You Never Know

From lightning and tempest; from earthquake, fire, and flood; from plague, pestilence, and famine . . . from oppression, conspiracy, and rebellion; from violence, battle, and murder; and from dying suddenly and unprepared, Good Lord, deliver us.

                    ~The Great Litany

Scripture: Luke 12:16–21

Pity the poet Aeschylus, who survived the battles of Marathon, Artemisium, Salamis, and Platæa and was resting outside his home in Gela, Sicily, one day when an eagle hovering overhead mistook his bald head for a stone and dropped a tortoise on it to break its shell. He broke instead the poor man’s skull. Sic transit gloria—fame is fleeting.

Lightning, tempest, earthquake, fire, flood, plague, pestilence, famine, oppression, conspiracy, rebellion; violence, battle, and murder can take us suddenly, as the Great Litany insists. “From dying unprepared, Good Lord, deliver us.”

We don’t think much about dying these days, unlike earlier times when folks were more comfortable with it. They made preparation with conscious precision. Churches were surrounded by cemeteries and filled with sepulchers, somber reminders that one’s body would one day lie under a slab.

Additionally there was good deal of writing and preaching on the subject by those who thought deeply about death and had come to terms with it. One such effort is Jeremy Taylor’s work, Holy Dying.

Writing in the seventeenth century, Taylor offered up a sensitive, compassionate manual on the art of dying—“precepts and necessary preparatives to a holy death,” as he put it.

Every event of our life is an intimation of mortality, he said. “At the end of seven years our teeth fall out and die before us,” he wrote, and, the Tooth Fairy not withstanding, “represent a formal prologue to tragedy.” Taylor reviews our lives as age “takes our bodies, weakening some parts and loosing others.” We taste the grave “as first those parts that serve for ornament and then those that serve for necessity become useless.” Baldness, he said, is more than a blow to male vanity; it is “a dressing to our funerals, the proper ornament of mourning.”

Taylor continues, “Gray hairs, dim eyes, trembling joints, short breath, stiff limbs, wrinkled skin, short memory,” are all reminders of impending death. “Every day’s necessity calls for a reparation of that portion which death fed on all night, when we lay in his lap, and slept in his outer chambers. Every meal is a rescue from one death, and lays up for another; and while we think a thought, we die; and the clock strikes, and reckons on our portion of eternity.” Thus we hear “the ticking of eternity” in every stage of aging.

The problem, Taylor continues, is that death “seizes upon old men while they still retain the minds of boys and anxious youth. [They do] actions from principles of great folly, and mighty ignorance, admiring things useless and hurtful, and filling up all the dimensions of their abode with the business of empty affairs: they do not pray, because they are so busy; they do not attend to the things of God, because they are so passionate—or driven, as we would say.

“Eripitur persona, manet res,” Taylor concludes, quoting Lucretius, the Latin poet: “The person is snatched away and the goods remain”—the exact point Jesus makes in the parable of the rich fool.

Death came for the fool when he was busy with everything but the business of his soul. He lived the good life but died badly, because he was not “rich toward God.” Thus, he was unprepared.

Recently I came across a form for family evening prayer in a very old copy of The Book of Common Prayer. The prayer would be thought quaint today and unsuitable for children, because it’s so candid about death and our need to prepare for its eventuality, but it too makes Jesus’ point. “The family being together, a little time before bed time, let the Master or Mistress, or any other whom they shall think proper, say as follows, all kneeling, ‘Make us ever mindful of the time when we shall lie down in the dust; and grant us grace to always live in such a way that we may never be afraid to die; so that living and dying, we may be thine . . .’”

Or, as Paul would say, “If we live, we live to the Lord; and if we die, we die to the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord” (Romans 14:8). Holy living, thus, is the preparation for a happy, holy death. No other preparation is necessary.

So Taylor prays . . .

“Oh eternal and holy Jesus, who by death hast overcome death, and by Thy passion hast taken out its sting, and made it to become one of the gates of heaven, and an entrance to felicity; have mercy upon me now and at the hour of my death; let Thy grace accompany me all the days of my life, that I may, by a holy conversation [life style], and an habitual performance of my duty . . . be ready to enter with Thee at whatsoever hour Thou shalt come for me.”