The Final Christian Battle
”Behold, thou hast made my days as it were a span long, and mine age is even as nothing in respect of thee; and verily every man living is altogether vanity.”
- Psalm 39:6
“As sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.”
- 2 Corinthians 6:10
It is very easy to view our growth during the season of Lent in the short term. By this point in the Lenten fast we have a good awareness of our own discomfort. Whether or not we chose our disciplines well, at a certain point we very much look forward to the Easter season. As Easter approaches, a healthy way to reflect on this past season is to determine which practices can be carried forward in our spiritual life. We should be evaluating our life of prayer. Have we grown in daily recollection? Are we attending to our life within the community of our parish? Have we prepared to meet the Easter season taking that hope back into our lives? However, although these questions are important, they are primarily focused on short-term growth.
But what about our own death? This is the longer-term reflection that most of us either are too focused on the present to consider or would really like not to think about. The truth of the matter is since the moment God created Adam from the dust of the Earth, we all share in that same “vanity” that is acknowledged by the psalmist. The season of Lent begins with this reminder and arrives at the end on Good Friday with Christ’s death on the cross. To arrive at Easter, we must pass through Good Friday. If we are honest with ourselves, at the end of this season, it is the last thing we would like to do; however, it is the most important thing we can do. This is where Jeremy Taylor’s meditation on Christian preparation for death in The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying gives us a proper orientation for such a reflection approaching Holy Week. Just as we arrive at Easter through Good Friday, we enter paradise through death. The fruit to be gained from Taylor’s work is best taken and digested through the space we give ourselves in Lent; because as he suggests in his dedication of the work: it is an “art to die well.” This art is best practiced when we have the time to prepare, Lord willing, well before our own battle with mankind’s final enemy.
“My lord it is a great art to die well, and to be learnt by men in health, by them that can discourse and consider, by those whose understanding and acts of reason are not abated with fear or pains: and as the greatest part of death is passed by the preceding years of our life, so also in those hearts are the greatest preparations to it; and he that prepares not for death before his last sickness, is like him that begins to study philosophy when he is going to dispute publicly in the faculty” (Taylor 1990, 466).
This work was written for Richard Vaughan, Earl of Carbery, on the anniversary of his wife Alice’s death, only six months after the passing of Taylor’s own wife Phoebe. Richard provided shelter for Taylor at his family estate Golden Grove, in the Welsh county of Carmarthenshire, during Taylor’s exile from ministry brought about by the English Civil War of the seventeenth century. Section one of the first chapter is titled, “Consideration of the Vanity and Shortness of Man’s Life.” Taylor spends a good amount of this section reflecting on the frail existence of man. Inspired by the Greek proverb of Lucian, human existence is bleakly related to that of bubbles in a stream. This is done to remind us that, “To preserve a man alive in the midst of so many chances and hostilities, is as great a miracle as to create him; to preserve him from rushing into nothing, and at first to draw him up from nothing, were equally issues of an almighty power” (Taylor 1990, 468). Understanding the consideration of one’s death to be a responsibility of every man, Taylor continues: “And because this consideration is of great usefulness and great necessity to many purposes of wisdom and the spirit; all the changes of time, all the changes in nature, all the varieties of light and darkness … doth preach our funeral sermon, and calls us to look and see how old sexton Time throws up earth, and digs a grave where we must lay our sins or our sorrows, and sow our bodies, till they rise again in a fair or in an intolerable eternity” (Taylor 1990, 469). Taylor’s meticulous meditation in this section of his writing leads us to consider that most things in life can be a foreshadowing of our own death. Even in sleep the dangers and concerns of the surrounding world cause no change in the state of that man. The world continues on just as well without him, and in that sleep, he cares not for the continuance of time. In death all worldly pursuits don’t mean much.
Taylor’s emphasis in this section gave me pause to consider my own employment. At Edwards Lifesciences, we design, test, and manufacture heart valves and technologies for critically-ill patients, without which many people would not survive. In fact, before their invention, the diseases treated would have led to one’s death. The corporate motto is, “Helping patients is our life’s work, and life is now!” Everyone from the CEO to the intern rallies behind this motto in an attempt to keep the idea that we are serving patients in the forefront of our mind in all that we do. All critical decisions are made with the highest integrity, quality, and are of course filtered through the lens of patient care. That is what’s at stake in the heart valve business. However, behind this worthy cause is the reality that we are only prolonging the inevitable, no matter how altruistic the project we take on. This is not a gloomy indictment; rather, it’s a very recent self-awareness of the other side of the coin that our helping of patients only goes so far, and I have to thank Taylor for bringing it to my attention. “Thus, nature calls us to meditate of death by those things which are the instruments of acting it: and God by all the variety of His providence makes us see death every where, in all variety of circumstances, and dressed up for all the fancies and the expectation of every single person” (Taylor 1990, 470).
Where does this meditation on death take us? This guidance is provided in the following section titled, “Consideration Reduced to Practice.” My favorite of Taylor’s gentle reminders in this section is his comparison of the end of our life to that of a king: “They have wisely placed a cemetery where their ashes and their glory shall sleep till time shall be no more; and where our kings have been crowned, their ancestors lay interred, and they must walk over their grandsire’s head to take his crown … when we die our ashes shall be equal to kings, and our accounts easier, and our pains or our crowns shall be less” (Taylor 1990, 474). This practical guidance leads us further into a focus on the present moment. Do not seek to know the future or plan too far in advance because the current moment itself is passing away even as we speak. And in my second-favorite quote of this section, you cannot help but hear the popular phrase “You only live once” echoed in Taylor’s critique of Greco-Roman philosophy. “The Greeks and Romans taught us the prudence of this rule, but Christianity teaches us the religion of it. They so seized upon the present that they would lose nothing of the day’s pleasure: ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die’” (Taylor 1990, 477).
