Death must come some time; this world isn’t our home, only a kind of hotel where our rooms will be wanted sooner or later for somebody else; life is meant to be only a span of time, and a comparatively short one. When I say it’s meant to be, I am, of course, assuming the fact of the Fall. Father Bernard Vaughan, the great Jesuit preacher, was having an argument with some lady who was very strong on woman’s rights, in which he wasn’t much interested; and I suppose he managed to get her rather ruffled, because she turned on him and said, “Well, anyhow, Father Vaughan, where would you be, but for a woman?” “But for a woman, Madam,” he said, “I should be sitting on this hot summer day under one of the trees in Paradise, drinking a lemon squash.” If mankind hadn’t fallen, no doubt we should be living, and fitted to live, an earthly life which would last much longer and be much pleasanter. As it is, we are living, and fitted to live, on a short lease, and we have got to make the most of our tenancy.…
Death must come some time; if it were not so, we should be inclined to live too much in the present. We are so short-sighted, you and I, that we are always tempted to put too much of our confidence, to rest too much of our affections, in the transitory, created things which surround us. I’m sure you must have had the experience before now of being asked out to something or other and really rather wanting to go, knowing that it will be rather fun when you get there, and yet—yet at the last moment, when the time comes to start, you begin to hang back and wonder why on earth you accepted that invitation… I wonder, isn’t that rather the position we are all in about leaving earth for heaven? We know that we shall be happy there; and yet the silly spell which our earthly occupations and ambitions exercise over us is so strong that we should never summon up the energy to take the journey, if it rested with ourselves whether we should take it or not.
God knows our weakness; he knows that our fellow-creatures seem more real to us than the things of heaven, simply because they are nearer to us, and have a more immediate hold over the imagination. So he arranges that the effort of making the last move shan’t be left to our choice. Sometimes a very kind host will send his car over to fetch you, because he knows you are not frightfully good at turning up when you’ve accepted an invitation, anyhow turning up in good time. When that happens, you can’t very well get out of it, can you?
That’s what death is; it’s God’s carriage, waiting for you at the door. Suppose you were a prisoner, shut up in a kind of Bastille place, waiting to be executed. Supposing that your imprisonment wasn’t a very uncomfortable one; rather boring, because there wasn’t a great deal to do, but on the whole you were fairly well provided for. And suppose that every morning the executioner came round for orders, like the cook, and said, “Would it be convenient for you to be executed today, sir?” How long do you think you would go on saying, “Well, not today, thanks”? You see, there would be always some little odd job waiting to get finished; you would be carving your name on the wall of the prison rather well, and it would be a pity not to get that finished off; or you would have a bet on with one of your fellow-prisoners about the Derby, and it would be just worth while hanging on for a bit to see whether your horse came home; one way and another it would always be, “Well, not today, thanks.” We shouldn’t really be prepared, if the choice were left to us, to decide exactly when we would like our lives to come to an end. And since that is so, it isn’t unreasonable that God should keep the decision in his own hands. That’s all death means, to us Christians.…
Death must come some time, and it may come any time. And obviously, if you and I are to be fit to die any moment, we ought to be fit to die at every moment of our lives. It’s usual, I believe, for the retreat father to say at this point, “By this time next year one of you will be dead.” I’m afraid I don’t know enough about the statistics of juvenile mortality to be able to say that with any confidence. But there it is—our Lord was always telling us to be on the watch; to be like servants who don’t know when their master is coming home, and therefore don’t take the risk of being caught dancing in the drawing-room if he comes unexpectedly. I met a lady once who told me she was on the Riviera, where they were making experiments with the search-light when it was first invented. And she was talking to another lady, a casual hotel acquaintance, on the sea-front one evening, when quite suddenly they found themselves in a great blaze of light. Whereupon this other woman took it for granted that it was the Day of Judgment, and knelt down and told my friend a series of most appalling sins she had committed; which was very awkward when it proved to be only the search-light. Well, we know better than that nowadays. But it remains true that a time will come at which your conscience, all in a moment, will be flood-lit with the glare of the Divine Judgment, and you will be lucky if you don’t find, then, that there was more standing against you than you knew. Perhaps we ought to think more about death.…
Death may come any time. We are frail creatures, and it wouldn’t be good for us to know for certain that we had, say, exactly ten more years to live. We should be tempted to put things off; to live carelessly for nine years and reckon on pulling ourselves together in the tenth. How difficult it is to work hard for an examination when we know that it is still more than six months away! Or don’t you find that? I bet you do. The sentry who has to keep awake all night guarding some important point is kept up to the mark all the time not simply because he doesn’t know when the officer will be going his rounds; he is kept up to the mark all the time because he may be inspected any time. So it is with us; we are soldiers on duty, and we are or we ought to be proud of it; but we should be afraid of dozing off if we knew for certain when it was that our Captain was coming round to relieve us. We should be afraid that we might be tempted to dally with temptation if we were sure, if we were absolutely sure, that there would be time left to repent in. Death may come any time; in what posture of soul is it going to find us? That is the point.
