59 – Death & Dying

Contents

Articles

• Facing Dying, Alan Naylor-Smith
• Doctor-assisted Dying, Michael Irwin
• Bereavement Today, Valerie Clark
• John Robinson and the Language of Faith in God, Don Cupitt
• Radical Theology Series: Nietzsche

Reviews

• David Boulton reviews The Closing of the Western Mind by Charles Freeman, David Boulton
• Anne Ashworth reviews The Trouble with God by David Boulton, Anne Ashworth
• Paul Overend reviews Dear Rowan... Please save the C. of E. by Robert Van de Weyer, Paul Overend

Poetry

• Jephthah and His Daughter, Jill Harris
• When I Survey....., Andy Kemp
• The Burial of my Parents' Ashes, Tom Owen

Regulars and Occasionals

• Flotsam and Jetsam
• Sea Change: a report by Penny Mawdsley, Penny Mawdsley

Editorial

It survives, surely, because the progressive weakening of religious institutions and religious thought does not alter the fact that at the deepest level of religious needs and impulses are as great as ever... We are still prompted to religious dread and longing by the thought of our own death, our own littleness, and the precariousness of human values in the face of Nature’s vast indifference... It is still the task of religion to generate an order of meanings and values for us to live by, an order which can give moral weight and purpose to individual and social life... | remain convinced of the value of prayer and worship and the urgent need to develop in oneself the inner religious resources to triumph over evil and suffering." (Don Cupitt, The Sea of Faith, BBC, 1984, p.32 & p.34) As I write, war continues in Iraq and amidst the meaning of a piece of music is not to be found in the many images of the machinery of war — the planes, final chord that resolves it, but in its whole, which tanks, bombs and guns — the news of soldiers’ and resonates in those who heard it long after the final civilian deaths is being reported. We are confronted chord is ended. So the meaning of a life may be by the horror of death understood only after each day. "O Jesus, make As : Fe that final resolution, when applause may well be due. But for the relatives of a child or young adult abruptly killed mid-song as it were, death raises very different and pressing questions. ‘Why?’ ‘Why such a one as this?’ ‘What for?” it stop!" The deaths of young people who are sent into | battle and of civilians caught up in war raise very different questions from, say, the death of | an elderly person. If we | think of those whose : lives had been generally happy and who lived The context of war well, but whose mind provokes many to ask and body had been for meaning for their fading over time, we can " consolation. It was out reflect that death can of conflict, under the seem to be a release from the struggles of living. reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, c169 BCE, that Families and friends can find consolation in that belief in an afterlife developed in Judaism (Daniel understanding and can celebrate their loved one’s life 12:1). Such a belief held to an eternal justice in the in its completion, while also finding a sense of their face of temporal injustice. We are now generally far late beloved’s continuing influence on them. The removed from sudden death, by adequate food, 3 . Sof 59 May 2003 medical support and times of peace. But in war people face those questions again, when under fire, or without clean water, or when living as homeless refugees.

All religions offer some understanding of death, but if we question the account of a particular religious traditions, does that leave us without any answers, or room to select or develop our own? Can we find a discourse, to imagine the course of Dis (the Roman father-god of death) and so cope with fear and grief?

Members of the network must surely have reflected on what comfort can they be to the bereaved - clergy especially, if they abandon the belief in resurrection of the tradition they represent. Is there any meaning, hope or consolation in this brutal universe? And if our theology provides us with none, then is this theology too detached and too harsh to bear? Is it, simply, worth bothering with, in times of war? We may not have the answers to such questions, but we need to be aware of them, to ask them of religion as a human creation.

It is true that when James Boswell interviewed David Hume on his deathbed, Hume stated that he no longer believed in religion and was sceptical of any afterlife. Yet Boswell found Hume ‘placid’ and ‘even cheerful’ in the face of his death. He was very disturbed by the Hume’s unconcerned atheism in the face of death. To calm his own fears, Boswell wrote to Samuel Johnson who, given crash on a dangerous corner, action is taken to prevent another. In this way new hope can arise out of death. But after genocide, after war, what action needs to be taken by the world community? Should the UN continue to support the concept of a nation state whose borders are inviolable, when that state kills its people? Are there ways of deposing tyrants other than by sanctions that kill their people, or by engaging with their armies and killing their soldiers?

Is there a social vision that grows from the wastelands of war, and can that vision be founded on a radical religious approach? If we have come to a theology that struggles to voice any other comfort and hope than that of eternal reward, we might at least explore such an approach. Can radical theology ‘generate an order of meanings and The Abduction of Proserpine, by Alessandro Allori, 1570 Values for us to live by, an order which can give moral weight and purpose to individual and social life’ and give us ‘the inner religious resources to triumph over evil and suffering’ (in the words of Cupitt of the 1980s)? It raises the sort of questions of radical theology that shall be considered at our summer conference, ‘Taking a Stand’.

Such questions at least consider the greater ‘body’ of society and of our world community. The loss of any member of that body, whatever their faith or nationality, is a grievous injury to this body. It is our loss and our pain. May they not have died in vain! the apparent evidence of Hume’s calm, concluded that Hume must have been lying about his atheism. It was troubling to Boswell, and perhaps to Johnson, that one could face death without fear.

But the death of an old man, who with philosophical detachment does not rage against the dying of the light, is very different from the tears of grieving parents whose daughter or son is killed in an accident or in Editor, war. Malachi O’Doherty As the rebuilding of Iraq and of peace in the Middle East lay ahead, what we can demand is that lives are not spent in vain. After a road Fortnight regain Politics ~ art ~ culture A new perspective from Northern Ireland 11 issue subscription - UK £28.00, Republic and Europe 53.50, US & Overseas £47.00 Malachi O’Doherty is the speaker for the Sea of Faith Northern Ireland Road Show, at Queens University, Belfast, September 27th 2003.