Submerging the absurdity of death in gratitude for the wonder and wisdom of life
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| Rogan josh curry (source) |
A pdf of the revised order of service in which this address was given, and about which it speaks, can be found at this link.
For the past year, it has been a privilege to help prepare the funeral service of a still living friend of mine who has a stage four cancer. We meet every few weeks, catch up with the medical news — or, as the old gag puts it, he performs for me an organ recital — and then we eat and shoot the breeze about life and death, music and films, politics, philosophy, religion and much more besides.
But this week’s meeting was more poignant than usual because, immediately before it, I finished typesetting for him a first draft of his order of service, which included a picture of him on the cover. It was slightly discombobulating, therefore, to find myself printing off a copy to take with me to show, not to a grieving partner or relative, but to the very person whose smiling face looked out at me as it came off the printer, and who would soon be casting me a convivial smile across a local restaurant table.
It was a salutary reminder of the truth of a thousand-year-old line of text, “media vita in morte sumus,” attributed to a Swiss monk with the marvellous name of Notker the Stammerer, and which was later immortalised for English speakers by Thomas Cranmer in the burial service found in the Book of Common Prayer as, “In the midst of life we are in death.”
As our glasses clinked over an excellent curry, it was impossible for either of us not to be acutely aware of the truth of this even as, for the moment, life continued pleasantly to prevail.
But, this week, I not only took my friend’s funeral service to the restaurant, but also an insight about death from a book published in 1999 by the American philosopher of religion and religious naturalist, Loyal Rue (b. 1944), called “Everybody’s Story: Wising Up to the Epic of Evolution” (State University of New York Press, 2000) which, even as it affirms Notker the Stammerer’s original line, makes it abundantly clear it is simultaneously true that, in the midst of death we are in life.
I was rereading Rue’s book in preparation for a piece I’m currently trying to write for the congregation and this podcast about the Epic of Evolution, and on the morning I was to visit my friend, I reached a passage (pp. 80-81) where Rue points out that the mystery of human life deepens when we “realize that our own death is implicit in the process of life.” As he notes, it’s become the norm “to look on death as a problem” and that “in most cultural traditions death is the problem of human existence.” But, he insists, “from the perspective of evolutionary wisdom, death is not a problem at all, it is a solution” and, not only that but, in evolutionary terms anyway, it’s a fairly recent one. Rue reminds us that before there was sexual reproduction there was nothing inevitable about death and, although it happened all the time, it did not need to. As some of you will know, single-cell organisms reproduce by division, with each division becoming a distinct individual capable of further subdivision. In this sense, death does not form part of the picture. Rue then goes on to point out that,
“. . . even in multicelled flatworms the prospect of growing old and dying makes no sense. They merely pinch at the middle, leaving two abbreviated flatworms to regenerate all the missing bits and so on, indefinitely. Death has no sting to a flatworm.”
You see, it’s only when more complex, sexually reproducing organisms come along, such as us, that what we call death “enters the picture as a certainty.” Here’s how Rue lays out why this is the case:
“The reason has to do with the divergence of cells into the germ line and soma lines. The germ line produces informed seed for the next generation, while the soma lines diverge for the production of various body parts. The body negotiates the environment, thus enabling the germ line to do its own job of bringing forth more seed bearing organisms. The strategy is simple and elegant: the soma line is the instrument of the germ line. It is all part of the utility function of maximizing DNA. Having performed its duty to the germ line, the body becomes redundant and eventually dies. But the germ line continues immortally onward in subsequent generations. The death of the body is an essential part of the design.”
Now, for a religious naturalist like Loyal Rue and me — and I think also for my friend, although I must leave him to speak for himself on this matter — knowing about this scheme of life and death, death and life, has profound consequences that can help us view our own death more equably and begin to open ourselves up to experiencing a sense of deep gratitude.
It seems only right and proper to finish this piece with Rue’s words concerning his own understanding of the consequences of this religious naturalist way of understanding life and death, death and life. But, for what it’s worth, I find myself agreeing with him, and I hope these words speak to you in some helpful ways as well . . .
How then shall I think about death? With gratitude, and as the occasions decide. When I have occasion to mourn the death of others I will try to absorb the loss in what I have gained from them. I will try to understand my grief as a measure of my gratitude. And when I have occasion to consider the fact of my own death I will attempt to think large. I will try to see that a soma-centered story of the self is a small and impoverished view, and that the life within me was first quickened among the primordial organisms appearing on earth four billion years ago. I will affirm that all lives, no less my own, are instruments of life itself. And by these measures I will submerge the absurdity of death in gratitude for the wonder and wisdom of life.”
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