Death and Dying
The Universal Experience of Death and Our Response
In the experience of the average Parish Priest in the West, I suspect that after the Daily or Sunday Mass, the most common Mass celebrated by a Priest is that for a Funeral. I also suspect that for many Priests, the Funeral Liturgy, and the preparation for it, constitute some of the most difficult times to deal with people. Add to the heady mixture of grief the fact that the vast majority of baptized Catholics lack a full understanding of what death means for the Christian, and also what is the purpose of a funeral, and there is a ready forum for misunderstanding.
Prayers and Liturgies for the Dead are some of the most aboriginal features of human religion. We should observe that for most religions, the primary purpose of exequy is so that the living could ensure or abet the eternal life of the one being buried, or least assuage their souls so that they would not haunt or afflict the living. The result of such a commemoration is usually some sort of comfort or carthasis, by which the mourners are able to process their grief together, so experience relief, and are able to integrate their grief into a wider metaphysical framework.
This said metaphysical framework in much of the West is completely breaking down. What is taking its place is a complete ‘therapeutization’ of the process of death and dying, and the current consumerist-materialist framework simply cannot cope with the experience of death. This leaves mourners quite literally unhinged, and some of the most significant lessons that death has to teach us are whistled past, ignored.
I might also add that just it is precisely as we have anesthetized the experience of death, we have also done away with one of the most fruitful sources for joy and creativity that result from the pain of it. Hence, to quote Mary Cholmondeley in her novel, Diana Tempest:
“Sorrow with his pick mines the heart. But he is a cunning workman. He deepens the channels whereby happiness may enter, and hollows out new chambers for joy to abide in when he is gone.”
Ancient Insights Overturned
As uncomfortable as death and dying may be to talk about, there is also a way of living side-by-side with it that provides a salutary reminder of our own mortality, as well as helping us to lovingly remember the dead. For instance, this is one reason why funerary monuments, whether with the body or cenotaphs, tend to be publicly erected structures. In a sense, the dead no longer belong to one person or one family. Once a person dies, they have passed into a great throng of dead people.
The fact that the dead pass on to be united with the long chain of ancestors that preceded them, and that each person possesses an immortal soul which will experience this, is such a significant human instinct, that we can hardly comprehend what will come to pass if people by and large forget it.
Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman acknowledged the vital importance of public belief in the immortality of the soul (and thus, the dead) in his Homily on the same subject:
“They [the pagans] had their profane worship, their gaudy processions, their indulgent creed, their easy observances, their sensual festivities, their childish extravagances, such as might suitably be the religion of beings who were to live seventy or eighty years, and then die once for all, never to live again. “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die,” was their doctrine and their rule of life. “Tomorrow we die;” – this the Holy Apostles admitted. They taught so far as the heathen; “Tomorrow we die;” but then they added, “And after death the judgment;” – judgment upon the eternal soul, which lives in spite of the death of the body. And this was the truth, which awakened men to the necessity of having a better and deeper religion than that which had spread over the earth, when Christ came, – which so wrought upon them that they left that old false worship of theirs, and it fell. Yes! Though throned in all the power of the world, a sight such as eye had never before seen, though supported by the great and the many, the magnificence of kings, and the stubbornness of people, it fell. Its ruins remain scattered over the face of the earth; the shattered works of its great upholder, that fierce enemy of God, the Pagan Roman Empire. Those ruins are found even among themselves, and show how marvelously great was its power, and therefore how much more powerful was that which broke its power; and this was the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. So entire is the revolution which is produced among men, wherever this high truth is really received.” – John Henry Newman, “The Immortality of the Soul”, Parochial and Plain Sermons.
We can readily note, then, that Christian Civilization provides three basic metaphysical insights:
1) We will all die someday. As Newman acknowledged, this is basically a truism. Yet all world religions by formal and informal means acknowledge this truth.
2) After death, our souls live on. This is very different than say, Indian reincarnation or Atheistic extinction. The seat of who we are continues beyond death, and is not obliterated or annihilated.
3) We meet God, and are judged. Upon the result of that judgment is our eternal fate. This particular insight is common in most monotheistic religions. I would add as an addendum the Ancient Christian belief in purgatory, which acknowledges a space for those who are destined for beatitude, but still require cleansing before going there.
