Introduction: death and me.
When I was eight, my grandmother was painlessly felled by a stroke, while watering her garden one summer evening. Since Easter 2006, a close great aunt has resided unhappily in a rest home, after a life of active service: sewing and cooking for others, working for the Leprosy Mission. She has struggled to accept her growing limitations, suggesting the Protestant work ethic is poor preparation for ageing and impending death. The hospital emergency department is now familiar territory as my father’s heart plays up, and he sometimes looks disturbingly tired, compared to childhood paternal omnipotence. Death has not yet deeply impacted me, but is drawing closer.
Around 40 years old many become consciously mortal (Hick, 1976, 88).[1] As a 34-year-old, healthy white male, with a master’s degree in science and career in computing, it is probably not surprising that I have not yet significantly contemplated my own mortality. But I am aware that Socrates viewed philosophy as a practice and preparation for dying (Phaedo 62c-64c), Schopenhauer called death philosophy’s muse, and many wisdom traditions would concur. So it may be worth contemplating the “dead-sure fact” of life’s end (Moltman, 1996, 78). Would I rather die unexpectedly like my grandmother or slowly like my aunt (Welch, Zawistoski & Smart, 1991, 27)? What will be the meaning of my life before then?
Furthermore, I now regularly preach at my Baptist church. What challenge or comfort can the Christian tradition bring regarding the mysteries of life and mortality? How does our death-view shape our life-stance? In particular, does death create or destroy meaning, enrich or impoverish our lives, and how can we promote the former, without unhealthy denial? My listeners are predominantly like me evangelical Christians, middle-class Pakeha New Zealanders, mostly university students or professionals. So my context here is the European tradition, rather than other cultural spheres, which may approach mortality very differently.[2]
In what follows, I first outline Western social attitudes towards death, and contrast these with 20th-century existentialist philosophies I have previously studied. I then survey key themes of the biblical Ecclesiastes, which wrestled with similar issues of mortality and meaning, and influenced the mediaeval-Renaissance Art of Dying tradition. This was a very different approach to death from popular denial or existentialist despair, assisting me to make suggestions for a healthy art of dying, and therefore of living, for us today.
The contemporary context.
In Victorian England, death was part of everyday life. Children were prepared for death, with up to one third dying (Hick, 1976, 82) – one Sunday school song contemplated the graveyard (Berridge, 2002, 14)! In 1900, 80% of deaths occurred at home (DeSpelder & Strickland, 2002, 11), with novels and paintings depicting crowded deathbed scenes (Hick, 1976, 84). Dead bodies, funeral processions and mourners draped in black were familiar sights. But during World War I, traditional mourning was curtailed (Berridge, 2002, 9 ff), and with increasing individualism and life expectancy, the 20th-century was progressively marked by the “sequestration and privatisation of death” (DeSpelder & Strickland, 2002, 8,182).
By the later 20th century, Victorian reality was inverted: death not sex was the new taboo; naked flesh was everywhere, but corpses rarely seen.[3] For society’s “cult of youth”, grey hair is no longer a crown of glory (Prov 16:31),[4] but to be dyed. Most people “pass away” in hospitals, “temples of death denial”, with priests in special garb speaking esoteric language (Byock, 2002, 283). In the 1960s, seeking to interview dying patients, Elizabeth Kübler-Ross met resistance and sometimes anger from medics (Kübler-Ross, 1975, xix) – dying constitutes a defeat of medical technology (Kübler-Ross, 1969, 6ff,20,218; 1975, 7ff). “Fast funerals” joined fast food (Berridge, 2002, 184), preservation by embalming and destruction by cremation both artificially preventing decay. This illusion of control (Bradbury, 1999, 131 ff) culminates in cryonics resuscitation, an expensive, nonreligious resurrection hope (Hick, 1976, 87). Death’s “mystery, awe and trepidation” is reduced to “medical and legal micromanagement” (Spiro, Curnen & Wandel, 1996, xi). It seems Ernest Becker’s “Denial of Death” (1973) dominates Western society.
