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The Rev Dr. Giles Fraser |
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"Death is nothing at all, I have only slipped away into the next room. Call me by my old familiar name, speak to me in the easy way you always used." These words are etched on my consciousness from years of taking funerals. "Do you know that poem, Vicar?" people would inquire. And I knew exactly what they wanted. To be honest, my heart would sink a little. Once again, I'd have to stand before a room of broken-hearted mourners and pretend to them that "death is nothing at all". In the circumstances, it seemed to me a ridiculous thing to say. Of course, death is something. It is the king of terrors.
Today is All Souls Day, the day that catholic Christians set aside to pray for the dead. And on this day the words of that so-called poem from Canon Henry Scott-Holland come readily to mind. In fact, despite what many people think, it isn't actually a poem at all. It's a passage lifted from a remarkable sermon preached at St Paul's Cathedral by a predecessor of mine in 1910 following the death of Edward VII. And in fact, it's a sermon that begins by acknowledging precisely the reality of death that the familiar poem-like section seems to deny. "It is the cruel ambush into which we are snared" he writes, "It is the pit of destruction. It wrecks, it defeats, it shatters". Within a few years of these words being preached, young men were dying by their thousands on the battle fields of Northern France.
Christians are sometimes made out to think that death doesn't really exist, that human beings just keep going in another realm and in another way. But for all its popular appeal, this isn't really a Christian position at all. Christians do believe in death. But alongside this, Christians also live according to the promise that death will not defeat us, that death will not have the ultimate victory. This is not the same as denying its reality. Rather, it's a claim that those who transfer the centre of interest and value outside of the mortal self and into the lives of others or into God's life will find that that what matters most thereby exists beyond the reach of death, beyond its power.
All this week, many of us will be wearing our poppies. And they too carry this double message. Yes, death is real. Blood is shed. Life is lost. Indeed, last week another soldier has lost his life in Afghanistan, making a total of 224 dead since operations began. To pretend that 'death is nothing at all' is to insult the generations of men and women serving in our armed forces who are often called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice, to lay down their lives.
Nonetheless, the poppy also reminds us that death does not have the last word. Beauty flowers out of the mud and annihilation of the trenches. New life is brought forth from the earth and death is cheated of its victory. This indeed was Scott-Holland's point in his famous sermon. Not that death is some sort of illusion. But rather, that death doesn't have the power for ultimate triumph. And therein lies the root of all Christian hope.