And this is where we may return briefly to the discussion of our Lenten fasts. Lent provides an opportunity to practice holiness. The practice of holiness does not come without many trials and failures. The remedy is perseverance in the proper use of the time given to each of us while appealing to the guidance of the Spirit. This is his goal: to bring death into the proper vantage point within the Christian life. Taylor suggests that, “For he that by a present and a constant holiness secures the present, and makes it useful to his noblest purposes, he turns his condition into his best advantage, by making his unavoidable fate become his necessary religion” (Taylor 1990, 477). This ultimately reminds us that we are pilgrims, not just in Lent looking ahead to Easter, but in life looking toward resurrection. “And where either there is sorrow or an end of joy, there can be no true felicity: which because it must be had by some instrument and in some period of our duration, we must carry up our affections to the mansions prepared for us above, where eternity is the measure, felicity is the state, angels are the company, the Lamb is the light, and God is the portion and inheritance” (Taylor 1990, 478).
Ultimately, this meditation on death should not paralyze us, but rather lead us into a reflection of the use of our own time in this life. He objects to the very common notion that our life is short. Although death may creep in at any point in a man’s life, Taylor would argue that most who live to use the argument that life is short did not come to discretion early enough. This person has lived in such a way that, when looking back on life, they feel deeply that something was amiss, and that opportunity was wasted. He rather eloquently explains this argument in the following quote:
“For old age seizes upon most men while they still retain the minds of boys and vicious youth, doing actions from principles of great folly, and a mighty ignorance, admiring useless and hurtful, and filling up dimensions of their abode with businesses of empty affairs, being at leisure to attend no virtue: they cannot pray, because they are busy, and because they are passionate; they cannot communicate, because they have quarrels and intrigues of perplexed causes, complicated hostilities, and things of the world, and therefore they cannot attend to the things of God: little considering that they must find a time to die in; when death comes, they must be at leisure for that” (Taylor 1990, 480).
This is a call that we do have time to consider the things of God, however most of it is wasted on trivial pursuits. For Taylor, Christians are to live out their vocation in light of the world to come given their own responsibilities to God and the church. There is no excuse for not being able to find time to pray. It must be cultivated. Taylor gently reminds the reader that: “For the actions of religion, God gave us time sufficient” (Taylor 1990, 482) and “Every man is called and enabled to the works of a sober and religious life” (Taylor 1990, 483). The time is to be redeemed by living a life of prayer within the seasons and order of the church. Lent, as we are reminded each year, gives us an opportunity to reset the patterns of prayer and provides us room to reflect on this next season. “And if we tell our days by canonical hours of prayer, our weeks by constant revolution of fasting days or days of special devotion, and over all these draw a black cypress, a veil of penitential sorrow and severe mortification, we shall soon answer the calumny and objection of a short life” (Taylor 1990, 483).
As I suggested earlier, our progress is rightly viewed in the short-term, but we also should take time to consider the longer journey. The reordering of our prayer life, whether during Lent or at any point along our Christian journey, is not solely for the present moment. So far, we have only covered the first few sections of Taylor’s book. Much more wisdom could be gleaned from each section of his poetic prose. Ultimately, Taylor is encouraging us to a life of consistent recollection on God preparing us for our own death. Not that all should be doom and gloom, but that our life may be, as St. Paul exhorts us, a balance of sorrow and joy, with our own death in the proper perspective. The Christian life is a preparation for death. This is why Taylor suggests in his final chapter that ministry to the sick should be started long before the sickness overtakes them:
“It is a great evil, both in matter of prudence and piety, that they fear the priest as they fear the embalmer or the sexton’s spade, and love not to converse with him unless they can converse with no man else, and think his office so much to relate to the other world that he is not to be treated with while we hope to live in this, and indeed that our religion be taken care of only when we die” (Taylor 1990, 501).
At this point in the journey, it is quite late. The sacramental life of the Christian gives us an opportunity to prepare, and never is it more important than in facing our final battle. “And we who all our lifetime derive blessings from the fountains of grace by the channels of ecclesiastical ministries, must do it then especially when our needs are most pungent and actual” (Taylor 1990, 500). This is the grace behind death in our own life and community. First, it gives us the opportunity, if we take it, to reflect on our own. It then takes us further into reflecting on how we might view and reorient our own life to prepare for our own. It is a grace of God to have time to prepare. Our life cannot be short if it is oriented around growth in prayer and recollection on God. Second, this is cultivated to its fullest within the streams of grace provided by the Sacraments of the Church. The Sacraments are what enable us to balance the sorrow of death with the joy of the resurrection. It is the only way to ponder the vanity of man’s life without falling into despair or constantly chasing one’s own pleasure before the time is up. When a life is well lived, it is evident at the end. May we take what remains of the Lenten season to reflect on our own life and orient it in the cultivation of our preparation for a Christian death. As we enter into the highs and lows of Holy Week, let us once again relive the scriptural accounts of Christ’s battle with death and pray for the grace to face ours. “The effect of this consideration is this, that the sadnesses of this life help to sweeten the bitter cup of death” (Taylor 1990, 491).
Bibliography
Taylor, Jeremy. 1990. Selected Works. Paulist Press.