Some believe death has now “come out of the closet”, and debate the “denial of death thesis” (Zimmermann & Roden, 2004, passim). AIDS and terrorism have raised our death awareness (Woods, 2007, 340), and in some areas a healthier acceptance of death and bereavement is emerging (Lendrum & Syme, 2004, xvii, 6-8). Choice proliferates in the “death supermarket” (Berridge, 2002, 110). The post-modern world is more complex, marked by both anxious necrophobia and fascinated necrophilia (Woods, 2007, passim). But many believe dramatic violent entertainment[5] and sanitised death in the media merely desensitise (DeSpelder & Strickland, 2002, 548).[6] Despite daily TV News tragedy, a sudden death in a Thomas Hardy novel recently impacted me far more! “Thanatomimesis” or pretend death coexists with a “cultural conspiracy” to avoid personal experience of real death (Berridge, 2002, six). Indeed, many still “plug the gap between truth and fear with euphemism” (Berridge, 2002, 7) and avoid life-insurance (Kopczuk & Slemrod, 2005, 19).
Between 1982 and 1997, Australian attitudes became both more open and more denying, with greater medical sensitivity to the dying and bereaved, but inability to socially express grief (Griffin and Tobbin, 1997, 2, 30). Artificial grass often covers the soil at grave sides, hiding the liturgical “earth to earth” (Griffin and Tobbin, 1997, 115), yet growing ecological awareness acknowledges death and values ritual. Schwass’ 2005 “Last Words: approaches to death in New Zealand’s cultures and faiths” updates a 1987 book. The two decades brought growing cultural and religious diversity, with increased variety of funerals, including secular services (Hudson, 2004, 44 ff). Over 65% of New Zealanders die in institutions (Schwass, 2005, 14), but the hospice movement, home-based palliative care and family involvement with the body is increasing (Schwass, 2005, 25). Nevertheless, death and dying are still widely avoided, especially by Pakeha (Schwass, 2004, 14).[7] The Funeral Directors Association of New Zealand (FDANZ) provides a free “My life, my funeral” kit to assist planning. But while 40% of funerals are now preplanned in the United States, and 15% in Australia, only 5%, though increasing, are in New Zealand (http://fdanz. org.nz/planning.html).[8]
What about Christians? Studies relating fear of death to religiosity, mostly among American Christians, have produced differing results (Hoelter & Epley, 1979, 404; Lazar, 2006, 185; Patrick, 1979, 299). In my middle-class evangelical experience, while accepting Christ and getting to heaven are emphasised, ageing and mortality are not – witness, perhaps, my aunt’s struggle. Healthy grieving may be hindered where the body is neglected as “just a shell” (Lynch, 2003, 20). Religious comfort may collude with denial, if the hope of eternal life means “I don’t really have to die” (Anderson, 2007, 45; Kübler-Ross, 1969, 37) just, with Feuerbach, change horses and ride on. This may be “cheap grace”, which avoids carrying the cross of our finitude by jumping straight to Christ’s victorious resurrection – perhaps symbolised by Protestants’ bare rectilinear cross, avoiding the unpleasantly bloody mortality of a crucifix! But to be born again, first you have to die. Paul knew he would rise with Christ because he was first “crucified with Christ”, “baptised into his death” (Gal 2:20, Rom 6:3 ff). Furthermore, “the thought of a life after death can cheat us of the happiness and the pain of this life, so that we squander its treasures, selling them off cheap to heaven” (Moltman, 1996, 50). Partly for these reasons, I spend more time here with the First Testament than the New.
,.
