How Are We to Prepare for Death?
The importance of religion from the perspective of death; two books, A Little History of Religion and The Lost Art of Dying; Steve Jobs on death; seeing the First Amendment as the Respect Amendment.
Richard Holloway begins his book A Little History of Religion by asking
What is religion? And where does it come from? Religion comes from the mind of the human animal, so it comes from us. The other animals on earth don't seem to need a religion. And as far as we can tell they haven't developed any. That's because they are more at one with their lives than we are. They act instinctively. They go with the flow of existence without thinking about it all the time. The human animal has lost the ability to do that. Our brains have developed in a way that makes us self-conscious. We are interested in ourselves. We can't help wondering about things. We can't help thinking.
We are religious animals.
And the biggest thing we think about is the universe itself and where it came from. Is there somebody out there who made it? The shorthand word we use for this possible somebody or something is God, theos in Greek. Someone who thinks there is a god out there is called a theist. Someone who thinks there's nobody out there and we’re on our own in the universe is called an atheist. And the study of the god and what it wants from us is called theology. The other big question we can't help asking ourselves is what happens to us after death. When we die, is that it or is there anything else to come? If there is something else, what will it be like?
What we call religion was our first crack at answering these questions. Its answer to the first question was simple. The universe was created by a power beyond itself that some call God, that continues to be interested and involved in what it has created. The individual religions all offer different versions of what the power called God is like and what it wants from us, but they all believe in its existence in some form or other. They tell us we are not alone in the universe. Beyond us there are other realities, other dimensions. We call them 'supernatural’ because they are outside the natural world, the world immediately available to our senses.
Where are we going?
If religions most important belief is the existence of a reality beyond this world that we call God, what prompted the belief and when did it start? It began ages ago. In fact, there doesn't seem to have been a time when human beings didn't believe in the existence of a supernatural world beyond this one. And wondering about what happened to people after they died may have been what started it off. All animals die, but unlike the others, humans don't leave their dead to decompose where they drop. As far back as we can follow their traces, humans seem to have given their dead funerals. And how they planned them tells us something about their earliest beliefs.
Unlike other animals, “humans don’t leave their dead to decompose where they drop.” Hollow asks, “So what prompted humans to start burying their dead?”
The most obvious thing we notice about the dead is that something that used to happen in them has stopped happening. They no longer breathe. It was a small step to associate the act of breathing with the idea of something dwelling within yet separate from the physical body that gave it life. The Greek word for it was psyche, the Latin spiritus, both from verbs meaning to breathe or blow. A spirit or soul was what made a body live and breathe. It inhabited the body for a time. And when the body died it departed. But where did it go? One explanation was that it went back to the world beyond, the spirit world, the flipside of the one we inhabit on earth.
Death is an important part of our “innate religion,” but in contemporary society, too often—I think—we forget to prepare for death.
This reminder from Steve Jobs about the importance of death shouldn’t be as striking as it is.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.
Almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is how it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.
This isn’t simply some profound business-leadership tip for aspiring entrepreneurs. No—Steve is reminding us of a central question in our lives—in religion—an eternal question. He is reminding us of the importance of death, in determining how best to live.
How are we to live? How are we to prepare for death?
I’m sure that some of my readers make remembrance of death a central part of their weekly religious practice. This is a good thing.
Recently there was a Econtalk episode discussing the book The Lost Art of Dying: Reviving Forgotten Wisdom by L.S. Dugdale, MD. In that book Dugdale tells the story of the ars moriendi—a handbook on the preparation for death. This handbook she says, emerged from the plague, when over two-thirds of Europe's population died.
Thousands fell ill each day and night. They died in their homes and in the streets. As Boccaccio put it, "The stench of their decaying bodies announced their deaths to their neighbors well before anything else did. And what with these, plus the others who were dying all over the place, the city was overwhelmed with corpses." Putrid bodies piled high. No living being could escape the spectacle and smell of death.
Who can fathom this scene? Although I have witnessed more people die than I can count, images of this intensity evade me. But it was in response to this unimaginable horror that the ars moriendi was born.
