Death Symposium -The Revd Canon Angela Tilby

Death, be not proud’: Dying, Death & Destiny

A record of the Symposium held in The Abbey Centre, 34 Great Smith Street, London SW1P 3BU on Saturday 18 November 2023, organised by The Society of the Faith.

The Revd Canon Angela Tilby: ‘Whatever happened to ‘a sure and certain hope?’ 

Before ordination The Revd Canon Angela Tilby worked for twenty-two years as a producer in the BBC’s religious department. She has been a regular contributor to Thought for the Day. Ordained in 1997 she taught at Westcott House Theological College, as tutor and Vice-Principal. In 2011 she became a Canon of Christ Church, Oxford, and continuing ministerial development advisor for the clergy of the diocese. She retired in 2016 and is now a Canon of Honour of Portsmouth Cathedral. She continues to write a weekly column for the Church Times.

Thank you very much. I am in that current pre‑death state known as retirement and I do Permission to Officiate and other such things of that happy kind in the Diocese of Portsmouth. I keep writing. Just a little plug, I am writing a book called: “Good faith: A Reintroduction to the Church of England”, which I hope I will have finished some time next year, and is the fruit of many years of thinking about such things. But I do also think about death and my title today is “Whatever happened to the sure and certain hope?” “Sure and certain hope” ‑ those words from the Book of Common Prayer, assuring us of our participation in Christ’s resurrection and in life eternal.

I have been to three funerals in the last few weeks, rather a record for me, more than usual even. All took place in church, as it happened. One was, and I say this in love and sadness really, the Requiem Mass of Keith Riglin, the Bishop of Argyll & the Isles which took place in Oban in Scotland. Another was of a lay Methodist who I happen to know: a very sad death of someone who took his own life after years and years and years of depression. And the third in a village in Sussex, of a man, a cousin-in-law as it were, who I did not know him very well at all but who turned out to have been everything in that village, chair of the parish council, the Rotary: every good cause you could imagine.

The last two ‑ and you will be familiar with this ‑ were framed very much as celebrations of life, with eulogies, eulogies, eulogies, one after the other telling us what a wonderful person this was, trying to make him come alive, as it were, and reminding us of all his sterling qualities and how much he would be missed. And followed of course by the good send off, with sausage rolls, cake, tea and wine, and all the rest. And memories.

Only at the Bishop’s funeral was there anything like a call, as I would put it, to transcendence, to actually think about where he might be going: a call to repentance on our part issued in with the Mass and the prayer for the departed’s sins to be forgiven.

I have a lovely picture which was on the back of the funeral order of Keith Riglin standing in his very pink cassock looking a bit like (and if you knew him you would understand this reference) a flower fairy pointing upwards as though to say, “That’s the direction.” And I found myself, as one does sometimes at really good funerals, talking to the deceased in my mind, and saying, “Keith, I want you to be there when my turn comes. Please point the way with your flower fairy episcopal paw,” and I will feel very welcomed into the life to come.

But for our contemporaries, I think, death is genuinely difficult. I find it genuinely difficult. And I inhabit this because I am a secular person as much as I am a Christian, as it is seen to be the ultimate end of that phrase we sometimes use “human flourishing”. What flourishing is there of the personality, of all the connectedness that I have with those around with me after death? And the more depressing of the Old Testament Psalms and others seems to paint a bleak picture: the dead have no life. The dead are not available. You cannot communicate with them any more. In fact, we must not ‑ there is a sort of forbidden-ness in speculating about what happens beyond. There is no sure and certain hope. And this certainly seems to be the secular attitude.

A huge contrast, in a way, with the Victorians. The Victorians are not that far away from us. I have done funerals in beautiful civic cemeteries and had this sense of how much the Victorians celebrated death. All those angels, all those lovely weeping angels lurking over the graves and the trees and the abundance of vegetation. The Victorians did celebrate death and they had no doubt, I think, that death is a happier state. If you think of it, if you look at the mortality figures for babies born in the Victorian era, most middle‑class families would lose at least one child, if not two or three, and the pressure to have a sense that we are released from the miseries of this life was very present in that extraordinary era, along with all the other good and bad things that we associate with the Victorian era.

But it is not so for us and I think it is partly because we have an expectation, a sense of entitlement that life should be good, that we have a right to flourish, that we have a right to fulfil ourselves, that, actually, our trajectory in life is one of addition rather than subtraction: of fulfilment and promise and hope and being yourself, being your best true self. All of this is available to us and we can do it all. We just need to push a bit harder to have the best life possible.

