of humour humming – that was John. He said that retiring to Swansea was just the right move, living on the edge of the Gower, allowing Alice to reconnect with her West Walean roots. When his own Newport (stroke-Dragons) beat Alice’s Scarlets, he tried not to gloat – not that it was very often he had the chance!

Those who shared meals with John and Alice will attest that he liked a good table – and cellar! In fact, John himself occasionally used the kitchen as a laboratory – even if the experiments weren’t always successful. No Luddite, he had a go at the new technology – the PC, the digital camera, the iPod. He continued to caravan like a gypsy and travel abroad. Get him to sit still and he’d read an absorbing biography – and savour a fine whisky. He served on our church Social Committee, and emceed many a memorable chapel event with flair and wit – and who can forget his quizzes? For several years he coordinated our participation in Christian Aid Week. And he always pitched in at our annual autumn leaf-clearing, even providing a garden vacuum. And in most of these activities, there too, of course, was Alice. John kept his family and his friendships in good repair.

And then, so suddenly, so insidiously, so aggressively, the illness that has been called “the forgetting” (David Shenk). With Lear, John could finally say, “Who is it that can tell me who I am?”

But you know, in the deepest sense of this question, the answer, whether we are of sound or unsound mind and body, is: “No one.” No one can see into our soul, no one can read the grammar of our hearts, even if what we do on the outside, what (if you like) “it says on the tin”, usually gives a fair indication of the contents within – indeed often a fairer indication than our own self-judgements, so prone are we to self-deception. But even those who have rigorously explored their “inner life”, who have worked and prayed their way to a less obscure or fictitious, a more accurate sense of self – to self-knowledge (as we say) – nevertheless, who I am always remains just outside my field of vision.

“Who is it that can tell me who I am?” The ultimate answer to that question is to be found in the title of an old African-American spiritual: “Oh, nobody knows who I am / Till the judgement morning.” Which is why the prospect of judgement is so awesome – because our Creator, from whom no secrets are hidden, will look into our hearts; but also, ultimately, why the prospect of judgement is so comforting – because our Creator sees us in the company of our Redeemer, the Lord Jesus, who is our peace. Who are we? God knows! Who are we? The question, rather, is “Whose are we?” And the answer is: we are God’s, in Christ. God made us – and God will re-make us. “Thus it is with the resurrection of the dead,” wrote St. Paul: “What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable… It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power” (I Cor. 15:42-43).

We are glad for the John we knew (as we say) in his prime. We are understandably agonised at the way John seemed to disappear down the black hole of dementia. But, as Christians, I trust we know that even as his sense – and our sense – of his self-coherence disintegrated with his failing memory, God remembered John and held him fast; trust too we know that it was love’s work that we then did the remembering for John; and, finally, in these ominous times when the so-called enlightened and progressive grow dismissive of imperfection and impatient with infirmity, I trust we know that John, even in his feebleness, had a dignity and sanctity waiting to be fully revealed. And now, in faith, behold! – John in glory, (we may imagine) mentoring children, shooting par, enjoying angelic choirs, and exploring the limitless geography of eternity.

William Stringfellow on the circus

Since Stringfellow was such an avid lover of the circus, I suppose I should conclude our Week of Stringfellow with a passage on the theological significance of the circus:

“In the circus, humans are represented as freed from consignment to death. There one person walks on a wire fifty feet above the ground, … another hangs in the air by the heels, one upholds twelve in a human pyramid, another is shot from a cannon. The circus performer is the image of the eschatological person – emancipated from frailty and inhibition, exhilarant, transcendent over death – neither confined nor conformed by the fear of death any more…. So the circus, in its open ridicule of death … shows the rest of us that the only enemy in life is death and that this enemy confronts everyone, whatever the circumstances, all the time…. The service the circus does – more so, I regret to say, than the churches do – is to portray openly, dramatically, and humanly that death in the midst of life. The circus is eschatological parable and social parody: it signals a transcendence of the power of death, which exposes this world as it truly is while it pioneers the Kingdom” (A Simplicity of Faith, pp. 89-91).

Normally the theological topics on this blog in any given week are completely random and unrelated. So I’d be interested to know whether readers have enjoyed this week-long focus on a single person. If this was an enjoyable diversion, I’d be happy to do similar themes in future, perhaps focusing on other neglected thinkers. (Lately I’ve been collecting and reading some of Donald MacKinnon’s more obscure and forgotten works: perhaps a MacKinnon week might be fun?)

