Life before death

Embracing death, parading it down streets, and even downplaying their egos, Julie Canlis contemplates why Christians do death.

Julie Canlis

Julie connects Christian spirituality with ordinary life in Wenatchee, Washington State, where she teaches and writes.

A Good Friday procession of people and priests hold a cross horizontal above their heads.

Good Friday procession in Bielsko-Biała, Poland.

Silar, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Easter is not about the Easter Bunny. Easter is about the paradox that we all try to skirt: only in death is there life.

But Easter is not just about metaphorical death and rebirth, at least not for Christians. Christians don’t believe that Jesus died for our self-esteem. Nor that he raised an Idea of himself. As Thomas Lynch, undertaker and poet in Midwest America reminds us,

“Do you think they would have changed the calendar for that? Done the Crusades? Burned witches? Easter was a body and blood thing, no symbols, no euphemisms, no half measures.”

Christians believe that Jesus’ body died. Ceased breathing. Flatlined for three days. And then (in myth-like fashion of the dying and rising god) this human being who lived at certain GPS coordinates, and had DNA from his mother, was given his life back. Not resuscitated. But resurrected. Yes, reader, Christians believe this.

Our culture is body-obsessed when we are living, and body-denying when we die.

Who are we without our bodies? When people die, Christians insist that their body isn’t just a “shell” of the real person. No, their body still is the person. That’s why cremation didn’t catch on in the Christian west until recently, and even so, your local priest might turn up their nose if you want to distribute the ashes into jars to be divided between the grandkids. Often, as soon as a person dies, our impulse is to insist, “she’s not there.” This is because our culture is body-obsessed when we are living, and body-denying when we die. As Prof John Behr, a University of Aberdeen specialist in thinking about death, observes, we want to live like hedonists and to die like Platonists. Easter presents a counter-narrative here. Our bodies have meaning. Jesus’ body has meaning.

In re-living the events of Holy Week, all eyes are on Jesus’ body. And Jesus’ body is doing some very physical actions – like healing bodies, raising bodies, touching unclean bodies, washing feet. And then it is his turn to have his body ravaged by arrest, torture, sleeplessness, betrayal, and execution. All eyes are not on the idea but on the body of Jesus. So much so, that they put guards at the tomb so that there could be no more monkey business about this man’s body.

It might seem peculiar to us that Christianity, infamous for its historically mixed relationship to the body, is centered on one man’s body. Ancient Christians spoke poetically that the tomb that held Jesus’ body became a womb. In his death, in the absolute silence of death, Jesus chose to share dead-ness with us. That this was the essence of his “work.” That his work could only be accomplished by surrendering, doing nothing – and that in doing nothing, he undoes the great “nothing” that threatens each one of us. Almost everything we fear, big and small, is somehow connected to a fear of death in one form or another. It is not death, per se, but the “fear of death” that enslaves us (says an early Christian preacher in Rome. And so, Easter stands at that pivot point between fear of death and life. Christians celebrate Easter as the day the world tilted. Where death no longer has the final say, but is something we can now use to our advantage. In fact, life begins to break in precisely through death. This is only because, as James Alison once said in an Easter sermon, “He entered into death and made it untoxic.”

The question is not “is there life after death” but is there life before death?

And so, strangely, Christians embrace death. We parade it on crosses through the streets. We paint it on our tombs, over our meeting houses, wear it on our chests. Because in embracing death (and the even more enslaving fear-of-death), we defeat it. Because of this belief, ancient Christians flung themselves at lions. They endured the agony of torture. They sanctified suffering. They also practiced small unnoticed “little deaths” of that great overlord, the ego. Not because suffering or death is good, or to be sought. But because death and suffering have been transformed into portals. Even in baptism, with oblivious babies being christened in frilly white dresses, we are dipping them defiantly into the waters of death and waging war on death. This is the mystery of Easter. This is why every Sunday is called a “little Easter” because even as we shuffle into that old stone church, something outlandish is being proclaimed. Death is not a friend, but neither is it to be feared. The worst has already happened. Now we can get on with living. The question is not “is there life after death” but is there life before death?

And here is the final kicker: Christian orthodoxy proclaims that Jesus still has his body. (Not every Christian would insist on this, but it has been central to the tradition for two millennia). Easter isn’t just a mythical story of the paradigmatic victory of life over death. Paul talked about it as a complete reversal: that instead of death swallowing life, Jesus’ embodied life swallows up all death. Christians believe that he is alive and well, in some kind of body (“transfigured” in Christian slang), pouring out blessing on all embodiment. This isn’t a body that is somewhere floating above us in the clouds, but is an embodied person raised as their whole life narrative into eternity – as one recognizable life. Resurrection is not the hope of our joining Jesus in the clouds, but of this same raising of our whole lives into Life itself. This is called “putting on immortality” like a coat – where everything from our past (even scars, like Jesus still had) is integrated into one recognizable life.

This is the Christian hope of Easter, as we live in the interim, no longer fearing but using death for dear life.

Article

Advent

Christmas culture

Joy

Poetry

20 December 2024

6 min read

The Advent poets who can’t wait until the world is sane

Tennyson to Eliot, Rossetti to L’Engle, find despair doesn’t preclude joy.

Beatrice Scudeler

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here.