And death, in a way, becomes, because it is unknown, a dread, something to be combatted and certainly held off for as long as possible. Death reveals a sort of vanity behind this perception that we have a right to fulfilment in this life. And the vanity remains. If you look ‑ and I am grateful to Stephen Tucker for pointing this out to me – at the enormous investments some of our tech entrepreneurs are making in life extension technology, in an attempt to merge ourselves mentally with biology to extend our lifespans, or indeed those terrible stories of very rich elderly celebrities injecting themselves with the plasma of their youngest son or grandson, and granddaughter I imagine, in order to try to rejuvenate themselves and give themselves a bit longer. Why should we want them, I ask myself, these people – Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and all the rest of them. Why is it such a gift to us that they go on for ever? The vanity behind it is never questioned. Or even in the more mundane things of looking at those cultures and societies where longer life seems to be the norm because of diet or physical conditions or activity, and trying to think how can we inject ourselves with those foods, blueberries, oily fish, whatever it is, that might give us a few more seconds, minutes. Did you know that every hamburger you eat shortens your life by at least 10 minutes. Bring it on!

If you ask doctors how they would most like to die, the usual answer is “in my sleep”, and if not in their sleep then in the shortest possible time ‑ sudden stroke, cardiac arrest, whatever; something which gives you the least possible knowledge you are dying, the shortest possible time to contemplate that fact, and unconsciousness. So a death that is unconscious, and that is not lived through, is the perfect choice of death for many of our contemporaries.

And yet though that is also true there is a kind a pushback, even in secular society. I think of Atul Gawande’s Reith Lectures of 2014 and the book that came out of that, “Being Mortal”, which was a real call, I think, to consider our death, and what we would like to achieve with the rest of our life, given that it does go on for ever, and to think about that seriously. And more recently, a wonderful book by Kathryn Mannix, a palliative care doctor, called “With the end in mind”. where she reminds us of the very simple fact that there are two really significant days which will never be complete days in our life: the day of our birth and the day of our death. We will not see that whole day through with the assurance of a day before it or a day after it. She calls on us in that very sane and realistic book to think about what the physicality of death is like, what kind of things tend to happen to most people who are dying. Both writers are calling on us to think about and to prepare for death. And then there are initiatives like the death cafés which encourage us to do so, not necessarily from a religious point of view, but just in an attempt to bring some sort of sanity and realism into society’s evading of death.

This comes up ‑ and I can think of a friend of mine who took the funeral of somebody who was 92 or so, and relatives were morally injured: how could she have died? Shock at the appalling nature of it. This is not uncommon in those of us who have a funeral ministry of some kind.

What we do not find very often, I think, is what you might have found again in an earlier era in medieval Catholicism, where the main anxiety about death was about judgment; about what might happen after death. People are not very afraid of God these days, except those who have been tortured in particular kinds of very hard-line conservative evangelical churches. Occasionally you do find somebody there who is genuinely afraid of what their life might mean in terms of judgment after death. It is pretty rare and it is usually about sex. Today the main anxiety around death is to do with loss and grief and that loss focuses around relationships. Loss of loved ones is what is most feared if you are going to be on this side of the death divide. Huge anxiety – which is why the Covid restrictions were so utterly devastating and damaging to so many. How can the dead die in peace if we are not there to help them on their journey, if we are not there to comfort and assure them and tell them that we love them? How do we deal with this? Do we tell young children that their beloved grandfather is now a star, that they will live for ever in our hearts, that they will always be with us just down in the garden as they always were? There are all kind of ways in which we try to lessen that sundering, that parting of death.

The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor argues that the problem with the death of loved ones is that it challenges what seems to a very deep instinct in human persons that the very experience of love has something of eternity in it, and stretches us beyond our individual boundaries, and in some sense heals our existential moments. You will remember that wonderful ending line of Philip Larkin’s poem An Arundel Tomb: “Our almost‑instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love.”

I think that is one point on which the secular and world of faith can have some kind of agreement or fellowship or some starting point – that the loss of love in death is at the heart of the crisis that we feel around mortality.

There is a resonance for me as a Christian in the liturgy – that insistence that in Christ we are part of Christ’s mystical body which is the blessed company of all faithful people. In some way, through our connections, our relationships, we become part of something larger, bigger and longer lasting, more original, more primal, than our individual selves, and that mystical body in which the parts retain their individuality and are ever-increasingly more integrated into the being of Christ. That seems to me to be a place of connection with this secular instinct that it is our loved ones we most fear to lose in death.

You will know that the Church no longer tells people what it ought to believe about anything, let alone death, and nor does it focus the preaching of the Gospel, offering a sure and certain hope. As someone who has taken a lot of funerals of people whose relationship with the Christian faith was pretty tangential – I always dread that moment where I know I have to preach the Gospel. I must find a way in this situation of pointing to the sure and certain hope, even though I know perfectly well that most people cringe slightly because this is the bit they find incredibly difficult to cope with. Nevertheless, I think we are obliged to do it.

