There’s fear or fascination as cultures confront death

If Western society discussed death more openly, would Halloween’s appeal hold such sway?

Rahil Patel

Rahil is a former Hindu monk, and author of Found By Love. He is a Tutor and Speaker at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics.

A bronze statue of a resting angel sits atop a low stone grave.

A grave in a Dresden cemetery.

Veit Hammer on Unsplash.

Watching Christians jump and sing “death is defeated” was a strange experience.

As a new believer in Christianity from a Hindu background, I was struck by how Christians approached death. While I had seen reincarnation as a path to heaven, I couldn’t understand why the church either hesitated to talk about death or celebrated it so intensely. Why were Christians sometimes dancing and other times, silent about death?

During my early years in Christ if ever the topic of death arose from the fun times I was having with Christian friends it was almost always met with a dead silence - excuse the pun. On one occasion, the husband of a close friend in our small church community had passed away due to cancer. I was one of the first to make a call to his widowed wife. When my friends heard that I had done this the response was unusual, “well done Rahil!” “That’s so good Rahil.” Strange. I was sensitive over the phone, but it wasn’t that hard. Then I asked the others if they were going to make a call and the response was equally peculiar, “erm, I can’t” or “I just can’t do that... ” Puzzling.

Recently, I came across the GodPod podcast, which shed some light for me on this hesitation. In an interview with Dr Lydia Dugdale about her book The Lost Art of Dying, a surprising statistic caught my attention: “In the 18th century, one-third of church sermons were about death and eternity.” I had to play that line back multiple times. In contrast, today’s sermons often focus on personal purpose, calling, or spiritual gifts. All important, but are we missing a vital balance—one eye on eternity, the other on our present lives?

Why didn’t the British or ‘international’ media film the funerals taking place in Britain? Why hesitate with death at home and yet have a somewhat fascination with it in the East?

This avoidance of death became even more apparent during the Covid pandemic. When the Delta strain hit India in 2021 it caused a massive widespread devastation and death. The funeral pyres were filling the sacred river banks up and down the country. At one point there was no more wood left to burn the bodies. It had run out! Urban crematoriums were overrun and so people left their deceased loved ones to simply float down the nearest river in the hope that the next life would be easier.

I followed the detailed footage of the funeral pyres and bodies choking various holy rivers. It was meticulously covered by the western media. Even PM Boris Johnson at the time cancelled his trip to India because the Covid death crisis was “out of control.” It’s Interesting how the western media flippantly assumed that death could be controlled. And then an eminent academic in India wrote a remarkable article for Project Syndicate. Brahma Chellaney’s opening paragraph was,

“When reporting on any mass tragedy, a basic rule of journalism is to be sensitive to the victims and those who are grieving. Western media, which double as the international media, usually observe this rule at home but discard it when reporting on disasters in non-Western societies.”

The author’s accurate observation demanded my attention. Why didn’t the British or ‘international’ media film the funerals taking place in Britain? Why hesitate with death at home and yet have a somewhat fascination with it in the East? Although Chellaney uses the concept of ‘grieving’ for his argument, there really isn’t such a spiritual concept across Indic faiths as Christianity knows of it. Of course, there is sadness and loss but grieving in the deep spiritual sense, not really. Is that why the Western media found it easier to cover death in the East? Because the secular (although Christian) West knows of the concept of grief so well at home? Or is it because the West do actually want to confront death without hiding and when they see other cultures do it so openly (and a tad bit casually) they are drawn to it? As morbid as it sounds (and I’ll do the British thing and apologise here) there might actually be a healthy interest with the way certain cultures embrace death that the west is seeking to find an expression for.

Brahmar Mukherji chaired the Department of Biostatistics Michigan University. In an interview with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 2021 she stated that India as a society sees death differently which is why the death toll along with so many other complex and practical issues was so high in that nation during Covid. They embrace it more easily. I am not promoting reckless behaviour around rules. One can’t play with a rattlesnake and then call it faith. My hope is that the reader finds hope when confronting death with a Christian lens. Why have themes of Euthanasia and Assisted Dying become such a big thing in the West and not in the East?

Which brings me to Halloween. It’s a leap, I know, but think about it: if Western societies and churches discussed death and eternity more openly, would Halloween’s macabre appeal hold such sway? Dressing up as a ghoul or a skeleton seems to be a playful, yet safe way to confront our fear of death—something we’re eager to do from behind a mask. That lighthearted, but jarring moment in the Barbie film comes to mind: “Do you guys ever think about dying?” Maybe that’s the real question we should be asking ourselves. Not just on Halloween, but frequently. How do we truly confront death—with fear, with fascination, or with the hope of something beyond?

