And the king was much moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept: and as he wept, thus he said, O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!67
Religion is at its best and can be at its worst when ministering at the death of children, probably because it is caught between the longing to comfort and the compulsion to explain or reconcile such a tragedy. Sometimes the way it comforts implies an explanation our minds find hard to accept. As a doubting priest, that’s a contradiction I learned to live with and no longer seek to be rescued from, the best and the worst of religion. And it is the death of children that brings it most clearly into focus.
The first funeral of a child I conducted was in February 1960, but I can remember it as if it were yesterday – and not just because I blundered. I hadn’t known the couple for long when their two-year-old son died. I went with them to a village outside Lanark to bury him in a tiny cemetery on the slope of a hill streaked with snow. The young father insisted on carrying the little white coffin himself, clutching it fiercely as we trudged to the hole the gravediggers had dug for his son. I read from the Prayer Book service for the burial of a child:
Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.68
Truth but not much comfort there. When it was over, I put my arm around the mother’s shoulders and whispered a hope the pain would pass. She shoved me away roughly. I want to feel the pain, she cried. How should I not feel the pain for the death of my wee boy? And I want to feel it for ever.
Religion’s first instinct in the face of death is to try to console like that – however awkwardly – and it is a particularly strong impulse at the death of a child. Harder than consoling the parents is what to say to a child that knows it is dying. Here the instinct to comfort and reassure is even more overwhelming. It has even been argued that we invented God in order to guarantee or support our longing for life after death. The only consolation we can offer a dying child is that death is not the end – it’s the entrance to another life. And since nothing on earth can support or justify that claim, we are forced to put forward the idea of God to guarantee it.
But that’s not the right way to put it either. In the moment of encounter with the dying child, theory vanishes, as well as the doubts that must accompany all theory. Facing down this nothingness, the priest is even absent from his own doubts and failures. They are not present because they are irrelevant to the extremity of the situation. The priest is emptied of everything except defiance in the face of absolute loss and becomes, in Auden’s phrase, a way of happening, a mouth.69 And the word the mouth utters is ‘NO’, even if it is shouted into a void. When I laid my hands gently on the heads of the dying and prayed the presence of a loving God into their minds, in that moment the truth or untruth of my action did not matter. The act contained its own meaning. The act was its own meaning. Everything else disappeared except the need to comfort the one afraid to fall into nothing. It was only when the consolation was over that the question of its meaning arose. Looking back, I can see how that dialectic has always been at work in my own experience.
When I was a curate in Glasgow, I became close to the family of an eleven-year-old girl who was dying of leukemia. What do you say to a child who knows she hasn’t long to live and is afraid, especially of being taken away from her parents? Apart from being there and offering love and support – hands laid gently on heads in silence — religion also offers God as a future in which the separated will be brought together again. If God is the ultimate reality on whom everything else is dependent or contingent, it follows that in God nothing is ever lost. It is even possible to deal with the difficulty of time for a child’s mind. Her parents are young and will live long after she is dead. Will they forget her? But doesn’t she see that in God there is no time or change? God is an eternal now. Do you remember times when you were so enthralled by a movie or a book that time stood still for you? It’ll be like that. All the pains of separation that time and space impose on us in this life will be resolved in an eternal Here and Now!
Did I believe it? That’s the wrong question, though I might not have known it at the time. There was no room for anything else by that bedside, though it was years before I found a way of understanding it. It came to me through one of the greatest books of the twentieth century, The Last of the Just, by André Schwarz-Bart, a novel about the Holocaust. At the end of the novel it is 1943, and Ernie Levy with his girlfriend Golda and a band of children he has been protecting are on one of the death trains to Auschwitz. One of the children has just died:
Ernie said, clearly and emphatically, so that there would be no mistaking him, ‘ He’s asleep . . .’ Then he picked up the child’s corpse and with infinite gentleness laid it on the growing heap of Jewish men, Jewish women, Jewish children, joggled in their last sleep by the jolting of the train.
‘He was my brother,’ a little girl said hesitantly, anxiously, as though she had not decided what attitude it would be best to take in front of Ernie.
He sat down next to her and set her on his knees. ‘He’ll wake up too, in a little while, with all the others, when we reach the Kingdom of Israel. There, children can find their parents, and everybody is happy. Because the country we’re going to, that’s our kingdom you know . . . ’
‘There,’ a child interrupted happily, repeating the words rhythmically as though he had already said, or thought, or heard them several times, ‘there, we’ll be able to get warm day and night.’