At the same time church people (because we are part of society) have many of the same kinds of fears and denials as the rest of society. Even where there are exceptions to this, they do not seem to me to be particularly healthy, I remember the funeral of a man who had died tragically early of a brain tumour. He had been extraordinarily, lovingly well cared for in his church and that had been a remarkable thing to behold. His funeral though, was a display of Christian triumphalism because he was now with Jesus, and all the hymns were resurrection hymns. I felt so sorry for his widow, who had to have a bright smile because he was so much better now. It was almost like the Victorians and something went beyond that because the angels did not weep: the angels were rejoicing. The louder singing, the less inclined I felt to believe there was any such thing as a sure and certain hope. It seemed to me to be that kind of denial which made no room for grief or loss at all.

Putting that aside for a moment, I want to say a little bit about what has happened in Christian theology over the last 50 years or so, when it comes to looking at our expectations about death. I want to consider what I would call the non‑realist option, which is something I became aware of, I suppose, from the 1960s onwards: a growing consensus among our liberal and intellectually minded Christians that we should not be thinking of any kind of life or consciousness at all beyond our physical death. This is often justified on the grounds that we were Hebrews and the human person is a psychosomatic unity, and when the body died there was nothing left. A Roman Catholic, a former religieux called Jaques Pollet writing in the 1970s said: “What a fuss we make about death”, before going on to say that death is just it, so just come to terms with the fact there is nothing. We have lived our life worshiping God and loving God ‑ end. There being no individual afterlife, he would then go on to say, as did others of his inclination, does not negate the promises of Scripture but we should take them in a different way. Biblical texts suggesting a post-death existence should be taken as metaphors pointing perhaps to God’s continual investment in the human race, pointing to the cycle of little deaths and resurrections in this life, or perhaps just living now within an eternal perspective. There are all sorts of ways you can conceptualise death.

And perhaps I should not do this because I am going to talk about my friend Robert Reiss, who was a Canon of Westminster here, and who was one of those who used to go positively angry at any suggestion that there might be some form of life after death. He said this is something that Christians have to grow out of, that it was immature, it was hopelessly wrong really, and he liked to quote Carl Barth, as denying post‑mortem existence, and John Mcquarrie, and various other luminaries of Catholic and Protestant theology to prove his point. I never read them well enough to know whether he was right or not but I engaged with him in correspondence from time to time to suggest that I felt a dismissal of life after death was a dismissal of something quite important in the Christian tradition.

It is interesting how the undertaking industry has responded to the changes in attitude towards death among our secular contemporaries, and among Christians. In Victorian times the undertaking firms did really well in that era which celebrated death as a better state of being, but now there is the no-fuss economical alternative. “You don’t want a religious funeral, do you?” is the normal thing that an undertaker will say when somebody begins to try to make funeral arrangements. Religious funerals are seen as difficult to arrange when you could have a no-frills funeral and simply the seemly disposal of the body. There are Christians as well as people who have no faith who seem quite happy with that: the separation of a memorial service pre‑committal and the committal happening in private as part of that whole thing. You never see the dead person through, as it were, their last social engagement into — (Laughter) Well it is, isn’t it. It is their last social engagement in public when they are there in the church with all of us around them. We say goodbye and they go out of the church by the way they came out, via their baptism, going towards the grave. This is the Christian wholeness of life pulled together. But so often now the two are separated and the disposal of the body is merely a secular functional operation. All the nice things you want to say to celebrate and re‑create the ghost of the person by eulogies and thankfulness for all the good things they did is separated out, and the memorial service becomes the funeral, and the funeral does not really happen. That is the norm now for many of us in ministry, and we have to cope with that one way or another.

I believe there is a loss of transcendence in society as a whole and it affects us in the Church. What do we mean by transcendence? I think essentially what it must mean is that our very being comes from beyond ourselves: that our existence is a gift, and a gift of participation in all that is. Not an accident and not an entitlement, but a pure gift.

The very first words of the Order for the Burial of the Dead in the Book of Common Prayer are the words of another, the words of Christ: “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord”, and then a promise that this relationship does not end. I know it is a total misquote from the Book of Job but it does jolly well, especially if you put Handel in the background: “In my flesh I shall see God”. And then it reminds you of the poverty of our human nature: “We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain that we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” So, though dying is a departure from this world, and it is genuine and it is a real sundering, it is a real ending, there is also an entrance into a deeper, richer promise of a life with, and in God.

