In The Death of Ivan Ilych, Leo Tolstoy’s protagonist is shocked to discover he is mortal. He has lived decently, successfully, and shallowly until illness unmasks the illusion that death only happens to others. Most of us, Tolstoy suggests, are like Ivan: we acknowledge death in theory but live as if it were something that only happens to others. Terror Management Theory suggests the fear of death is the fundamental motivator of all human behavior. However, it is well documented that for many people who experience a brush with death, the fear diminishes, and they change something about their life.[1]
There is apparently something powerfully connected to a vision of mortality that plays a pivotal role in forming us into the people we want to be. Modern medicine and religion often conspire to sustain our avoidance of mortality. Medicine’s success has caused a rejection of resignation in the face of sickness and death; as Joseph Ratzinger once observed, dying has become “a technical task technically handled by technical people.”[2] Even in the Church, we can be tempted to avoid pain by dressing it in a religious attitude that clothes mortality in platitudes, only seeing it as antagonistic to the “good life.” We baptize denial and call it hope.
Practically, the outcomes of this avoidance were identified in a 2009 Harvard study that found “positive religious coping” was a significant predictor of receiving “intensive life-prolonging care” from “mechanical ventilation or resuscitation in the last week of life.”[3] This type of care is associated with “poor quality of death and caregiver bereavement adjustment” and a “negative outcome for religious copers.”
“Predominantly Christian” patients were highly likely to refuse hospice and palliative care and less likely to have advance care planning. They state that these patients with “unrealistically optimistic expectations” of survival might be experiencing “spiritual crisis at the end of life, thereby leading to more aggressive care” or that “accepting the limitations of medicine and preparing for death” may insinuate they are “giving up on God.” To me, this suggests the participants had been formed in a way that they could only hope for continuation of biological life rather than fulfillment through death and resurrection.
Sheldon Solomon, the scholar behind TMT, was recently interviewed on NPR’s Hidden Brain. Host Shankar Vedantam asked, “I’m wondering what it’s like for you personally, Sheldon, to have spent so much of your career thinking about a cheery topic like death. Has it changed the way you’ve thought about mortality yourself?” Solomon’s response showed the paradoxical relationship between how the more one thinks about death, the less it can impart change:
We … have joked, but quite seriously, that terror management theory has spared us the necessity of directly confronting our own existential anxieties, because by turning it into an intellectual exercise, it really does distance us a bit.[4]
Solomon’s response illustrates that formation and preparedness for death require not intellectual assent but specific practices. In By the Renewing of Your Minds, Ellen Charry insists this type of formation requires “emotional engagement with concrete models for emulation and a social context within which to practice them.”[5] The New Testament predominately uses passive words to describe this. Meaning, it is less something that we accomplish and more something that is imparted. Perhaps the Church gave us something to meet this need, even if we’ve forgotten it.
For the Anglican, the 20th-century ascetical theologian Martin Thornton wrote, the mechanism of formation “is undoubtedly the Book of Common Prayer.” Structured primarily around the threefold rule of the “Office, Eucharist, and personal devotion,” it is an integrated ascetical system that unites the sacramental system of baptism and Eucharist into a single, central source of formation.[6]
The backbone of this system is the two-fold office of Morning and Evening Prayer. “Extra liturgical devotions” are of course important, says Thornton, but only as they “enrich the bare bones of the Prayer Book foundation.” Without which, the “body collapses; without the Office all is lost.”[7] In other words, the prayer book sets forth not cafeteria options from which one can pick and choose elements of spirituality, and the Daily Office is not a tacked-on option for the super religious. It is a rule of life in a comprehensive system. It is rehearsing walking and dying with Christ.
Morning and Evening Prayer have been said to bear a resemblance to “the seven ages of man.” Morning Prayer rehearses walking with Christ in youth, thanking God that he “hast safely brought us to the beginning of this day.” While the French Catholic director of the seminary of St. Sulpice, M. L’abbe Bacquez, is specifically writing of the Divine Office of the Roman Church, the theme correlates between traditions. He connects the ordering “of the supernatural life—of which the Office is the manifestation” to natural life, in a harmony between the development of the divine life under the influence of the Office. All natural life follows a course of “germination, of increase, of fructification,” and decline. Messing about with the Offices or eliminating them fractures the connection to ordered time, ceasing to “produce any impression upon the soul.”[8]
While Morning Prayer prepares us to begin the day rejoicing and asking God’s protection, Evening Prayer progressively places us in the grave, like “one who is no longer able to strive against his enemies” but looks only to God alone to be a defense and shield.[9] The dramatization of the seasons and decline evokes the diminishment of age, “that black season cold and mournful during which the strength fails and beauty fades,” causing us to “ardently aspire after our last end.”[10]
Here the Church prays, “Lighten our darkness, O Lord,” having always linked night prayer with death in a type of rehearsal for the final relinquishment of our work. This is especially the focus of the Nunc Dimittis, demonstrating the culmination of life, the relinquishing of work, and a prayerful request to peacefully depart. The promise of rest is in “harmony with the feelings of those whose day has been a day of work; who look solemnly, yet not gloomily, toward that coming night when no man can work; and whose eyes are fixed with hope.”[11]
Compline (meaning completion), the final prayers of the day, most starkly evoke our final descent to the grave. Typically said in darkness, its central themes include spiritual warfare, requests for a peaceful ending, and protection through the darkness of death “when no one can work” (John 9:4) recalling the shortness of life.