‘Yes,’ Ernie nodded, ‘that is how it will be.’
‘There,’ said a second voice in the gloom, ‘there are no Germans or railway-trucks or anything that hurts.’
A woman digs her fingernails into Ernie’s shoulder . . .
‘How can you tell them it’s only a dream?’ she breathed, with hate in her voice.
Rocking the child mechanically, Ernie gave way to dry sobs. ‘Madame,’ he said at last, ‘there is no room for truth here.’70
In a public conversation with Richard Dawkins at the Edinburgh Science Festival some years ago, I quoted those words and asked him what he would have done in the situation. ‘The same,’ he said. It turns out that there are times when it is impossible to accept the utter finality of death. A child’s death is one of them. There is no room for truth here. There is only room for the impossible act of consolation.
***
But religion does more than console us in the face of death. It uses its best arts to defy death itself and withstand its power over us. And music is its loudest trumpet. A few years ago, I was at a friend’s Solemn Requiem Mass. The setting for the mass was for baritone soloists by the French composer Duruflé. My friend lay in his coffin in the chancel. And my sadness was eased when the young baritone soloist sang Hosanna – save us – again and again over his dead body. I heard it as a protest against the finality of death. Death was a brute power, and it had beaten my friend to the ground. But the beauty of the music defying his death was itself a kind of victory. It reminded me of that young man years ago in Tiananmen Square waving a handkerchief at the huge tank grinding towards him. Death will roll over us all in the end, but it cannot take away our songs. And they strengthen us in ways words never can.
People like me, people of the word brought up in a religion of the word, too easily forget that words can’t do everything. We like to believe that everything can be said; that there’s a verbal equivalent for every human experience. And really great writers almost pull it off. They almost persuade us. Their artistry translates mute emotion into language. Sometimes we shiver with recognition when we read their words because they come so close to expressing what we ourselves have gone through. But they are not art’s only form of translation. Some things just can’t be said. That’s why Edward Hopper, the great American painter of human loneliness, said that if he’d been able to say
it he would not have had to paint it. That’s even more true of music. And it is why what I am trying to do here is absurd: talking about music instead of playing it. All I can do here is to try to bear witness in a few words to what music can express without any words.
As mourners stand in remembrance of their dead at nightfall, what words can convey how a bugle sounding the Last Post from a castle battlement seems to pour the sorrow of all their loss into the wind? Or how an ancient plainchant melody lifting round a church at evensong carries the same ancient sadness and longing?
One of the most remarkable examples of a music that made beauty out of oppression and death is the singing that came from African American slaves in the United States. Think of the longing and pain in the Spirituals and the way they transfigured sorrow into art. One way to connect with their music is through Michael Tippett’s oratorio A Child of our Time, in which the great spirituals are used like the Passion chorales of Bach to capture and transcend human suffering.
Steal away, steal away home,
I ain’t got long to stay here . . . 71
We singers of human sorrow might paraphrase Hopper: if we could say it, we wouldn’t have to sing it. But sing it we have, over all the graves of history and against the force that keeps filling them.
And we send out our poetry against death as well. Auden told us that poetry makes nothing happen. True, but it can give defiance a mouth, and that’s far from nothing. The mouthiest shout of defiance against death comes from Saint Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians, the oldest writing in the New Testament, dating from about ce 55, about twenty-five years after the execution of Jesus Christ.
When we first meet Paul, he is a persecutor of those who followed Christ. And it was the word Christ that prompted his wrath. Christos is the Greek translation of the Hebrew word for Messiah, the agent God would send to establish a new kingdom of justice and peace on earth. It was and remains the fundamental hope of the Jewish people. And not just of the Jews. It is also one of humanity’s most persistent dreams – the establishment of a perfect community in which the strife and inequality that characterise our history will be removed at a stroke, and justice and peace will prevail on earth – and death will be no more. The most vivid versions of the dream came from religious visionaries, but there have been secular versions of the messianic hope, and some of them have darkened the politics of my lifetime.
Humans, as reflective animals rarely at peace with them-selves, find it hard to live with the muddle and confusion of their nature. So they are always on the lookout for a saviour who will chase all their troubles away. Even the pragmatic and relatively sane political parties of the world’s surviving democracies are far from immune to the messianic virus. During periods of accelerating and destructive change, the longing asserts itself again and we start searching the horizon for the one who is to come. It’s a theme well rehearsed in the classic Hollywood Western, such as Shane in 1953, in which Alan Ladd plays the man from nowhere who rides into a community under threat, destroys the bad guys and rides away again. In 1985, it was reprised more violently by Clint Eastwood in Pale Rider. The longing persists. We are always on the lookout for the one who will come and save us from ourselves.