William Stringfellow: freedom from death

William Stringfellow’s theological writing is pervaded by the conviction that the resurrection of Jesus frees us from the dominion of death. The world is ruled by principalities – by suprahuman, suprapersonal institutional powers which bind human life to the service of death. But the gospel sets us free to live and work within these institutions as servants of Christ; we are freed from the dominion of the principalities, since the resurrection of Christ frees us from the fear of death. Since death is the only power with which the principalities can threaten us, we have nothing whatsoever to fear! This, for Stringfellow, is the gospel; this is the Christian life.

Reading Rupert Shortt’s new biography of Rowan Williams, I came across a passage that beautifully illustrates this theme of freedom from death. On the morning of September 11, Rowan Williams was due to address a group of Christian leaders in a building next to Trinity Church, Wall Street – just one block away from the World Trade Center. They watched and waited in horror as the morning's events unfolded. When the first tower collapsed, their building began to shake and fill with smoke and soot. Rowan gathered with a few others in a stairway, trying to breathe the suffocating air. They felt certain they were going to die. Fred Burnham later described the experience:

“None of us will ever forget it. We were bonded for life. We became comrades in the face of death. And there was in the group a total submission and resignation to the prospect of death…. And I discovered for the first time that I am not afraid of death, and that has totally changed my life. My experience, my every breath from that moment on has been different from anything prior to that. That transformative moment, discovering that you are not afraid to die, can totally transfigure your life” (Rupert Shortt, Rowan's Rule, p. 214).

This is exactly the message of William Stringfellow’s theology: because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we find ourselves strangely unafraid of death’s power; we discover that we are free. And this means that nothing will ever be the same again.

William Stringfellow on the power of the state

“Remember, now, that the state has only one power it can use against human beings: death. The state can persecute you, prosecute you, imprison you, exile you, execute you. All of these mean the same thing. The state can consign you to death. The grace of Jesus Christ in this life is that death fails. There is nothing the state can do to you, or to me, which we need fear” (A Second Birthday, p. 133).

And it’s great to see that Halden is also joining in the Week of Stringfellow!

Funeral Meditation: he read the book

A guest-post by George Hunsinger; from a funeral at Nassau Presbyterian Church, 16 August 2008
 
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.  For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom. 8:37-39)

Our friend Peter is no longer with us. He has embarked on that journey which some day must be taken by us all. That final journey still lies ahead of us, but Peter now has it behind him. He has entered “the undiscovered country,” the unknown destination, “from whose bourn,” as Hamlet famously observed, from whose boundary, “no traveler returns.”

Peter was forced by the circumstances of his life to give that journey a considerable amount of thought. Having been diagnosed, while still a college student, with a form of cancer that was considered incurable, he knew for the rest of his life — more than most of us do about our own lives, I suspect — that his days were numbered. The experimental treatment program that added decades to his span of years — a span that we may still rightly feel was all too short — left him with an uncommon sense that each new day was a gift, that life was not something to be squandered, that it was to be enjoyed, pondered in its mysteries, and above all lived out in gratitude to God. Like anyone, Peter had to grapple with his doubts, his unanswered questions, his pains, and losses, and griefs. But he did so as a person of faith. His circumstances were often difficult, but his faith enabled him to live above his circumstances. 

His circumstances did not destroy his faith. On the contrary, his faith prevailed over his circumstances. It was not an easy struggle for him. His ongoing bout with cancer was an ongoing bout with death. But in the course of that deadly bout he learned the meaning of a key biblical virtue. It is a virtue that we often discussed in our weekly Sunday morning Bible study class, because it often comes up in the letters of St Paul. Peter was a faithful member of that class for more than twelve years. When we had to consider the theme of what St Paul called hypomone — a word that has no good English translation but which points to the the theme of patient endurance, of perseverance, of calling upon God in the time of trouble, of continuing to trust in the promises of God regardless of one's difficult circumstances, the theme of not losing heart —  Peter paid particular attention. For him it was of more than theoretical interest.

Peter was well aware of what Hamlet meant when he soliloquized about that undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveler returns. But he did not quite agree with Hamlet. He did not quite agree, because he had somehow caught wind of a rumor, that rumor which, if true, meant that Hamlet had not quite gotten things straight. Despite everything that might count against it, Peter believed that this rumor was true. And because that rumor was true, Hamlet could not have the last word. It was not quite correct that from the boundary of that undiscovered country no traveler returns. Because a Traveler was known who had returned.

This mysterious Traveler was the One who had not only returned, but by whose power that undiscovered country, that wasteland of death itself, had been robbed forever of its sting. It was this Traveler whom Peter believed would accompany him, and did accompany him, in life and in death. Better, it was this Traveler whom Peter believed that he himself was accompanying. It was this Traveler — the One who had returned from that undiscovered country with the joyful news that His love was stronger than death — it was this Traveler, whose name is Jesus Christ, whom Peter himself confessed, along with all the company of the faithful, as his only comfort in life and in death.

