Some people want nothing to do with religion for themselves, but are content to let it be. They might take the same view of it as Miss Jean Brodie did of scouting:
“For those who like that sort of thing," said Miss Brodie in her best Edinburgh voice, "That is the sort of thing they like.”
But some people think that religion is harmful and should be actively opposed. An argument you often hear in this context is that religion is cowardly. We all have to die, and most of us don’t want to: it’s said that religion takes the sting out of the most unwelcome feature of human life by providing us with a consoling fantasy about a life after death, and that it would be more courageous to turn our backs on the fantasy.
I want to challenge this story, because I’m not convinced that the idea of life after death is much of a consolation for human mortality - even for someone who is convinced that there is a future life, and that it will be benign rather than unpleasant. The difficulty is that any life after death, however envisaged, would be radically discontinuous with the life that we already know. And so the promise of a future life cannot possibly make up for the loss of everything we love and care about in the life that we have here and now. The two things simply can’t be weighed on the same scale. Imagine a refugee child who has just endured the destruction of their home, exile from their own country, and permanent separation from their parents and family and everyone else they have ever known. Imagine telling that child that they will now live in a different country, where their life will ultimately be better than anything they have ever known. Would you expect them to be consoled?
Death is an unwelcome prospect for everyone; and turning our eyes away from the reality of death is universal, whatever beliefs we hold, or profess. Some people are forced to confront that reality through being diagnosed with a life-threatening or terminal illness: much of the wisest writing about death results from this. But even for those of us who don’t have such a diagnosis, there’s a great deal to be said for trying to face up to our own mortality.
Although death is inevitable, its timing is (for most of us) highly uncertain. I will be 55 in November. I could die within the next 24 hours; or I could live for another 40 years or more. We can and should plan for a normal lifespan (which in today’s society means a life that may extend well into its 80s, or beyond); but we cannot assume that this is what we will get. This is one of our primary difficulties, as soon as we try to think about death in any serious way: the certainty of the event, combined with the uncertainty of its timing.
It helps, I think, to try to combine two things: to maximise our sense of astonishment at the fact that we get to live a human life at all; and to minimise our sense of entitlement to any particular lifespan.
In relation to the first, we can focus on the extraordinary set of contingencies that led to the existence of our species, let alone to the existence of any of us as individuals. There’s a Buddhist parable about our sheer improbability. Imagine a blind turtle on the ocean floor, that surfaces once every hundred years. Now imagine a ring floating on the surface of the ocean. How likely is it that the turtle will surface just at the right time to put its head right through the middle of the ring? That’s how unlikely it is to be born human. In its original context, it’s a parable about rebirth, and how rare and precious it is to have an opportunity to hear the Buddha’s teaching. Read outside that context, you could understand it as encouraging a sense of privilege at living a human life, and as calling for ontological gratitude - gratitude for being, and specifically for our own being.
As to our sense of entitlement, a friend who was diagnosed with terminal cancer when she was a little younger than I am now said that it was tempting to ask the question: why me? But (she went on), given that there are vast numbers of people who die in or before their 50s, it makes just as much sense to ask: why not me?
There’s also a particular gift that the prospect of death, and the fear of death, can bring us - a sharper sense of compassion. I can’t think of any more powerful spur to compassion than the reflection that every single person faces exactly the same fate that you face yourself, and fear for yourself. When life is seen against that background, it becomes a great deal harder to see other people as enemies. Opponents, yes; antagonists, yes; people who make you angry or drive you to distraction or who need to be thwarted for the sake of their own wellbeing or that of other people. But enemies?
None of the above depends on any kind of religious faith or affiliation. In terms of how religion might help us, I’m especially interested in religious practices that involve a setting-aside or bracketing of the everyday self, and going into silence - as for instance meditation, contemplative prayer, or Quaker worship. What such practices can bring with them is an increased sense of yourself as permeable, a softening of the boundaries between self and world. There’s an element of self-surrender about this, and at times this can feel like a kind of rehearsal for death. This doesn’t at all depend on whether the explicit content of the practice involves some sort of reflection on death. I think this is the most important thing that religion can offer in the face of death: not promises for the future, but forms of practice that we can adopt here and now, practices that prepare us for life by helping us to live alongside death.
In present conditions, all of this has a particular urgency. Since 1945, we’ve faced the possibility of destruction for our civilisation or even for our species, because of the weapons now available to us. More recently we’ve come to realise that the climate emergency, and the wider ecological crisis of which it is a part, give rise to comparable risks. And my strong sense is that, unless we can engage in some realistic way with our own individual mortality, we will be gravely hindered in how we engage with these wider threats. If the prospect of our own individual death is effectively unthinkable and unspeakable, how can we possibly address issues about extinction at a global level?