In its first iteration, the ars moriendi referred to a handbook on the preparation for death. Related books, including an illustrated version, began to develop throughout the 1400s—a time when premature death from plague, war, or famine was almost inevitable. A central premise was that in order to die well, you had to live well. Part of living well meant anticipating and preparing for death within the context of your community over the course of a lifetime.
These last two sentences deserve boldface—at minimum.
Why have we lost sight of this tradition?
Over centuries, the original ars moriendi grew into a sizeable literary genre. It shaped practices related to living and dying in the West for more than five hundred years, succumbing only to the arrival of an early twentieth-century society fixated on ushering in a modern age. Cultural habits began to change dramatically. The automobile promised independence. The suffragists brought liberation. Talking movies, television, and jazz music supplanted earlier modes of entertainment. Antibiotics and anesthesia offered life beyond life. Not only did we stop thinking about how to die well; our very culture became inhospitable to the art of dying.
We stopped thinking about how to die well.
She finishes her first chapter by giving an overview of the book.
A New Ars Moriendi
This book seeks to explain and to revive the ars moriendi not in its original form, but in a manner that matches modern sensibilities. Although the art-of-dying literature was birthed within the context of the Western church, this is not a religious book. It is, however, a book on the wisdom of dying well derived from centuries of Western Judeo-Christian cultural practices. And for that reason, it does not avoid the influence of Judaism or of Christianity on habits of dying in the West. Nor does it ignore other existential dimensions.
Notice that she encourages us to see her book, not as a religious book, but rather as one that draws its wisdom from religion.
How are we to interpret the meaning of religion here? What is the difference between education and religion, now and going forward? It seems that we “need” religion, but don’t “want” religion. Not speaking for everyone here of course.
How shall we proceed?
This book accepts as a given that, when it comes to dying and death, we need to look backward in order to move forward. The arc of the book thus proceeds from the problem of medicalized and institutionalized dying through to a description of a revitalized ars moriendi.
In order to move forward, we have to look backward because we’ve lost something.
In each chapter, I will consider an aspect of what it takes to die well and challenge you to reconsider your views of dying and death. I have already set up the problem in this first chapter by telling the story of Mr. Turner's three deaths. We do not die well, and conveyor-belt medicine will continue to carry us to bad deaths unless we hit "pause" in the system. Changing the way we die takes work.
What sort of work? I'll show you that dying well requires the recovery of a sense of finitude (Chapter Two) and the embrace of community (Three)—both central features of the original ars moriendi. But there's more. To die well we must guard against the excessive allure of the hospital as the destination for dying (Four) and recognize that our fears of death cannot be medicalized away but must be courageously confronted (Five). I'll explain the importance of regarding our own ailing bodies and accompanying others in their frailty (Six). Since living so as to die well requires deliberate reflection, we'll also consider possible roles for spirituality (Seven) and ritual (Eight). In the last chapter, I'll attempt to spell out for you a modern ars moriendi—a practical guide to living and dying well.
If the whole project sounds morbid to you, rest assured that it's not. The art of dying well starts with the art of living well.
That's what we'll discuss in the pages that follow—how to live well with a view to the endgame.
There’s a quote in there worth pulling out.
The art of dying well starts with the art of living well.
How does the art of dying well help us live well? And how might this perspective change my habits for the better? I’ll have to read more to find out.
Getting back to Richard Holloway’s book now—let’s emphasize this forgotten wisdom of religion by asking, “Why have we alienated religion from our lives?” Certainly there are valuable aspects of religion, but they seem estranged from us.
Holloway’s book helped me understand importance of prophets; the importance of Jesus the Jew; the way Jesus challenged religion and authority. If we listen to Holloway—if we aren’t distracted and driven by our dogmas—we might learn something.
In his first chapter, Holloway is teaching us about the centrality of death in religion, explaining that humans believed their departing breath meant that their spirit had gone “back to the world beyond, the spirit world.” He writes
What we discover of early funeral rites supports that view, though all our distant forebears left us are silent traces of what they might have been thinking. Writing hadn't been invented, so they couldn't leave their thoughts or describe their beliefs in a form we can read today. But they did leave us clues about what they were thinking. So let's start examining them. To find them we have to go back thousands of years BCE, a term that needs an explanation before we move on.
