JEREMY TAYLOR does not hesitate to confront his readers with the
fact that death is a matter of "worms and serpents, rottennesse and
cold dishonour".
For Taylor, death was more closely linked to sickness than to
extreme old age; and this is his focus in Holy Dying. Not
that senile decay was unknown to him; but sickness is the real
threat, the great mystery that seems both powerful and utterly
arbitrary, and, in some incomprehensible way, an instrument of
God.
What we almost never encounter in the general course of life,
but what Taylor knew as "normal", is death, the state of being
dead, as corruption. As St John the Evangelist insisted, through
Martha, "already he stinketh" (John 11.39).
Christianity is built on a historical event interpreted by means
of a gigantic paradoxical conceit that death is life, suffering is
salvation, putrefaction is liberation.
The Bible is rich in reflection on physical corruption. When
Handel set Job 19.25-26 for his oratorio Messiah, he
effaced a tiny part of the text, but preserved the graphic nature
of the whole: "I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall
stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though [after my skin]
worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God" (AV).
Taylor did likewise in Holy Dying:
I have read of a fair young German Gentleman, who living, often
refused to be pictured, but put off the importunity of his friends
desire, by giving way that after a few dayes burial they might send
a painter to his vault, and, if they saw cause for it, draw the
image of his death unto the life. They did so, and found his face
half eaten, and his midriffe and back bone full of serpents, and so
he stands pictured among his armed Ancestours. So does the fairest
beauty change, and it will be as bad with you and me.
We do not speak like that of death now. Our society has lost its
grip on a common language for death and dying. I mean here
"language" in the fullest sense: not only spoken words, but also
words sung together, words of prayer repeated and long reflected
on: "Our Father", "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in
peace", "Earth to earth . . ."
What a difference a fridge makes! Holy Dying speaks a
language of death that is rich and articulate where we are
mealy-mouthed and squeamish. Taylor speaks directly of corruption,
decay, mouldering, where we want to say people have "passed away" -
even the two syllables of "deceased" feels better to us than the
monosyllabic thunk of "dead". All that stands between us and Taylor
is the achievement of refrigeration, which keeps the earthy
realities of putrefaction out of sight. But the flesh of the dead
is as still and cold and heavy as ever.
It is the calling of a Christian - as Holy Dying so
eloquently argues - to accommodate the truth of human fragility to
the Christian message that death is not the end, and therefore not
to be feared; and that the whole of our life is the proper context
for this reflection on a holy dying. When death is at hand, it is
far too late to start. Now is the time to begin our preparations,
not when death is almost upon us.
Taylor tells us: "Death is the same harmless thing that a poor
shepherd suffered yesterday, or a maid-servant today. . . Two
differing substances were joined together with the breath of God,
and when that breath is taken away they part asunder."
Nothing that he argues is more humane or pertinent than this:
"Our blessed Lord was pleased to legitimate fear to us by His agony
and prayers in the garden. It is not a sin to be afraid."
This is an edited extract from a sermon preached by the Revd
Dr Cally Hammond, Dean of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge,
in the college chapel last term.