While much of the West denied death over the last century, for the European existentialist philosophers, it was central (Tomer, Eliason & Wong, 2008, 7-38). Fear of death, the dread of nothingness, is “the rumble of panic underneath everything” (Becker, 1973, 284; Tillich, 1952, 46, 51). And yet “everyone lives as if no one ‘knew’” (Camus, 1955, 21). For Sartre, the fact that death could happen any time, cancelling all possibilities and preventing completion, renders human life a nauseating “useless passion” (Hick, 1976, 101 ff; Macquarrie, 1994, 36, 58). We are “condemned to be free”, but flee this anguishing responsibility in bad faith and self-deception (Wicks, 2003, 41), of which death denial could be the supreme example. For Camus, we are all death row prisoners on mere temporary reprieve, running a meaningless “relay race without an ultimate goal” (Wicks, 2003, 60,66). While mostly in denial, the naked realisation of our mortality can hit any time. “At any street corner, the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face” and “the stage-sets collapse” (Camus, 1955, 17, 19). It then becomes hard to justify continuing to live, but Camus rejects both suicide and hope as weak minded escapism, in favour of strong minded revolt (Camus, 1955, 11,53ff; Wicks, 2003, 58 ff). The Greek Sisyphus is noble and tragic because he is conscious: unlike most he knows his work is absurd (Camus, 1955, 109).
For Heidegger, by contrast, death is a source of meaning (Inwood, 1997, 51, 69 ff; Macquarrie, 1994, 34 ff). We mostly live in inauthentic fallenness, alienation from our true selves, drifting in conformity to the anonymous dehumanised “they”. We acknowledge that “one dies” in general, but mask, with idle chatter or superficial curiosity, the knowledge that I myself will cease to exist, that my time is running out. Heidegger believes death is not just an additional event at life’s end, but our very being, shaping our whole life, like the ripening of a fruit. Facing our Angst with an attitude of “impassioned freedom towards death” frees us from lostness in the “they-self”, because we each die alone. It shows us what is truly valuable; it motivates us to live in an authentic, meaningful, life-enriching way today, not endlessly postpone doing what is most important, as if we had for ever (Richardson & Bowden, 1989, 21 ff; Roberts, 1957, 154 ff).
Ecclesiastes
The French existentialists’ despair is not new, but even had a precursor in the First Testament book of Ecclesiastes (Christianson, 2007, 86). For Sartre, death claims both the solitary drunkard and the great statesman, rendering their lives equally pointless (Macquarrie, 1966, 70). Likewise the “preacher”, or Qoheleth (Eccl 1:1), “hated life” and “gave his heart up to despair” when he observed “the wise die just like fools” (Eccl 2:16-20). Camus’ Sisyphus, perhaps as punishment for trying to cheat Death, perpetually pushes his boulder up the hill (Camus, 1955, 107 ff). It is a futile treadmill cycle, endlessly wearisome and never new, like everything else under Qoheleth’s sun (Eccl 1:4-10; Ellul, 1990, 60; Murphy, 1992, 10). Indeed, all is hebel, “a chasing after wind” (Eccl 1:14, 2:11, 17, 4:16).
With 38 occurrences, hebel (Christianson, 2007, 98 ff; Ellul, 1990, 49 ff; Murphy, 1992, lviii ff) is Ecclesiastes’ most characteristic word, traditionally translated as “vanity” – empty, meaningless, useless, in Camus’ term, absurd. hebel literally denotes vapour, smog, mist, the faint breath of our life so quickly dispersed by a breeze or the morning sun. In the prophets, the plural denotes idolatry, while a cognate is Abel, condemned to death despite his righteousness, like everything in this life (Ellul, 1990, 58). Work (1:3), wisdom (1:17, 2:15), pleasure (2:1), building and planting and buying (2:11), “youth and the dawn of life” (11:10), all is hebel. No wonder “Vanity of vanities” frames the main discourse (1:2, 12:8).
But another frequent word is simha, or joy, with “enjoy life” a competing key theme (Murphy, 1990, 53; Murphy, 1992,lx). Qoheleth repeatedly exhorts his readers to “eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil” (2:24, 3:13, 5:18, 8:15), to “be happy and enjoy themselves” (3:12), especially in their youth (11:9). While this appears life affirming, death’s finality means that there is simply “nothing better” to do (2:24, 3:12, 8:15): “let us crown ourselves with rosebuds before they wither” (Wisd Sol 2:8). Carpe diem, for the future is unknown (Horace Odes 1.11)!