Richard Hooker spoke movingly of a funeral, at a time when funerals were not really allowed. They happened rather oddly at the dead of night, with nobody around, and you could not say any prayers in case it was implied that you were imploring God for the soul of the deceased and you mustn’t do that. Their judgment was in God’s hands, which implied there was nothing you could do to affect the fate of the departed. Funerals went through a bad patch at the Reformation, particularly in Scotland, where the Calvinist view of life was prominent. Richard Hooker in a kindly, gentle, and not too triumphalistic way, suggested that funerals are a sign of our affection for the deceased; a readiness to hold him or her in love as they make their final journey.

That is a lovely way of putting it and again resonant of those words of being part of the mystical body of Christ, the blessed company of all faithful people; what you do if you are part of that mystical body. You love the person and you see them on their final journey, with prayers and affection, and with love. If there is some sense that the physical world – nature, the universe, our own bodies and our loves and desires – reflect back and depend on a reality greater than ourselves, not only does death change meaning but of course life does too. This frail body of the flesh does not, in Christian thought, take us away from being part of the mystical body, the greater body of Christ.

In this sense that there is no place of transcendence in the contemporary world, there are of course alternatives. The urgency for transcendency is so deep it runs out into different channels and different streams. One way is a belief in a self-transcendence: the sense we can rise above ourselves by ingesting stuff from the world about us, ingesting its variety and wisdom, living as full a life as possibly you can get. I mentioned this earlier. The end of it, of course, is consumerism, or as I once described it Tesco ergo sum. This instinct, I think, is what lies behind those life-extending programmes offered by Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and others that I referred to earlier. Eat this, attach this, stretch that and you will somehow extend your life, eventually to the point of touching immortality. All for yourself you have done it: the perfect self-made eternal being. God. Fantastic!

The second alternative, which is around in obvious ways and some less obvious ways, is the belief in sacred violence. That is attaching yourselves to a cause where the issue matters more than you do. So you lose yourself in the participation with others – participation good word: violence bad word ‑ in which there is a suppression of your individuality, and the righteous hope that you have is absorbed into that righteous anger that others will, like yourself, ultimately inherit the earth. “Because I die in rage, I live in the victory of others.” “It is not me that lives but my people.” Not unfamiliar from the theology of the Hamas and I have to say it also echoes some tropes of liberation theology which reflects its Marxist leanings.

Few today I think can speak of transcendence with conviction. CS Lewis did so with wonderful imagination in the Narnia stories but since then, few have made a good case for that fusion of biblical revelation and neoplatonic philosophy which are, as I understand the root of Catholic orthodox and much Protestant theology. Even Rowan Williams, to whom I am devoted, fights shy of engaging with this challenge. If you look at some of his earlier works on spirituality and his book “Resurrection”, beyond the poetic and brilliant spins on New Testament texts, there is a quiet but yawning scepticism, less so in his later work. I think he changes when he gets engaged with theologians like Tom Wright and others later on.

Tom Wright is another interesting case. He is the doyen of evangelical biblical exegesis in which he lives with this split world, it seems to me, between Hebrew and Greek thought – Greek thought bad: Hebrew thought good. His way of understanding resurrection, a belief in the resurrection of Christ and our resurrection with Christ, is that it happens at some infinite state beyond time but yet not beyond time, because he does understand a bit about modern physics, and he understands how complicated it is to say what is of time and what is not. He thinks the universe is full of dead planets in which the resurrected live happily for ever. I do not think I have got it quite right, but I think that is what he seems to be trying to say, and that seems to me to make no religious sense. That is just not the way the world is, where these little bits of dust that go to the universe in places where human spirits can be resurrected.

He has been in a very interesting theological debate for the last year or two with the irascible American orthodox scholar David Bentley Hart who has demonstrated that Tom’s view of resurrection, the body-liness of Greek and Hebrew people, is massively exaggerated. For Tom it has to be material and physical. Bentley Hart points out, echoing CS Lewis here, that what we call the spiritual, that otherness, that transcendence from which we believe we come and to which we believe we go in the body of Christ, is the real world and, in some sense, forgive the platonic resonance, this world is the shadow. This world is the lesser world. The real world is somehow more substantial and more genuine than the fallen world of the flesh and of our everyday experience. As CS Lewis describes: the true Narnia, brighter, deeper, higher and also more solid than anything in this world. The weight of glory. Remember that essay of CS Lewis where he puts a great emphasis on the weight of kabod (glory) in Hebrew: the solidness of glory, of transcendence from which we come and to which we go.

I think the problem of finding good news in death is a problem for Christian apologetics in general; the difficulty about engaging with whether or not there is an ultimate reality on which this world, our bodies, our lives, our histories all depend, beyond the limitations of time-bound awareness.

I have to say that I see nothing in the claims and discoveries of cosmology, of biology and neuroscience or AI, that would exclude this. In fact, it seems to me it makes better sense than any alternative, which is why obstinately perhaps, I persist in affirming that we have a sure and certain hope.