In Paul’s time, there were Jews who thought he had come at last and the golden age was about to be inaugurated. They believed that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah, the Christ. Hence the name he came to be known by in history, Jesus Christ or Jesus the Messiah. But to their consternation, he did not defeat the powers of this sinful world. He was defeated by them. They executed him on a cross and dumped his body in a criminal’s grave. Then his followers described how he appeared to them and told them not to despair. ‘Get ready,’ he told them, ‘I’ll be back soon to bring in the longed-for community of righteousness and peace on earth.’ To Paul, a devout Jew, the claim was blasphemous, and he was commissioned to hunt down those who made it. But while he was on the chase, he himself had an experience that convinced him Jesus was indeed the Christ, the one who was to come. Here’s how he describes it:
. . . I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died . . . and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day . . . and that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve: After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once . . . After that he was seen of James; then of all the apostles. And last of all he was seen of me also . . . the least of the apostles, that am not meet to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.72
The thing to note is that his psychic encounter with Christ persuaded Paul that Jesus was the Messiah, but it did not persuade him there was life after death. It did not need to, because that was a conviction he already held. Paul was a Pharisee, a member of a sect in Judaism that believed in the resurrection of the dead, a belief that was by no means universal in Judaism then or now. For Paul, Christ’s resurrection was not unique. It was a particular example of a general truth: the dead will rise again. In fact, Paul went on to say that if there was no resurrection of the dead, no life after death, then Jesus Christ couldn’t have been raised either:
Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen . . . and we are found false witnesses of God; because we testified of God that he raised up Christ; whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not.73
For Paul, what was unique about the resurrection of Christ was that it signalled the beginning of the end of history and its sorrow. Christ’s resurrection was the first move in God’s end game. And it would be completed in his lifetime:
Behold, I shew you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall
all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last
trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised
incorruptible, and we shall be changed . . . then shall be brought to
pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?74
The important phrases in that passage are ‘we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed’. Paul is reassuring the followers of Christ that the timetable for God’s D-Day is still on, because they were puzzled. They’d been told it would start while all of them were still alive. But it hadn’t worked out that way. The trumpet had not sounded, yet some of them had died. Would they miss out on the great day when it came? Paul comforts them. When the trumpet sounds to herald Christ’s return, the dead will rise incorruptible from their graves to join in the final victory.
It didn’t happen. Still hasn’t. Like everyone else, believers in Christ keep on dying. Yet over their graves the Church goes on shouting Paul’s defiant questions: ‘O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?’ And it knows the answers. Hasn’t death always been its business? Hasn’t it forever watched those graves filling with the dust of its own children? So who can blame it for choosing to confront death not with facts but with poetry?
Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for, thou art not soe,
For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill mee.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better than thy stroake; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.75
Religion is at its most compellin
g when it restrains the urge to explain death away and contents itself with voicing our sorrow and defiance that it keeps beating us into the ground. It feels most authentic when it stops preaching and becomes, instead, our song, our protest, the handkerchief waved against the immense tank looming at the corner of the street. That’s when, in Paul’s words: ‘Death is swallowed up in victory.’
But it is only ever the victory of beauty over force, defined by Simone Weil as that ‘ x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse of him. Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all . . .’76 Death gets us all in the end, but it can never kill our songs. And that is the only victory they give us.
You strode up the aisle alone,
unafraid of the hushed gloom,
stained glass glint from the West
on your shoulders, and you paused
in the chancel, slim silhouette
against the wide East window,
child in a field of dwindling light,
listening, it seemed, to the silence.
‘What do you think a church is for?’
I asked, curious, as we left.
‘Singing’, came your answer,
quick and sure, ‘for singing’.77
***
Religion not only protests the death of the individual, it also protests the death of the universe, the death of all that flowed from the Big Bang of 14 billion years ago. Science offers various scenarios for how that ultimate death will be. Since it is all unimaginably distant in time — 2.8 billion years away according to one reckoning – it is nothing to get worked up about now. As a physical event, it need not trouble us. The universe as we know it will see us out. But that is not the real issue, or not for me. The issue is what it will have meant once it’s over. In particular what it will have meant for us, as far as we know the only beings in the universe who can think about these matters. Will it all be lost as if it had never been, ‘like tears in rain’?
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