More religiously, Ecclesiastes also instructs readers to “fear God and keep his commands” (12:13), remembering that “God will bring you into judgement” (11:9): “it will be well with those who fear God… but it will not be well with the wicked. “ (8:12-13). Such predictable moral retribution is more characteristic of Proverbs, Job’s friends, or Deuteronomy than Qoheleth’s frustration that whether righteous or wicked, good or evil, clean or unclean, religious or not, “the same fate comes to all” (9:2-3).
Many have struggled with Ecclesiastes’ internal contradictions. For many “Conservatives”, Qoheleth just plays the role of an atheist to illustrate the vanity of living “without God”. For many “Liberals”, he was a true pessimist, Sceptic, Stoic,[9] or Epicurean (Murphy, 1990, 52), either citing conventional wisdom before undermining it,[10] or subjected to later “pietistic insertions”, softened with “sugar to make the pill go down” (Ellul, 1990, 40). Others believe these contradictory ironies, recalling Camus’ “subtle dance” between “absurdity, hope and death” (Camus, 1955, 17), are the key to the book, and highly suited to paradoxical post-modernity (Johnston, 2004, 22). So the temptation to sanitise Ecclesiastes, tame its “cutting edge” by resolving its tensions to logical linear coherence, must be resisted (Ellul, 1990, 7, 39; Murphy, 1990, 52; Murphy, 1992,xxxiv).
Wisdom and true faith begin not with finite, comprehensible rationality, but with “the fear of the Lord” (Prov 1:7, Sir 1:14ff),[11] including the realisation that God is immortal, but we are not (Ellul, 1990, 171, 174). “From everlasting to everlasting you are God… 1000 years in your sight are like yesterday”, but “the days of our life are 70 years… soon gone, and we fly away” (Ps 90: 2, 4, 10). Qoheleth too knows the days are few before our “dust returns to the earth as it was” (Eccl 2:3, 5:18, 6:12, 12:7). Furthermore, God is omniscient, but we are not, despite our endless scientific striving (Ellul, 1990, 151), repeatedly “adding one thing to another to find the sum”, which we like Qoheleth never attain (Eccl 7:27-8). To mortals, God’s work is unfathomable, our own future indiscoverable, the “day of death” and “time of disaster” unknown – thus Qoheleth’s rhetorical “who knows?” (3:11, 7:14, 8: 7-8, 17, 9:12, 11:5).
Indeed, who can grasp the contradictory human condition (Macquarrie, 1966, 56)? Human beings die just like animals, coming and going naked from and to the dust (Eccl 3:18-21, 5:15). And yet they long for more: in the ambiguous phrase of 3:11, God put “eternity in their hearts” (NIV), or “a sense of past and future into their minds” (NRSV). But “who knows whether the human spirit goes upward” (3:21)?[12] So we are animals, but know we will die (9:5; Moltmann, 1996, 54):[13]
“Man (sic)… is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history. He is a creator with a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity… Yet at the same time… man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox… a terrifying dilemma…” (Becker, 1973, 26)
As such, our death is both natural and unnatural (Tillich, 1949, 171-2). Genesis 3 associates mortality with divine punishment, so for Paul “the wages of sin is death” (Rom 6:23),[14] and the First Testament indeed views violent, premature, childless death as a fearful curse (eg Ps 55:4). But a peaceful death, “full of years” with many offspring is more natural (eg 1 Chr 29:28; Richardson and Bowden, 1989, 145). “Death belongs to life as birth does” (Tagore, in Kübler-Ross, 1969, 240), like the flourishing and falling of a tree’s leaves (Sir 14:18) or other cycles of nature, at the appropriate times decreed by God (Eccl 1:4-7, 3:1 ff).
Mediaeval-Renaissance art of dying.