In my last conversation with Peter, a few days before he died, he stressed that resurrection hope — the hope by which he himself had learned to live — was a hope for this life and not just for the next. He wanted the first Question from the Heidelberg Catechism to be included in his Memorial Service. We will recite it in a moment. “Tell them it’s not just a hope about death,” Peter instructed me. “Tell them it’s a hope about life. Tell them it’s our only comfort in life and in death, in life and not just in death.” Those were, in effect, his last words.

How did Peter learn to live by this hope? This is a question which can have no easy answer. I will not try to do it justice but only to lift up one small piece of it. It concerns that piece in which I myself may have played a role, however modestly, as a figure in Peter’s life. I have already mentioned the weekly Sunday morning Bible study. But Peter also attended another class that I lead. He was a reguler member, again over a period of many years, of my Karl Barth Student Reading Group. Karl Barth was a great theologian, though, as anyone knows who has tried it, not an easy theologian to understand. Peter did not just attend the Barth Reading Group. He really read Barth. And what impressed me was that he was always eager for more. He would ask me about what were the best ways to get his hands on the writings of other great teachers of the church, like Calvin, like Luther. Peter read them too. He read them seriously. He made them integral, I suspect, to his urgent quest for faith, for hope, for hypomone.

Peter was primarily a reader of the Bible, but as a Bible reader he also read the great Reformation theologians, who gave him the incomparable gift of wisdom and understanding and hope. We might say that Peter was and became what is called in Yiddish a Gelernter. In Jewish culture to be a Gelernter is a rare and honorable achievement. Many might aspire to become a Gelernter but not everyone has the leisure or the discipline or the motivation that it takes. A Gelernter is not necessarily a Rabbi or a professor. A Gelernter can be an ordinary Jew who manages to achieve extraordinary things. A Gelerner can be an ordinary saint who through diligent study of the sacred text attains to an extraordinary level of knowlege, wisdom and understanding. A Gelernter, in this sense, is an ordinary saint who is learned in the sacred text.

Years ago I heard a story about a Gelernter in a sermon. I wish I could remember it better, but it went something like this. Once upon a time there was a Jew in a Polish village who worked as a tailor or a shoemaker. Somehow he came into some money. He no longer had to repair garments or shoes to make a living. He could do whatever he wished. So he fulfilled his lifelong dream and became a Gelernter. His wife and his family and everyone in the village were proud of him, a simple shoemaker who became a Gelernter. Of course he helped his relatives when they needed money, and he gave generously to the poor. But he did not see any of that as his deepest vocation. He enjoyed talking with the Rabbi and others in the synagogue, even as he applied himself night and day to the sacred text. He was once asked what he would say to the Lord God when he had to stand before him at the Last Judgment. The Lord would ask him, what did you do with your life? To which this former shoemaker felt he had a ready answer, the best answer he could possibly give. He would simply reply to the Lord God by saying: “I read the Book.” He belonged to the people of the Book, and he himself had been blessed to read the Book.

Peter was a serious Christian. He came to church to worship God and to hear the Word of God. With his particular life struggles, he knew there was nothing that he needed more than to hear the Word of God be rightly proclaimed. And of course he did many things with his life. He loved the opera, he loved rowing, he loved Albrecht Dürer and other great works of art. He gave generously to the poor. But he was also one of those ordinary saints with an extraordinary attainment. He was an ordinary saint who, driven by interest and need, attained to the high stature of a Gelernter. He was not a professor or a minister. But he devoted himself to study some of the great theologians of the church. And he did so most of all because they helped him to understand the Book.

Peter did many things with his life, but above all he read the Book. And when he comes to stand before the Lord God on the Last Day — as each of us will finally do in that undiscovered country to which we all must some day embark — and when he is asked what he did with his life, as we will all some day be asked, I think that on this side of that farther shore we can almost hear what Peter will say, as he will indeed be entitled to say: “I read the Book.”
 
Let us pray: Into your hands, O merciful Saviour, we commend your servant Peter. Acknowledge, we pray, a sheep of your own fold, a lamb of your own flock, a sinner of your own redeeming. Enfold him in the arms of your mercy, in the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and in the glorious company of the saints in light. Grant also, O Lord, to all who are bereaved, the spirit of faith and courage, that they may have strength to meet the days to come with steadfastness and patience, not sorrowing as those without hope, but in thankful remembrance of your great goodness, and in the sure expectation of a joyful reunion in the heavenly places. All this we ask through Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God now and for ever. Amen.