For as long as I can remember I have had a fairly vivid fear of catastrophic death. Whether this fear sits at a healthy or unhealthy level I do not, but I imagine most people have it to some degree. At times it disappears behind a myriad of other concerns, or it appears absent when it might be expected, or overwhelming for no obvious reason at all. As I have grown older I have had to adjust for this fear and manage the limitations it could have easily imposed, so that I could do things that I genuinely loved. It became over time less visceral and more like a low grade background hum that filled certain kinds of silences. Even then the specter of death has never left the back of my mind while hiking or camping in the backcountry. Though most would consider white water kayaking to be the domain of the fearless, I cannot recall a single trip, since taking up the sport as a young man, where I did not push off into the river while partially wondering if this would be the end.
As a priest I have had to confront a different variation of this fear, which is the fear of growing old and dying, of my time slowly slipping away into some kind of final oblivion. It is the same fear but it burns at a different pace. Every time we enter the hospital room of another dear elder whose hope of living is completely gone as they are wasting in the final moments of death, we confront the inevitability that in one form or another, this will one day be us. I admit to being troubled in some of these circumstances and barely able to see beyond my own unease. I think often of Levin in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Upon entering the room of his ailing brother, he becomes paralyzed by the atmosphere and terror of death. While standing motionless and aghast, Kitty sets about cleaning the room and making the poor soul comfortable, very practical forms of mercy for which Levin was simply unavailable.
While in theory Christians should have a sure defense against this kind of fear, I am not aware of many instances where Christians greeted death with a smile. Jesus’ own death is an indication that even perfect faith can suffer in the face of dying. As a millennial who has turned the corner toward the latter stages of life, I have recently seen this growing awareness of death among my own generation. Our children are growing up rapidly, our hair is turning grey, and we are sore pretty much all the time. Many of us, who are Christians, were formed as young adults in theological climates that sought to redress an overemphasis on death and the afterlife that some teachers saw infecting certain kinds of Christian spirituality. Many times I have heard or read prominent Christian teachers scold or critique the popular hymn traditions, for example, and their preoccupation with the next life, as though they devalued the present created order. This correction was eagerly embraced by millennial Christians in the west who grew up in a pretty cushy and opportune world. But I sometimes wonder if we will begin to find solace, perhaps for the first time, in a spirituality that knew the bitterness and proximity of death far more acutely than we have.
It is only in recent years that I have begun to think quite steadily about my own death beyond the catastrophic lens, as a promised outcome to which I am definitely proceeding. After all if you can avoid disaster, you can almost imagine that you will be just fine. Thinking more deeply about death, rather than allowing it to haunt and menace the edges of our thoughts, is a good thing in moderation. To enter the hospital room knowing that my own mortality is every bit as a real as the sick and dying person before me, can bestow a kind of trembling awareness of how little we have to offer of ourselves. What we have to offer as priests, or visitors of any kind, is not a kind of dispatch from the land of the living to which we will shortly return after reciting a few prayers. What we have to offer is much more but also much less, in as much as we are mortal creatures in the process of dying ourselves, who can only point to and surrender alongside another to the all embracing grace of God.
Though as Christians we believe that Jesus is triumphant over death and have perhaps believed it our whole lives, we are inevitably drawn beyond the initial phases of our faith. Though not untrue, in these phases we are not yet fully aware either of the real breadth of our salvation. The grace of God in Christ is not only true, but it turns out that it is all that we have. This salvation begins to overwhelm everything else. If our faith had stood on any other grounds then God alone, in the contemplation of death those grounds quickly begin to crumble. As the psalmist says: “For God alone my Soul in Silence waits.” Psalm 62. These words present a picture of our whole life, as we await God in the fullest and most final sense possible. In the final moments, when we are stripped of all our accomplishments, vitality, strength and even most of our hopes, in silence we will draw near to God alone.
There is a kind of mysterious inversion that can take place when offering comfort and ministering to the dying. The promises of God that we read aloud no doubt offer assurance and hope to those who are most urgently in need of them, but we too are strengthened as they receive these words, either in silence or out loud. So often I have left a conversation or a moment with a dying Christian, with my heart and mind settled toward my own fears and forebodings. It is the witness of dying Christians that has given me some semblance of clarity and even a desire to number my days aright.
In the end, it is not just the reality that we will one day die that should inform our pastoral presence, but also the fact that even now we live only by the grace of God. Grace is everything, as the final words of Bernanos’ great novel concludes. While we can avoid this to some degree, or imagine that there are somehow other things, or other paths and possibilities to deflect our deepest fear, in the end there is only one way, the narrow passage through which we all will pass.
I have come to enjoy the music of Paul Zach, his soulful album Sorrow’s Got a Hold On Me in particular. One of the songs “Always With Me” ends with a sober but powerful verse: “When I fade away in death/you will catch my final breath/you will take me to my rest.” The music itself conveys a sense of a fading approach to an almighty mystery, a gathering stillness before our God who comes to meet us in our death and draw us into his infinite presence. I wish there was more worship music that tried to convey this gravity and power that stands at the heart of our salvation. Something tells me that most folks in the pews are fearful about the same things.
The Rev. Dr. Dane Neufeld is the incumbent of St. James, Calgary.