It makes sense to have a global calendar or way of dating when things happened in the past. The one we use now was devised by Christianity in the sixth century CE, showing just how influential religion has been in our history. For thousands of years the Catholic Church was one of the great powers on earth, so powerful it even fixed the calendar the world still uses. The pivotal event was the birth of its founder, Jesus Christ. His birth was Year One. Anything that happened before it was BC Before Christ. Anything that came after it was AD of anno Domini, the year of the Lord.
In our time BC and AD were replaced by BCE and CE, terms that can be translated with or without a religious twist: either Before the Christian Era for BCE and within the Christian Era for CE, or Before the Common Era for BCE or within the Common Era for CE. You can take your pick as to how you understand the terms. In this book I'll use BCE to locate events that happened Before Christ or Before the Common Era. But to avoid cluttering the text I'll be more sparing in my use of CE and will only use it when I think it's necessary. So if you come across a date on its own you'll know it happened within the Christian or Common Era.
Anyway, we find evidence from about 130,000 BCE onwards of some kind of religious belief in the way our ancestors buried their dead. Food, tools and ornaments were placed in the graves that have been discovered, suggesting a belief that the dead travelled on to some kind of afterlife and needed to be equipped for the journey. Another practice was the painting of the bodies of the dead with red ochre, maybe to symbolize the idea of continuing life.
Our calendar has been and still is a religious calendar. What does this tell us about us?
Holloway teaches us about the importance of religious symbolism—specifically symbolism surrounding death.
Another example of symbolic thinking was the way in which marking where the dead lay became important, especially if they were powerful and significant figures. Sometimes they were laid under gigantic boulders, sometimes in carefully constructed stone chambers called dolmens, which consisted of two upright stones supporting a large lid. The most dramatic of humanity's monuments to the dead are the pyramids at Giza in Egypt. As well as being tombs, the pyramids might be thought of as launch pads from which the souls of their royal occupants had been blasted into immortality.
Humans saw death as a door to another phase of existence.
A good reading of these clues is that our forebears saw death as the entrance to another phase of existence, imagined as a version of this one. And we catch a glimpse of their belief in a world beyond this one, yet connected to it, with death as the door between them.
So far religious beliefs look as if they might have been acquired by a process of inspired guess work. Our ancestors asked themselves where the world came from and figured it must have been created by a higher power somewhere out there. They looked at the unbreathing dead and decided their spirits must have left the bodies they once inhabited and gone somewhere else.
But an important group in the history of religion don't guess the existence of the world beyond or the destination of departed souls. They tell us they have visited it or been visited by it. They have heard the demands it makes of us. They have been commanded to tell others what they have seen and heard. So they proclaim the message they have received. They attract followers who believe their words and start living according to their teaching. We call them prophets or sages. And it is through them that new religions are born.
He talks about prophets of various religions throughout the book. Seeing the same prophetic patterns across various religions is helpful. If my memory serves me, he even defines prophet in a secular way at one point. Again this is helpful (to me).
Holloway closes his first chapter with
Then something else happens. The story they tell is memorised by their followers. At first it is passed on by word of mouth. But in time it is written down in words on paper. It then becomes what we call Holy Scripture or sacred writing. The Bible! The Book! And it becomes the religion's most potent symbol? It is a physical book, obviously. It was written by men. We can trace its history. But through its words a message from the world beyond is brought into our world. The book becomes a bridge that links eternity with time. It connects the human with the divine. That is why it is looked upon with awe and studied with intensity. And it is why believers hate it when it is derided or destroyed.
The history of religion is the story of these prophets and sages and the movements they started and the scriptures that were written about them. But it is a subject that is heavy with controversy and disagreement. Sceptics wonder whether some of these prophets even existed. And they doubt the claims made in their visions and voices. Fair enough, but that is to miss the point. What is beyond dispute is that they exist in the stories told about them, stories that still carry meaning for billions of people today.