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Music

Sustainability

17 October 2024

4 min read

What’s the point of celebrating the harvest?

We reap what we sow: a once young man’s guide.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A soot stained burnt-out harvester sits in a recently harvested field.

A burnt-out harvester, Lonesome Farm, Oxfordshire.

Nick Jones.

I plan next week to visit a small nursery school, called Young Haymakers, for their Harvest celebration where toddlers to five-year-olds will sing songs about tractor wheels going round and round, with vigorous manual actions as they shake, shake, shake the apple tree.

We’ll have a Harvest snack at tiny tables, a prayer and then they’ll give me the Harvest gifts from their families for those who may be hungry.

It is, of course, a delight, one of the happiest duties of a parish priest and I’ll miss it terribly as I hand it over to a new Rector. But, while I take nothing away from the sheer joy of thanksgiving of these children for the fruits (and vegetables) of this harvest and for those who farm them, I can’t help but wonder what Harvest, as a festival, really means for grown-ups.

The metaphor has been just too rich to avoid this season. We reap what we sow – and we witness that from Ukraine to Gaza and Lebanon, from Sudan to a United States that teeters on the brink of self-destruction as the world’s beacon of democratic values.

One might add to this sorry list the longer-term grim gathering-in from the world’s reliance on fossil fuels, a failed harvest of biblical-scale abomination as we destroy our planet’s natural capacity to host us. Truly, we have sown a wind and, in so many areas of human endeavour, we look like we reap a whirlwind (literally, in the case of weather crises such as Hurricane Milton).

There are prophetic voices that cry out in our human wilderness, from those who foresee the demise of the US at the hands of a shallow nationalism to those few on the political stage who predict an all-out war in the Middle East as the only possible conclusion to the escalation of revenge attacks between Israel and its neighbours.

The ancients saw famine and failed harvests as judgments for their sin, their divergence from the divine will. It’s unlikely that our world is going to accept such culpability any time soon. To do so would require a humility that we have lost, along with losing our religion.

We need to be careful of ascribing too much of a prophetic voice to Young. This was, after all, a fairly bombed-out singer-songwriter of the start of the Boomer generation.

Setting aside the reaping of whirlwinds from millennia ago, I’m going to invoke a popular folk song from a little over half a century ago. I do so because, in 1972, we lived in a more innocent world, before we knew how industrialisation could destroy our human species and when a western hegemony in democracy was taken for granted. Little did we know the precipice on which we were perched.

The song is by the folk-rock colossus Neil Young and is called, appropriately enough, Harvest. It is, lyrically, one of his more obscure works and to listen to it now is to struggle to get past a strangulated hippy voice that verges on self-parody.

But it repays the effort. Young’s lyrics are infused with religious reference and imagery, but no claim should be made for his affirmation of the Christian faith. Nonetheless, we’re entitled to view art through the prism of what informs us and, as such, Harvest yields its fruits. Young may well be singing about his lover, but it’s in love that all truth is explored.

Listen to it. Young’s Harvest opens with the lines “Did I see you down in a young girl’s town/ with your mother in so much pain?” Through a scriptural lens, this sounds like the pain of incarnation, the sharing of Mother Mary’s agony in visceral human experience.

It continues: “Will I see you give more than I can take”; for the confessing faithful, we’re at the foot of the cross here. “Will I only harvest some?”; we can, all of us, only harvest a little of the mystery of that event. “As the days fly past, will we lose our grasp?”; of course we will – time is finite. “Or fuse it in the sun?”; an uncanny pre-echo of climate change worthy of Nostradamus.

We need to be careful of ascribing too much of a prophetic voice to Young. This was, after all, a fairly bombed-out singer-songwriter of the start of the Boomer generation. But it’s also true that we should be careful of where we look for prophetic voices.

For Young, the Harvest is indeed a cruel and painful event, which we can only understand in part. We do indeed reap what we sow, but there may be purpose to be found in that. And the Harvest is indeed bitter, but in it we may glimpse a plan: “Dream up, dream up, let me fill your cup/ With the promise of a man”.

Or, okay, it’s just a song, harvesting a good deal of cash for its writer and singer. I’m no big fan of Young. But it might just have told me more about the Harvest than singing All Things Bright and Beautiful.