I see Dead People

This very famous scene comes from M. Night Shyamalan's excellent film 'The Sixth Sense' but personally I can empathise with Haley Joel Osment's character, Cole Sear. At the moment I feel like I see dead people.

This feeling has much to do with a significant number of requests to minister to the dead and dying in recent weeks.

This blog post is not an opportunity to bemoan that ministry, for it is all too rare a privilege. Nor is this an opportunity to comment on the cost of that ministry on me personally, even though there is one but it is nothing compared to the cost of being a grieving relative in the first place.
Death is one of the things that Christians have traditionally meditated on during this holy season of Advent, along with Heaven, Hell and Judgment. Advent is, in the context of Christ's longed for coming amongst us and promised return, an opportunity to prepare ourselves for a holy death.

Death though is something that as a society, we try to avoid. Everything from extreme dieting, through rigorous exercise, plastic surgery and even anti-wrinkle face creams are all, at various levels, forms of coffin dodging, of death avoidance. Death more often than not no longer happens at home, but in hospital, the funeral no longer in the local church but in an out of town crem. Funeral services are no longer simply 'The Burial of the Dead' but 'Thanksgivings' and 'Celebrations.'

Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was…

These words were written by Henry Scott Holland when he was a Canon of St Paul’s cathedral. But they weren’t written as a poem, these words were part of a sermon. Scott Holland fashions these words to encapsulate one response to death, a response which often comes in the immediate wake of a death but which swiftly evaporates. Alongside this response to death he expressed another view,

Death ‘makes all we do here meaningless and empty…. It is the cruel ambush into which we are snared... It is the pit of destruction. It wrecks, it defeats, it shatters It makes its horrible breach in our gladness with careless and inhuman disregard of us. We get no consideration from it. Often and often it stumbles in like an evil mischance, like a feckless misfortune. Its shadow falls across our natural sunlight, and we are swept off into some black abyss. There is no light or hope in the grave; there is no reason to be wrung out of it.’

Though from the same Scott Holland sermon, this extract is not read at funerals.

But death for the Christian is neither ‘nothing at all’ nor is there ‘no light or hope in the grave.'

Paul writes in Rom 6:23 '...the wages of sin is death'. Death is a serious thing, it is not a trivial or illusory as the first scenario from Scott Holland suggests. But Paul’s verse continues ‘...but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord...' Therefore the second scenario from Scott Holland is also wide of the mark. For us as Christians therefore we can own on the one hand the seriousness of death, but also to our hope that it does not have the final word; hence Paul can taunt death, I Cor 15:55 '...Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O grave, is your sting?'

And yet the words 'earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust', part of the committal prayer, can so often sting. For whilst we rejoice as Christians in the knowledge that death itself is conquered by Christ's own death and resurrection, the reality that the person we have known and loved will be with us no longer is the harshest of realities, it is something.

Jesus knew this. 'Father if it is possible for this cup to pass from me...' Jesus didn't want to face what he ultimately willingly chose in the Garden of Gethsemene and turned his face to Jerusalem and his crucifixion. Confronted with the death of his great friend Lazarus '... Jesus wept...'

Death is nothing at all? No, death is something. God knows. This priest feels surrounded by death and dying at the moment. I see dead and dying people.

Advent reminds us that in a sense we all see dead people.

We are all made from dust and ash - from the ground, from the elements around us. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, reminds us of our mortality and failing and gives us permission to cry out to God for redemption, salvation and change.

God's Messiah comes to be enfleshed in dust and ashes with us, calling us to be transformed into glory.

Advent reminds us of our mortality, to prepare for our death's well and to long for God's transforming glory in our midst.