In this book we'll read the stories the religions tell us about themselves without constantly asking whether that was the way things actually happened back then. But because it would be wrong to ignore that question entirely, we'll spend the next chapter thinking about what was going on when those prophets and sages saw visions and heard voices. One of those prophets was called Moses.
I’ve read Holloway’s book and recommend it. I’ve just started Dugdale’s book, and I’m looking forward to reading the rest.
Let’s close with thinking about 1) respect, 2) the First Amendment, and 3) how we can live better.
I wonder, “If we’ve neglected to ponder how to live well from the perspective of death, what else might we be neglecting? As part of our estrangement from supernatural religion, have we also neglected the ethos of respecting each other?”
I believe we can all do better when it comes to respecting each other and our differences. This ultimately is what the First Amendment is about. Sometimes we think of the First Amendment as freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of association, etc.—yes, it’s all of those things and more—but I also find it helpful to see it as an agreement to respect others and their rights. Respect is simple and easy to understand—so it might be better to explain the First Amendment in terms of respecting others. Respect is important because it allows us to learn; to figure out what works and to find truth—peacefully—without religious war—without force.
We shouldn’t need the First Amendment to remind ourselves, or force ourselves to respect each other, but the truth is, we do need this reminder. We need it in writing, in the highest law of our land. Respecting others should be a habit inculcated within our families, our schools, our churches and our communities. It should be part of our “religious” beliefs—our worldviews. What did Jesus Christ say about respecting others?
It might help to interpret the First Amendment as the Respect Amendment. Here is a simplified translation of the First Amendment, written in terms of respect.
We are here to learn. We respect ourselves and our rights. We respect others and their rights.
This is actually a modification to a behavior management poster, posted to the side of the whiteboards in each classroom of my children’s school.
I am here to learn. I respect myself and my rights. I respect others and their rights.
I think of this poster as a First Amendment for elementary school classrooms. What do you think—would this help in higher education too? Might this help our country? Rights of course can be interpreted in various ways, but most importantly and concisely rights are life, liberty and property.
There was an Econtalk episode recently about obedience to the unenforceable. I’ll have to go back and listen more carefully, but it seems this episode simply teaches us to make a habit of respecting others rather than taking the immature and un-responsible perspective that because there’s no written rule—no legislation requiring us to be respectful—we don’t have to be respectful.
Further, the First Amendment allows us the freedom to be wrong and to say wrong things, so long as we “respect” others and their rights. And not because we want to be wrong, or want to say wrong things, but because we are human and inevitably will be wrong, sometimes. And of course we’ll be wrong while believing we are right. In other words, we can easily fool ourselves. But what to do about this?
It is through making mistakes that we learn what is right, what is good, and what works. This is how we form good judgment. And we aren’t going to agree on what works—not at the same time anyway.
In a milieu of public property—when rights have not been violated, when rules of respect have not been breached—rather than forcing our way on others, it’s better to leave each other alone. Let people figure things out for themselves—through the consequences of their decisions and through justice, which we should always enforce. Respecting others—even when we know they are wrong, or might be wrong; or just different—is generally a good idea. This doesn’t mean to always remain silent, but it does mean to be prudent with our words; to use force when rights have been violated; and to restrain ourselves from using too much pressure when rights haven’t been violated. This takes discipline—it takes vigilance.
Can daily or weekly “religious practice” help to inculcate habits of respect? Absolutely—if done right. Here it might helpful to view “religious practice” as tantamount to secular character education or as a self-improvement practice.
So we have this wonderful First Amendment, but it’s not perfect. We might ask, “Why didn’t the Framers incorporate the idea of secular religion into the First Amendment?” And “Why didn’t they incorporate the word ‘discrimination’ into the First Amendment (e.g. sexism, racism, etc.)?” For example, the following might be an improvement to the first part of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or discrimination, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;”
And don’t forget those last six words: “or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” We have the right to discriminate. Of course we do. It would be crazy to take away that right. Everyone discriminates. To discriminate is to be human. (More on this below).
The important thing to consider here, is that we can still incorporate “secular religion” and “discrimination” into the First Amendment. I think that would be a wise idea. What do you think?
