Now and then

Yesterday I was writing a reflection on the 50th anniversary of the death of C. S. Lewis, and remembered the vivid description at the end of the final Narnia Chronicle, The Last Battle of life on the further side of death. ‘The term is over: the holidays have begun’ says Alsan. ‘The dream is ended: this is the morning.’

Last Sunday at Hilton Church, Duncan McPherson was preaching on the Gospel Lectionary reading from Luke (20:27-40) – it’s the passage where the Sadducees, who don’t believe in resurrection tell Jesus a preposterous story about a woman who was married to seven husbands in sequence. Whose wife would she be in the world beyond, they asked Jesus with malicious glee.

Well, Jesus dealt with this question with is customary wise thoughtfulness and Duncan explored his answer. But then, since it was Remembrance Sunday, Duncan particularly focussed on the teaching of the Bible that there is life beyond death; that past, present and future is all ‘now’ to the God who stands out-with time, who ‘is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.’ (Luke 20:38) I think this means both that the ‘now’ which was their moment in history is present to God, and also in another sense, that the whole community of God’s people from ages past and ages still to come is already present with God in the dimension beyond.

But since the ‘now’ is all we’ve got, it is crucial both to face up to the reality of the fact that we will die, and also to live life to the full in the present.  I guess this was the theme of my recent reflection.

Last Sunday Duncan read a marvellous ‘Blessing for death’ by the Irish poet, author and priest John O’Donoghue (1956-2008) – it’s from his book Anam Cara: a book of Celtic Wisdom. Its theme is death: ‘May you know in your soul that there is no need to be afraid,’ but its major emphasis is on living in the now, and making the most of each moment.

Thus, he writes:

When you come to die may it be after a long life

May you have a wonderful urgency to live your life to the full.

May you live compassionately and creatively and transform everything that is negative within you and about you

May you be peaceful and happy in the presence of those who really care for you

But there is also a looking forward to the dimension beyond death:

May there be a beautiful welcome for you in the home that you are going to.

It seems to me that there are three elements to reflecting on our own mortality. The first is coming to accept the fact that we will indeed die – which for most of us is perhaps a gift we receive as we grow older, the gift of which John O’Donoghue writes ‘I pray that you will have the blessing of being consoled and sure about your own death.’

And then there is the element of learning, in the light of our mortality, to live in the ‘now.’ That was Duncan’s theme. And finally, there is the realisation that death is indeed a portal to a new dimension described in the language Aslan chose to communicate with school children as the delicious freedom of the summer holidays.

Of course I realise that our faith will wax and wane, and that there will be days when we feel we are hanging on to a threadbare faith. But it is important as we are enabled to keep in mind all three of these elements – the fact of death, the consequences for ‘now’, and the country beyond death. I suspect we come to see and be seized by them one of them at a time, not necessarily in any particular order. I also suspect that it’s possible to so dream of the dimension beyond that we fail to fully sing our song in the present, and on the other hand to be so focussed on living ‘now’ in the light of death that our lives are in practical terms little different from our friends whose honest reflection leads them to see death as the end.

I think my recent reflection tends towards this second kind of unbalanced focus. My eyes were opened to this as I struggled this week with a book by the Roman Catholic theological writer James Alison which my friend Iain Macritchie lent me. (It’s called On being liked – its key emphasis is that God doesn’t just love us – God actually likes us, which is pretty cool.)

Alison writes of the lesson the death and resurrection of Christ teaches us: ‘It is we who could not be unhooked from our addiction to death until we were shown that we could live as if were not.’

We need, he adds ‘to be weaned off our addiction to death and to having our beings formed as though the end of our biological lives were our enemy.’

And he describes the practical implications of ‘the perception of something which had not been perceivable before [the resurrection], that God has nothing to do with death, and that humans need not either.’

He says ‘The consequences of living that out would start to be born: that we can gradually, ourselves, learn to live as if death were not by, in a variety of ways, undergoing death beforehand so that it loses all power over us, and we start to be able to live free of its compulsions.’

Now arguable James Alison treats death too lightly in these sentences. But I believe that heart of his thinking as absolutely right – that while we need to face up to all the implications of living in a fallen world, and while mourning and weeping and grieving is wholly appropriate, and while physical dying is no insignificant thing, we can learn to live as if death were not, as if death was a portal into a different dimension.

Perhaps it is when we truly learn to see biological death as a beginning rather than an ending that we are truly set free to live in the provisional ‘now.’

But we believe it will be for each of us as it was for the children C. S. Lewis wrote of in the final sentences of The last battle.

All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which on one on else has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

Writes O’Donoghue ‘May your soul smile in the embrace of your anam cara.’  And we believe that the soul friend who accompanies us both through the preliminary pages and the great story itself is none other than earth’s Aslan, Christ himself.