The Lord Almighty grant us a peaceful night and a perfect end…
Guide us waking, O Lord, and guard us sleeping; that awake we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace.
While for the faithful death is resting in the Lord, there is an ambiguity about dying and the details of how the other side is ordered, with a threat that remains between here and there. Compline challenges us with this reality and any “imprudent feeling of security,” reminding us that “we are never secure here below, that darkness is the time of snares, and that we can never be too watchful in the presence of an unsleeping foe whose hate is unsatiable.”[12]
Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.… Hide us under the shadow of your wings. … Visit this place, O Lord, and drive far from it all snares of the enemy.
The ambiguity deepens in the fact that these prayers do not seek to assuage every angst in overly hopeful promises that bypass the difficult realities. In fact, Compline makes no mention of our resurrection, only Christ’s. Instead, it extolls the goodness of God and his protection through the unknown darkness that comes, resisting jumping to Resurrection Sunday without the darkness of Saturday.
That we may depart this life in thy faith and fear, and not be condemned before the great judgment seat of Christ; … We entreat thee, O Lord.
Compline, more than any other prayer of the Church, reminds us that we are powerless in the face of death and trains us toward a non-anxious presence in the face of mortality—not singularly because of a promise of resurrection, but by reminding us that God is our only end. Our focus is shifted away from our vision of the good life, steadfastly hoping in “His grace and by fidelity to His inspirations.”[13]
I lie down in peace; at once I fall asleep; for only you, Lord, make me dwell in safety.
There are significant hindrances to the practical efficacy of the prayer-book system in the lives of American Episcopalians—most significantly, the basic lack of provision for the Office and training at the local level. While the Sunday Eucharist is central, the engagement (and, frankly, availability) in the Office is sparse.
Each congregation completes an annual parochial report recording the statistics of the congregation. General results of the report are publicized, but specific items are withheld. A 2018 report from RenewalWorks of over 200 parishes and 12,000 parishioners covered similar items.
Members report regularly attending Sunday services, but they “do not feel personally responsible for practicing faith outside of that weekly service.”[14] Researchers then quantified results into four “spiritual growth stages,” with a clear connection between commitment to “daily spiritual practices” (especially engagement in the Daily Office) as a “strong driver for movement from the second to the third stage.” Seventy-three percent of Episcopal respondents self-identified within the first two stages, meaning “they consider themselves to be at an early, perhaps less mature stage of spiritual development.” These respondents were “older in age and have attended their church for longer than ten years.” They also indicated “a lack of competence or confidence in leading group prayer or praying the Daily Office.”[15]
Overlaying this research with the Harvard study could insinuate a connection between immature spiritual growth and attitudes toward death, despite religiosity. Even more disconcerting, RenewalWorks highlighted this failure by juxtaposing the prevalence of engagement in “spiritual practices such as guided yoga and meditation,” while at the same time church programs focusing on training in prayer “seem to have diminished.”[16] Even if the Anglican tradition offers a path of spiritual formation that challenges cultural trends regarding death, worse than low attendance at these services, there is little provision for them.
Thornton helpfully emphasizes that today’s great pastoral need is for “a serious restatement of the ascetical theology behind the Prayer Book scheme” and its coherence as a “living ascetical framework and system of Christian living.”[17] Critical aspects of the fullness of the ascetical system, along with the sacraments, are simply required provisions and must be recovered.
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[1] Tassell-Matamua and Lindsay, ‘“I’m Not Afraid to Die.”’
[2] Ratzinger, Eschatology, Death, and Eternal Life, 70.
[3] Phelps et al., “Religious Coping and Use of Intensive Life-Prolonging Care Near Death in Patients With Advanced Cancer.”
[4] Shankar Vedantam, We’re All Gonna Die!
[5] Charry, By the Renewing of Your Minds, 26.
[6] Thornton, English Spirituality, 258.
[7] Thornton, English Spirituality, 265.
[8] Bacquez, The Divine Office Considered from a Devotional Point of View, 325–29.
[9] Blunt, The Annotated Book of Common Prayer, 214.
[10] Bacquez, The Divine Office Considered from a Devotional Point of View, 322–29.
[11] Blunt, The Annotated Book of Common Prayer, 211.
[12] Bacquez, The Divine Office Considered from a Devotional Point of View, 544.
[13] Bacquez, The Divine Office Considered from a Devotional Point of View, 545.
[14] Sidebotham and Gunn, RenewalWorks: What We Are Learning, 3.
[15] Sidebotham and Gunn, RenewalWorks: What We Are Learning, 4.
[16] Sidebotham and Gunn, RenewalWorks: What We Are Learning, 4.
[17] Thornton, English Spirituality, 274, 263.
The Rev. Parker Williams is Assistant Chaplain at Pusey House, Oxford. A priest of the Episcopal Diocese of Missouri, prior to ordination he worked in conservation stewardship and soil management.