Beyond a misty and raindrop streaked window, a colourful triangle shape emerges.

Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash.

After his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in 1927, critics began to notice a change in T. S. Eliot’s poetry. Some thought this was for the worse, that Eliot’s newfound faith dimmed his literary powers, making his usually impenetrable style more conventional. But there is a less cynical view. I think, instead, that his conversion brought a sense of clarity and purpose to his poetry. I think what really happened is that, like many Christian converts before and after him, he found a sense of joy.

Nowhere better can we find that distinctly Christian sense of joy than in Eliot’s ‘The Journey of the Magi’, an Advent poem recounting Jesus’s birth from the point of view of the magi travelling to meet him. Like many of my favourite Advent poems, ‘Journey of the Magi’ is not straightforwardly cheerful, instead dwelling on the idea of alienation. The last stanza of the poem in particular is devoted to the magi’s confusion at returning to their old life after witnessing the miracle of Christ’s birth:

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

It’s hard not to read these lines and imagine that Eliot himself might have experienced a feeling of alienation, as a new convert, when looking back on his old life. And yet, the magi’s sense of being ‘no longer at ease’ in their old home, of being among ‘an alien people’, is not something that only converts experience. All of us, whether we are converts or reverts, whether we were brought up in the Christian faith or are still contemplating it with uncertainty, have a moment when we realise that believing in Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection radically changes the way we look at the world.

And conversion isn’t something that just happens once. Every year, during Advent, we are asked to meet despair with joy. For those of us living in the northern hemisphere, we’re specifically asked to do this in the darkest and coldest time of the year, when nature looks so gloomy and unwelcoming. As Christina Rossetti puts it in one of our country’s most beloved Christmas hymns, Jesus comes not at a time of flourishing nature, but rather ‘in the bleak midwinter’, when the earth is ‘hard as iron’ and water frozen ‘like a stone’. Just as we persevere in our yearly hope that spring will come again, so too we are called to renew our conversion of heart each Advent, waiting in hope for Christ’s birth.

But hope doesn’t have to mean blind optimism. The older I’ve become, the more I’ve come to think that rejoicing during Advent doesn’t have to involve unadulterated cheerfulness. Grief has its place within joy, as counterintuitive as that may seem. In fact, Advent is an opportunity to cultivate the virtue of hope in spite of grief, and in spite of the evils that we see in the world. ‘Were we led all that way for / Birth or Death?’, ask the magi. The answer is both. Each year Christ’s birth reminds us that faith requires us to die to our old selves. For some, this means having uncomfortable conversations with family or friends who don’t understand their conversion to the faith. For others, it means facing illness or death of a loved one or other kinds of trauma without giving in to despair.

None of this is easy, of course. Clinging to hope in dark times can truly feel like ‘bitter agony’, as Eliot writes. And yet, as one of the magi says in the final line of Eliot’s poem, ‘I should be glad of another death’. When we die to our selves, we also experience a new birth in Christ. Even as we celebrate his birth, we are reminded of his death on the cross for us, of the fact that he so loved us that he was willing to bear unbearable pain for our sake.

That kind of love, although it doesn’t remove all the sources of suffering in our daily life, does call for rejoicing. Another wonderful Advent poem, Madeleine L’Engle’s ‘First Coming’, emphasises the necessity of joyfulness in the face of a corrupted world. L’Engle begins by reminding us, stanza after stanza, that Jesus didn’t wait for humanity to become perfect before coming to us: ‘He did not wait till the world was ready’, she begins, before adding, ‘He did not wait for the perfect time’, ‘He did not wait till hearts were pure’. Rather, Christ came ‘in joy’, to ‘a tarnished world of sin and doubt’, right ‘when the need was deep and great’.

L’Engle ends ‘First Coming’ by encouraging us to imitate Christ not just in his patience, but also in accepting joy now, not when we world finally stops being rife with sin and pain:

We cannot wait till the world is sane
to raise our songs with joyful voice,
for to share our grief, to touch our pain,
He came with Love: Rejoice! Rejoice!

We can’t wait until ‘the world is sane’ to be joyful. Joy is remembering that Christ really did come ‘to share our grief’, no matter how seemingly unbearable it may be. Lord Tennyson expresses a similar sentiment in his poem In Memoriam, an elegy written after the loss of his dear friend Arthur Hallam. He admits that the pain at his friend’s death is so intense that, as Christmas is drawing near, he almost wishes ‘no more to wake’, and for his ‘hold on life’ to ‘break’. Then, he hears the sounds of bells:

But they my troubled spirit rule,
For they controll'd me when a boy;
They bring me sorrow touch’d with joy,
The merry merry bells of Yule.

Happy memories of Christmas bells from childhood are mixed with pain for Tennyson, bringing him ‘sorrow touch’d with joy’. That’s what all the best Advent poems, from Tennyson to Eliot, From Rossetti to L’Engle, show us: that sorrow doesn’t preclude joy. In the weeks leading up to Christ’s birth, it’s normal to dwell on both birth and death; Advent can be a season for both somberness and merrymaking. Most of all, Advent is a time for prayer, that our hearts may be filled with the knowledge that Christ loves us even in our sorrow, and that the very knowledge of Christ’s love may in turn fill our hearts with joy.

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