And here you will perhaps complain that God is not treating us like a Friend; he is treating us more like a school-master; he is, so to speak, putting us on our honour to serve him faithfully, and then coming upon us suddenly to see whether we are serving him faithfully or not; that, you will say, is not the way in which a friend treats his friends. Well, I think that objection is well founded, and I think that if there were only more people in the world who would treat God as a Friend, if it were not such a lamentably common attitude to treat him as a schoolmaster, he might perhaps have arranged differently. I am not just talking at random when I say that; I am basing my judgment on evidence. There is much about the lives of the saints that is of uncertain authority. But there is one assertion which you come across so often in reading the lives of the saints that you can almost pronounce it a general rule—they nearly always seem to have prophesied beforehand the time, sometimes the actual day, of their deaths. Why did God give them this particular grace? Precisely so as to show that they were his friends, that they served him as his friends, and therefore it was safe to reveal to them, what he keeps secret from us others, the moment at which he would take them out of the world to himself. And this at least is certain, that in proportion as you live on friendly terms with God, death will be relieved for you of half its terrors.
There is still one aspect of death which remains to be considered. Death is the crowning moment of our lives. And that, not merely in the sense that with death comes judgment, and it will be too late to do anything about it. Of course there are such things as death-bed repentances, and I hope there are many; otherwise there will be such a lot of interesting people you won’t meet in heaven. Some of you, perhaps, will make a mess of your lives; will be unworthy of the teaching you have had, and sink deep in sin, perhaps in doubt about your religion. But never doubt this, that at your last moment there is pardon for you if you will turn to God and make an act of contrition in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Remember that, if you forget every other word I’ve said to you.
But death ought to be the crown of our lives in another sense; for it is the hour of achievement.… To us Christians “achievement” means something quite different from the brief praise of our fellow-mortals. When our Lord died on the cross, he said “It is achieved,” and we know that he was referring to the sacrifice which he had been offering, all those three hours, all those thirty-three years, to his heavenly Father. And we, so far as we have succeeded in understanding what he wants of us, have offered up our lives as a sacrifice in union with his. We have tried, vaguely and fitfully, to do all that we did for his honour, to suffer all that we suffered for his sake.
And now all that is over, because death has come; and we wrap it all up in a parcel, as it were, and thrust it towards him, like a bad piece of knitting, for his acceptance, “Take it, Lord; I know I’ve made a mess of it again and again, this life you gave me to live; the pattern hasn’t been your pattern, and there have been loose edges everywhere. But it was meant to be like your Son’s life, a sacrifice; take it, please, and make what you can of it; I have come to the end of the skein now.” That is the Christian’s life, the Christian’s death.
This essay is a chapter from A Retreat for Beginners.
Republished with gracious permission from Cluny Media.
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The featured image is “Procession of Schoolgirls” (c. 1890), by Joaquim Vayreda i Vila, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
