Mortality

June is the month when my mother died, and while I have many happy memories and remember her with love and gratitude, I also regret the missed opportunities, the conversations we didn't have. One of the few certainties in life is that whoever is born will die. Life is what happens in between, and we must make the most of it.

I believe that life begins with conception, although individual existence, in the sense of independence, doesn't happen until later, certainly not until birth, and, it could be argued, not even then. Every moment, from conception onwards, is a step towards death. Some death is what I think of as pre-mature, which we understandably seek to prevent: deaths from ill health and disease, from accidents and murder. Alternatively, death may be actively sought and enabled as a release from suffering when the prospect of continuing life would be unreasonably painful or qualitatively unacceptably poor. For myself, I hope for what I think of as a natural death – death due to age when my time-limited body and mind simply reach their use-by date and quietly stop.

But despite everyone knowing that aging and death are the natural and inevitable consequence of life, we try to stave them off. From such simple 'remedies' of diet and exercise, through commercialised concern with appearance (anti-wrinkle creams, botox, face-lifts, and so on) to the extremes of cryo-preservation, we are generally encouraged to want to live longer and to appear younger. Our youth-centric culture both compounds, and is compounded by, this negative attitude to aging and death, despite (or more likely because of) the evident demographic shift toward a predominantly elderly population, albeit marginalised and undervalued. And when I ask myself why this is, I regret to say that part of the unnatural and simply misguided vilification of age and death lies in the hands of the Christian church.

Christian theology derives very much from the teachings of the apostle Paul, and what Paul proclaimed was 'Christ crucified'. Paul believed that death was the result of human sinfulness, and that Jesus' crucifixion was a salvific event: Christ 'died for our sins' and 'was raised from the dead'. Thus those who are baptised 'into Christ Jesus' are both baptised into his death and raised with him to 'newness of life'. Without getting too tangled up in the intricacies of Pauline theology (easily done!), it is clear that, for Paul, death was something to be overcome, defeated; as the author of Revelation subsequently wrote: 'Death shall be no more'. This is the predominant theology that we have inherited, and the other side of it is the Christian eschatalogical hope: that, beyond death, there is new life of some sort. So much for Jesus' own teachings of the immanence of God's reign!

One small exception to this attitude toward death is found in the later teaching of Francis of Assisi (d.1226). Judging from his early writings, Francis had inherited Pauline negativity, but as he grew older his attitude seems to have begun to alter. In verse twelve of his Canticle of the Creatures (composed around 1224, and said by some to be adapted from Psalm 148) he wrote: 'Praised be You, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death, from whom no one living can escape.' While this is hardly unequivocally positive, it is at least a change, and, in the context of the whole canticle, which is rooted in humanity's fellowship with all creation, frames death as simply the liminal experience of a new beginning. In 1910, William Henry Draper, rector of a parish church at Adel, near Leeds, paraphrased Francis' Canticle for his church's Whitsuntide fesival, and verse 12 became verse 6: And thou most kind and gentle Death, Waiting to hush our latest breath (O praise Him! Alleluia!) Thou leadest home the child of God, And Christ our Lord the way hath trod. (O praise Him! Alleluia!)

Search the hymn books – and I have! - and I think you'll be hard put to find another such positive framing of death – which is why I chose it for mother's funeral eight years ago. And why, other than for the purposes of a compassionate funeral, would one want to? Simply because I think that there may be links between people's increasing preoccupation with physicality, longevity, and the staving off of death, and the decline in formal, corporate religion, notwithstanding the rise of individualistic spiritual quests.

Now, that may seem quite a jump! But look at it this way: The church, by and large, preaches a theology of the Cross, which is fundamentally futuristic: in order to secure a future 'life after death' it is necessary to accept 'salvation' through Jesus' death on the cross. All a bit 'jam tomorrow' and, to be honest, not very satisfying, not to mention the fact that we have no idea whether Jesus himself believed his death to be a salvific imperative, only that he was willing to accept what he understood to be God's will. However, there is an alternative, namely the theologies of Incarnation and Immanence – that in Jesus, God didn't die for the life of the world, but was born and lived for the life of the world – God with us. From the very little that we know of his teaching, we can confidently conclude that Jesus brought the good news that God and God's reign are not tucked away for some post-apocalypse, post-death future time, but are here and now. And so it is the here and now that the church needs to deal with.

Traditionally, the church's theology and liturgy have represented a corporate liminal space, where the divine and the human meet. But if we truly believe in Incarnation and Immanence then we must also accept that this is a false dichotemy, and should no longer promulgate the concept of any separation between these supposed two realms. What I suggest therefore is that two inter-related actions are necessary: firstly, we need to reform our theology, to plough a furrow back through centuries of Pauline and post-Pauline accretions, to return as closely as we can to Jesus' own precepts; and secondly, we need to create new liturgies, to act as experiential gateways leading us away from the Pauline drama of salvation and towards a benign framing of our mortality and a truer understanding of our creatureliness.