Jerome’s influential reading of Ecclesiastes emphasised contemptus mundi, despising the vanitas of this fleeting world (Christianson, 2007, 26, 101 ff; Murphy, 1992, li ff), leading to memento mori, or remembrance of death: “It is better to go to the house of mourning, than the house of feasting; for this is the end of everyone, and the living will lay it to heart” (Eccl 7:2). So Renaissance Vanitas still life paintings featured phrases from Ecclesiastes alongside skulls, rotting fruit, and hourglasses representing death, like the vivid symbols of Eccl 12:1-7 (Christianson, 2007, 75,119, 22 5ff). In the crypt under Santa Maria della Concezione in Rome, skeletal monks, among stacked skulls and scapulas, still hold signs: “What you are now, we once were; what we are now, you will be” (Sir 38:22)[15]
For Paul, Christ’s resurrection had conquered the “last enemy” of death (1 Cor 15:26, 55-6), so “to live is Christ, to die is gain” (Phil 1:21, NIV). Early Christians echoed this confident fearlessness, but by the Middle Ages, death was “right ferefull and horrible” (Beaty, 1970, 7), a dreaded precursor to judgement, purgatory and hell (Hick, 1976, 196 ff; Richardson and Bowden, 1989, 146).
The 14th century brought famines, the Hundred Years War in France, and the Black Death (Beaty, 1970, 38). “The grim, primitive cacophony of rattling bones, deathbed screams, and the rustling of patient worms” (Beaty, 1970, 46) induced defiant worldliness for some – recalling Camus’ revolt – and the gruesome Danse Macabre. With death now too frequent for priests to attend, the 1415 Tractatus artis bene moriendi, or Tract on the Art of Dying Well, enabled people to prepare alone (Beaty, 1970, 1-53; Imhof, 1994, 2). It taught a dying Everyman, or Moriens, how to pray and resist the five deathbed temptations of unbelief, despair, impatience, pride, or avarice, and so to achieve a good death. With an 11-part woodblock form for the illiterate, and widely translated, it sparked a literary tradition culminating in Jeremy Taylor’s 1651 The Rules and Exercises of Holy Dying (Beaty, 1970, 197-270).
Taylor begins “A Man is a Bubble” (Taylor, 1989, 19), another translation of Ecclesiastes hebel (Christianson, 2007, 117 ).[16] Moving beyond much earlier literature, for Taylor the art of dying well is the art of living well, the ars moriendi is the ars viviendi. As the Stoics taught, all of life is a progressive dying (Beaty, 1970, 216): “It is a great art to dye well, and to be learnt by men in health”, well before their deathbed (Dedication, Taylor, 1989, 6). Observers today confirm that our past attitude to life, be it defensive denial or courageous acceptance, mostly shapes our future dying (Kübler-Ross, 1969, 29, 37, 236), though some do dramatically change (Byock, 1997, 31, 140).
A new art of dying for today.
So, what can this tradition, from paradoxical Ecclesiastes to mediaeval memento mori, say to our death-denying but post-911 anxiety-ridden 21st-century? First Testament wisdom (see above) to self-help gurus assert that facing death sharpens awareness of life’s meaning and stimulates spiritual growth (Byock 1997; Byock, 2002, 281; Peck, 1997, 118). Ignatius of Loyola advised considering how you will view today’s decisions at your point of death (Spiritual Exercises, 186.7). Samuel Johnson famously commented that the prospect of hanging wonderfully concentrates the mind (source forgotten). For Stephen Covey, death is a wake-up call to live effectively and “leave a legacy” (Covey, Merrill & Merrill, 1994, 17 ff). So with Imhof (1994), I believe we need “An Ars Moriendi for our time”, a realistic engagement with death in order “to live a fulfilled life”. Furthermore, if Terror Management Theory is correct, this is essential to reduce global violence, as different cultural “immortality projects” that buffer our fear of death increasingly collide (Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 2000).
