In the Midst of Life, We are in Death

St. Notker window, Kirche St. Martin, Jonschwil Switzerland

In the Midst of Life, We are in Death

12 March 2016

Homily preached at 2 p.m. Sung Rite I Funeral with Eucharist

For Eric George Bunn

Parish Church of Trinity Ashland (Oregon)

God, give us hearts to feel and love. Take away our hearts of stone,

and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

The Benedictine monk was out in the monastery farmlands, working the fields.  Orare et labore “prayer and work,” described the monk’s days.  He paused, contemplating the beautiful Swiss scenery about him.  He noted lay workmen building a stone bridge, a high span over a deep chasm cut by the river running alongside the monastery grounds.  Long before the days of laws demanding safety harnesses for workers, the monk saw the workmen precariously pursuing their construction hundreds of feet above the abyss floor.  “That’s not safe!” he said to himself.  Then, the contemplation triggering his imagination, he realized, “but then, nothing is safe.  Life is terminal.  No one gets out of here alive. Those workman pursue their labor in danger, and earn their bread by courting death.”  The Latin words came to him: Media vita in morte sumus “in the midst of life we are in death.”

The monk was named Notker.  He was surnamed lovingly “the Stammerer” by his brother monks because of a severe speech defect that he had from youth.  Despite his impediment in speaking, Notker was extremely gifted in writing.  He developed the line that came to him and wrote an antiphon, using older liturgical fragments.  The anthem is still used in Rite I Burial at the graveside before the remains are committed to their resting place: 

In the midst of life we are in death;

of whom may we seek for succor,

but of thee, O Lord,

who for our sins art justly displeased?

Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty,

O holy and most merciful Savior,

deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death.

Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts;

shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer;

but spare us, Lord most holy, O God most mighty,

O holy and merciful Savior,

thou most worthy Judge eternal.

Suffer us not, at our last hour,

through any pains of death, to fall from thee.

Notker I of Saint Gall died on April 7 in 912, his saintly feast day in the Roman and Eastern Orthodox calendars.  The Sarum rite, the usage of Salisbury Cathedral that is the basis of much of our Prayer Book rites, appoints this antiphon to be sung in Evening Prayer after the Nunc Dimitis during this time of year, the third and fourth weeks of Lent.   We will end our service today with the Nunc Dimittis as the final anthem.

Notker’s antiphon expresses an important Christian idea that was assumed for many centuries but that we seem to have sacrificed on the altar of modernity: that death is about life, and life is about death. 

The common modern and post-modern view is perhaps best summed up by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Tractatus logico-philosophicus (6.431): “At death, the world does not alter but comes to an end … Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death” (6.4311).  This view, that death is the opposite of life, the annihilation of the individual person, and the final destruction of consciousness is the opposite of the Christian view, which has always seen death not as the end of life. In the words of our Prayer Book funeral service, “Life is changed, not ended.” 

Eternal life in Christian doctrine does not start at death.  Rather, it always exists.   We begin to participate in it as we hear God in our hearts and respond to Jesus’ call to us to follow him, knowingly or unknowingly.   Eternal life is timeless, but so overwhelmingly full of life that our biological deaths cannot touch it.  Death is indeed in the midst of life. 

Eric died relatively young and most certainly unexpectedly.  But he did not die unprepared.  Over his entire life, he responded faithfully to the sense of duty, the deep desire to pursue with vigor the course set for him to run, that God placed in his heart.  I think one of the reasons he preferred Rite I was the line at the beginning of the canon of the mass, that giving thanks to God “is meet, right, and our bounden duty.”  This touched his heart because it corresponded so well to his experience. 

Eric was one of those gifted few in our society who created jobs and wealth for others, through his passionate and skilled pursuit of his family development business.  For 37 years, he was a faithful husband to his beloved Georgia; he was a doting and dedicated father to his son Daniel; and foster father to many.  His home was a center of stability and hospitality for his larger family and community. 

Georgia told me that Eric reveled in visiting the great historic churches and cathedrals of the East Coast, Britain, and Europe, all with Georgia and Daniel in tow.   

An introvert by nature, he was always brought into community with family and associates by his sense of joy and wonder at it all.  I found him a kindred soul, a guy with a nerdish and wonkish streak as wide as my own.  But all was tempered by his sense of doing the right thing.   

Now he is one of those whom “we love, but no longer see.”  The separation will be hard for those of us who knew him and love him. 

Stephen King, in his novella “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption,” says “Get busy living or get busy dying.”  The sentiment, as useful as it is in life-denying situations like prison or addictive/obsessive disorders, misses the point that living well makes us free to welcome death when it eventually comes for us.  The wonderful secret that Eric discovered in his youth is this:  if you live life as life is intended, you will find satisfaction and joy. Death is no longer something to be feared.  Inevitable, and painful for its separations and loss of so much joy we find in life, it nevertheless is still life, changed, not ended.  It is a fuller life, a more joyful life, and one which will eventually encompass all the good and joy that we may temporarily have lost.  When duty is honored and the love of Christ embraced, we begin to see our body’s dissolution as the old friend that St. Francis of Assisi called, “Sister Death”:  “Be praised, my Lord, through our Sister Death, from whose gentle embrace no living person can escape.”

In the midst of life, we are in death. 

This very traditional funeral, requested by the family, is a Mass of the Resurrection, a celebration of hope in the face of death, of confidence in the face of human frailty, and of grateful joy in the face of all it means to be human, good and bad. 

Thank God for such hope, confidence, and joy.  And thank God for our brother Eric.

In the name of Christ, Amen.