Is death ‘nothing at all’?
by Mark Ireland, Psephizo:
Mark Ireland writes: Watching the lying in state of the late Queen, and pondering the incredible devotion of those who queued all night in the cold, has prompted me to read again a sermon preached by Canon Henry Scott Holland in St Paul’s Cathedral after the death of King Edward VII. The late king’s body lay in state in Westminster Hall in May 1910 and was viewed by about a quarter of a million people.
Scott Holland’s sermon before the Lying in State contained these lines which have been read at so many funeral services since:
Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed…’
Like many clergy, the request to include these lines in a funeral service always used to make my heart sink—feeling that this was no more than another bit of folk religion, denying the devastating loss of bereavement. Including these lines in a Christian funeral service seemed to make it harder to then speak about the awkward reality of death and how through the painful death of Jesus we can find the hope of resurrection.
Until, that is, I read the whole sermon for the first time and understood these lines in their original context.
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
