What happens when we die?

In a letter to a friend [1955] the German novelist Herman Hesse once said:-

‘I have the same attitude towards death as I had before – I do not hate it and I do not fear it. If I were to ask who and what – apart from my wife and sons – I love and cherish most, it would transpire that they are all dead people, the dead of the centuries, composers, writers, painters. Their being, compressed into their works, lives on and is more present and real to me than lost; my parents and siblings, the friends of my youth – they belong to me and to my life; today, just as before, when they are still alive, I think of them, I dream of them, and I regard them as part of my daily life. This attitude towards death is therefore, not madness or some sweet fantasy, but is real and integral to my life. I am well acquainted with grief over the transience of things, and I can feel it with every flower that fades. But it is grief without despair.'

This remarkable fragment shows someone who has in a sense befriended death. Death has become something as close as his sense of being alive. This is not as odd as it may sound. All of us, in one way or another, ‘practise' dying. Christians make this experience of ‘dying', practising and rehearsing for it, explicit in the way through each day they pattern their prayer. They mark the movement out of darkness into daylight, following the course of the sun, as it rises to its full strength at midday, until we return again to the darkness of night. Preparing for sleep is the rehearsal for dying and is why Night Prayer or Compline, the prayer before sleep is so gentle, honest and important. We can sense this pattern in our relationships too. Take, for example, the experience of falling in love. In the song ‘Weird Fishes', by Radiohead, using the most unlikely of images, they sing: ‘In the deepest ocean / the bottom of the sea / Your eyes they turn me / Why should I stay here? / Why should I stay? / I'd be crazy not to follow / Follow where you lead,' and conclude ‘I get eaten by the worms and weird fishes / Picked over by the worms and weird fishes / I hit the bottom and escape.' To follow her is to die and find life. But he has to die first.

I like Hesse 's befriending of death and Radiohead's dramatic jazzy image of love as a kind of death into something entirely new. At Christmas the Christian community looks toward a birth and at Easter it looks toward a death or, to be more accurate, out of a death. Christians sense both these things – befriending and dying – as they celebrate Easter when death is faced and the transformation of death in what they call ‘resurrection', is celebrated. Indeed each Sunday of the week is called the ‘day of resurrection', a weekly Easter. If we ‘practise dying' each day, what happens as we live? There is life after death in this life,' my old monk friend tells me. Close to the end of his own life he explains that just as those who have died are becoming their true selves, we can ourselves already begin now to become who we truly are. Since Christ becomes his true self through his death He already shares his life with us now. We don't have to wait. In the Christian tradition prayer indeed is described as, ‘the first death' the way of losing our ‘selves' – when we lose our lives we find them as the Gospels record – in preparation for the ‘second death', our physical death into eternal life. If we ‘practise dying' each day, what happens when we actually die? The Church teaches that, ‘heaven is the endless moment of love. Nothing more separates us from God, whom our soul loves and has sought our whole life long.'

Easter is such a paradoxical time. It marks a death and yet invites us into life – now.

© David Broad, Rector – April 2012