THE
P RTAL
November 2016
Page 10
Thoughts on Newman
Keeping death ever
before our eyes
The Revd Dr Stephen Morgan has been thinking about death
and how Blessed John Henry Newman saw it
I
t is, so the great spiritual writers tell us, a very good thing to keep death ever before our eyes. Thanks
be to God and to the advances in health care, this has become ever more difficult for most people. Those
advances – together with what we might call the ‘medicalisation’ of death – whilst entirely welcome in their
physical consequences, are distinctly mixed blessings in the spiritual domain. For you and me, death tends to
occur hidden away in hospitals or care homes after prolonged periods of declining physical health and ever
more intrusive medical interventions.
For few of us, these days, death comes in our own
homes and in front of our own eyes. T S Eliot remarked,
in Four Quartets – Burnt Norton, that “human kind
cannot bear too much reality”, although his punctuation
is singular, lending a delightful ambiguous, somewhat
oblique feel to his precise meaning. When that reality
takes place only in particular, peculiar, remote contexts
– as death does in our own times, our own culture –
we are able largely to ignore it, to avoid bearing it at all,
for all intents and purposes: such is death for us today.
If we are able to ignore the reality of death and avoid
any consciousness of the inevitability of our own,
the spiritual consequences can be extremely serious.
We can live with no awareness of our own eternal
destiny, with little thought given to the everlasting
consequences of our actions.
Trends in theology over the last century and a half
have compounded these orientations by telling us that
our faith is n