Three antitheses of these insights have emerged today, which militate on a practical and theoretical level against us:
1) We will all die someday. Best ignore it. Many people in many cultures often possessed “Memento Mori”. Sometimes they owned human skulls, or emblems of moths or butterflies, or other reminders of death and immortality. The average person in the West today does not prepare adequately for death.
2) After death, either compulsory heaven, or nothing. It is the great hope of Christians that we and our deceased relatives will live on in eternal joy. But this is not a given. To treat it as if it were is serious presumption. On the other hand, to treat death as if it were a sort of dissolution is likewise wrong, because it cheapens the dignity of the human person and denies the immortal nature of a key part of who we are as persons: our soul.
3) We may meet God, but he requires nothing of us. If we allow for the fact that someone believes in the judgment, then it implies there is something on which we must be judged. Most people today dispense with this altogether.
Grief finds an end goal and an interpretive key
Grief, in my opinion, is ultimately love that has lost its object: we do not grieve over the things we never loved, or that are present here with us (unless we foresee that a departure is coming, then we may grieve in advance, so to speak). Grief is a searching in the dark for the face of a loved one. Even if the Christian Religion were to be totally fable and mistaken, I think we should ask ourselves if we gain anything by abandoning these insights, whether practically or theoretically. Let’s use grief as a litmus test here.
The Christian vision acknowledges death, with all of its sometimes shocking reality. Traditional practice involves vigils/wakes, funerals, burials, annual commemoration, Month’s Mind, etc. It encourages the public assembly of mourners to comfort one another. In doing this, Christianity escapes both the modern tendency to “airbrush” death, or to leave mourners with “fruitless or unavailing grief”.
The Christian vision believes in the immortal soul, and so assures us that the dead are not gone, and that we too have an eternal destiny. An effective belief in the immortality of the soul automatically communicates dignity to the human person. We aren’t just random conglomerations of atoms, or bags of water and organs. We possess immortal souls destined for either blessedness or misery, and we have a role to play in what we receive. Therefore, we learn lessons about how to live so that when we meet our time, we done good to others and served God.
The Christian vision believes in the General and Particular Judgment, (I acknowledge there is a vocal minority that denies the latter, but they are very small) whereby God weighs us according to our works, as Scripture says. Although we have sinned, what saves us is precisely that we believe in Christ, and that he justifies and sanctifies us. Therefore, how we die, and what we have done before we die, has tremendous value. It also matters whether we have a living connection to Christ, or whether we have fallen away or live in a state of apathy.
All this gives grief in a sense a ‘place to go’: the mourner stops being a passive spectator at the death of another, but instead takes a more active, processing role in incorporating in themselves the deep insights about what death, heaven, hell and judgment mean. Additionally, it directs their grief into a great work of love: Prayer for the Dead. Prayer for the Dead is a care package sent lovingly by those here below to those beyond.
Prayer for the Dead
Prayer for the Dead until the Protestant Reformation was a universal Christian practice. Even for those Churches which do not explicitly endorse a dogma on Purgatory, most believed in some sort of suffrage for the souls who gone before Christ’s Judgment seat.
The Christian vision acknowledges that grief isn’t a one-time event, but something which appears and reappears throughout one’s life. Anniversaries, holidays, pictures, music and more can trigger a deep memory, and bring about renewed grief. With Prayer for the Dead, this grief has an outlet, rather than being closed up inside of the person; the person can then turn to God, and offer prayers, have Masses said, visit a cemetery, or do other pious practices.
What happens if we abandon these metaphysical lodestones, these guides to death and dying which traditional faith provide, is that we either deny some elements of death and grief, or we relativize and anesthetize it. I can only think about the increasing practice among millenials and non-practicing boomers of having wakes and funerals in bars or social parlors, reducing the experience of grief to only the social and the psychological. What we come to live and practice in regard to the dead is inevitably what we will come to live and practice in regard to the living: ultimately, it is not just the dead themselves who may come back to haunt us, but an insufficient preparation for, and vision of, death and dying, which will leave us in a starless night. In contrast, if we are willing to open ourselves out to an integral Christian vision, we can find comfort for ourselves with the “peace that transcends understanding”, because we have practiced, once again, the dress rehearsals for eternity, and for those who have stepped onto that stage, we can send our loving care.