So how do we go about this? The Psalmist prayed “teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart” (Ps 90:12). Death clocks do just this, counting down the seconds to one’s statistical death![17] But against our society’s “mindless cult of quantity” (Kaufmann, 1976,244), or Camus’ rebel hero who simply seduces the most women, plays the most roles, achieves the most conquests he can (Camus, 1955, 64-85),[18] the value of life is measured by its quality (Preston and Dixon, 2007, 107). To live 2000 years, without enjoying good, is still vanity (Eccl 6:6), while terminal patients may live more in their last months than their whole life (Kübler-Ross, 1975, 151).
“It is only when life has lost its sense that no standards remain to evaluate it except length. But a superb short poem would not gain by being made longer and longer, and still longer and, if possible, endless. A Rembrandt self-portrait would not become better by being made larger and ever larger. Perfection lies in intensity…” (Kaufmann, 1976, 244).
Tourists who may never be back often see more of a place than local residents, who feel they have for ever. All too often, “lives are spoiled and made rotten by the sense that death is distant and irrelevant” (Kaufmann, 1976, 214). So like the patriarchs, we should live as pilgrims, “strangers and foreigners on the earth”, just passing through, and travelling light (Heb 11:8-16, 1 Pet 1:17). So Kaufmann believes we should “impress on ourselves how young so many great composers, painters, poets, writers, died”, and “make a rendezvous with death, pledging to be ready for it at the age of thirty”, extending this every 10 years to 40, 50, 60, viewing each extension as a gift (Kaufmann, 1976, 248).
So “good deaths” are not random, but can be fostered (Byock, 1997, 30). A few die with exceptional beauty and grace, who have earlier worked hard to develop “skills for dying”, like ordering their lives without loose ends, mourning well, learning to express and receive forgiveness, gratitude and love (Byock, 1997, 82, 140, 217-8). Ageing requires a letting go, giving up our independent pride, relaxing our central Western need to control (Byock, 1997, 234 ff; Woods, 2007, 336).[19] The spiritual disciplines like simplicity, silence, solitude and submission may help prepare for the forced “stripping away”, the purgatorial purification, of old age and death (Peck, 1997, 88).[20] Perhaps they would have helped my aunt.[21]
But renunciation is not an end in itself. Ascetic Jerome and his mediaeval progeny one-sidedly emphasised Qoheleth’s vanity theme, neglecting life’s joy. This risks the “micro-suicide” of “avoiding non-being by avoiding being” (Tillich, 1952, 71-4). By repressing one’s uniqueness, living less fully and deadening oneself in advance, there is less to fear losing when we die (Morrant & Catlett, 2008, 362 ff; Tillich, 1952, 50). But “those who try to make their life secure” by such “systematic self-restriction” will “lose their life” (Becker, 1973, 210; Luke 17:33). To flee pain is to flee joy. Grief “is the tax we pay on the loves of our lives” (Lynch, 2003, 20), “pain the mirror writing of love’s delight” (Moltman, 1996, 119). “Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth” (Camus, 1955, 110). So Qoheleth weaves together enjoyment and vanity, challenging readers “to work out for themselves how the realities of hebel and joy must coexist” (Christianson, 2007, 258).[22]
This tension is perplexing. Death is fearsome. So the journey from denial to acceptance may lead through resentful anger, desperate bargaining, and deep depression, as Kübler-Ross observed for those more obviously terminally ill (Kübler-Ross, 1969, 36-98). Jesus himself wrestled with soul-troubling fear in Gethsemane (Matt 26: 36, John 12:27). But because he did, unlike the individualist existentialists, we need not simply face death alone. In response to rising crime, we may barricade ourselves behind bars, or build community to protect each other. Similarly, denying death isolates us emotionally. But in the ars moriendi, the dying Christian is surrounded and strengthened by the Church. And the Christian dies in Christ, who is “the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25) and died to “free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death” (Heb 2:15).