Some view religion in a narrow and negative sense. For them, the “religion glass” is always half full. Others view religion as a way of life. I’m suggesting that we should view religion as both positive and negative because it has both good and bad aspects. It can help or hurt us. It’s important to see both sides. This is what Richard Holloway is attempting to do. Let’s make improvements rather than discard everything. Let’s trim to truth rather than hold onto beliefs that are past their expiration date.
Discrimination can be viewed in the same way as religion—as having both good and bad sides. Some only see the word discrimination as negative, but all of us discriminate. We discriminate against clothes, food, jobs, art, language and even people we don’t like—in favor of food and clothes we do like. Discrimination is very similar to religion. Discrimination is our taste. We all have taste. Some show poor taste. Many of us would like to think we have great taste.
And what we call education—publicly funded or privately funded—might just be another form of “religion.” Education can be used to teach any “religious belief”—Judaism, Christianity, DEI, environmentalism, socialism, capitalism—including real-world skills and character education. Even science can be turned into a religion. And science is a “religion,” depending on how we define religion. If religion includes everything—all our beliefs, habits and the means by which we learn—then science is a religion.
Education can be either good or bad—in that its contents—the stuff being taught—can be good or bad. You might view DEI as good—I view it as bad. It’s subjective. Its goodness or badness depends on our perspective—on the facts that we have, and who we are. The problem with DEI, is that many of us don’t want to be forced to learn DEI or pay for your DEI. DEI is your religion, not ours.
Same with voluntary socialism. I’m happy to let you live out your socialist dreams on a private commune anywhere in the world, including the United States, so long as you allow us to live out our dreams on our property. To have these opportunities we need a norm of respect and freedom. I don’t want to be forced to learn, live or pay for your socialism, so we need to leave each other alone per the First Amendment—or else neither of us will get to live the “religion” that we desire.
Holloway and Dugdale are leading us toward a new understanding of religion. This is part of our eternal quest for what works best—part of our innate urge to survive and pass on our genes. In this quest, it’s important that we do an accounting of the pros and cons of religion. Religion is both 1) the means by which we learn and 2) a set of beliefs and habits. It has been with us for as long as humans have been conscious. It is the way that we make meaning of ourselves and our world. But religion has changed rapidly within the last few hundred years. We now incorporate more sophisticated tools into religion (e.g. critical thinking, science, logic, philosophy, evolutionary biology, computer science, physics, mathematics, astronomy, economics, technology, psychology, sociology, etc.). In fact, we have incorporated so many new sophisticated tools into religion, that our religions no longer looks anything like the religions of 1776-1790, when our founding documents were written. And we have created new secular religions that are being funded by our tax dollars. We should update the meaning of religion in the context of the First Amendment so that we can avoid learning the hard way, the wisdom of the First Amendment. The Framers knew things that we have forgotten. Let’s not learn by way of the school of hard knocks what we can learn through dialogue—before another crisis emerges.
But setting aside the First Amendment conversation, let’s remind ourselves of the importance of religion from the perspective of dying well. In an upcoming post, I’ll share with you my six-month experience as non-member learning about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from within the Church. Why focus on the Latter-day Saints? The Saints are quite good at thinking about death and preparing for death. Let’s look at the LDS focus on death and how that initiates a dialogue about living. And of course the Latter-day Saints aren’t perfect—no religion is, but we can learn from them, especially if we interpret their scriptures as metaphor rather than statements of reality. Certainly we may not want to copy exactly what the Latter-day Saints practice or believe, but let’s at least consider that they might do some things better than us. What can we learn from them?
I’d like to do the same for other religions too, especially the Eastern religions that many of us are not very familiar with.
Of course disrespectful comments will be deleted.
Similarly I plan on reading and sharing more from The Lost Art of Dying: Reviving Forgotten Wisdom. Let’s compare Dugdale’s suggestions on the art of dying well to the Latter-day Saints’ practice of dying well. If you’re thinking about buying Dugdale’s book, but aren’t sure yet, you might consider listening to this discussion with the author.
Alright, enough writing. Time to read.