Terminal patients must sometimes choose between suffering alertness and drugged semiconsciousness. This choice is ours. While more comfortable, “the suppressed awareness of death buries us alive” (Moltman, 1996, 51). But “death is the key to the door of life” (Kübler Ross, 1975, 164), encountering it the way to “feel newborn, and experience life here, in all its uniqueness and beauty, with freshly awakened and sharpened senses” (Moltman, 1996, 50):
“To live in the bright light of death is to live a life in which colors and sounds and smells are all more intense, in which smiles and laughs are irresistibly infectious, in which touches and hugs are warm and tender almost beyond belief” (Bill Bartholome, in Byock, 2002, 281).
This choice may determine whether I one day bitterly realise, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons” (TS Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, 51), or joyfully affirm that “I wanted to” – and did – “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life” (Thoreau, Walden, 2.16). Perhaps the last words should come from Elim Christian College, following their loss of seven lives this year. Students now sport badges reading “Jump in Puddles – Ephesians 5:16”. Because life is short, “make good use of every opportunity you have”, “making the most of the time” (Eph 5:16, Good News Bible, NRSV).
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[1] At 37, the sudden, “visceral knowledge of death produced an unnerving fear” for Spitzer (2004, 37).
[2] It is in part, Western individualism that “makes death so frighteningly ‘the end of it all’” (Moltman, 1996, 51). Kaufmann believes fear of death is not universal, but a product of Christianity (Kaufmann, 1976, 211, 220 ff).
[3] Even of animals for those in cities (DeSpelder and Strickland, 2002, 190).
[4] Unless otherwise specified, biblical citations are from the New Revised Standard Version.
[5] By 1971, an average American 14-year-old had allegedly witnessed 18,000 deaths on TV (Hick, 1976, 86).
[6] A major thesis of Neil Postman’s 1987 “Amusing Ourselves To Death”.
[7] For Chinese, our largest Asian population, death is also often taboo, the word itself bad luck, and to make a will is “courting death” (Kübler-Ross, 1975,29; Schwass, 2005, 76).
[8] Berridge (2002, 123) reports 3% of UK funerals as “pre-need” sales, versus 70% in Belgium and the Netherlands, and 50% in Spain. Without details of the source and cultural make-up of these statistics, it’s hard to draw conclusions, but they could reflect an ongoing British “stiff upper lip” mentality in New Zealand?
[9] The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius often resemble Ecclesiastes, but space precludes discussion here.
[10] 8: 12 in the Good News Bible reads “I know what they say …”
[11] An ambiguous phrase (Murphy, 1992, lxiv, 35).
[12] For the First Testament, personal destiny was mostly the ambiguous shadowy Sheol, where “there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom” (Eccl 9:10), where God was generally neither present, remembered, nor praised (Ps 88:4-5, 10-12). Exceptions are Psalm 16:10, 23:4, 139:8.
[13] Sin is refusing this creaturely finitude, grasping at immortal God-likeness (Pannenberg, 1998, 561).
[14] The relationship between evil, sin, finitude and death is debated (Feldman, 1992, 3, 145; Moltman, 1996, 77-95; Pannenberg, 1998,559ff).
[15] Buddhist monks often contemplate decaying graveyard corpses to realise their own impermanence (Kübler -Ross, 1975, 68-9).
[16] Last year in Bangkok, I saw boys blowing bubbles in a Buddhist monastery – a fitting symbol for a faith emphasising transience!
[17] www.deathclock.com, www.death-clock.org
[18] Because “what counts is not the best living, but the most living” (Camus, 1955, 59).
[19] Often hardest for the “rich and successful, the controlling VIP” (Kübler-Ross, 1969, 48-9, 236-7).
[20] Foster (1980) and Willard (1988) reinterpret these classic, often seen as more catholic, practices for contemporary evangelical Protestants.
[21] Indeed, her retirement home somewhat resembles a monastery, living alone in her “cell”, but with communal meals!
[22] Appropriately, Ecclesiastes was read at the feast of Tabernacles, celebrating God’s goodness while dwelling in fragile temporary booths (Ellul, 1990, 42-5).
