Years ago I preached a sermon on death to a relatively young congregation. As I greeted congregants after the service, many smiled the Southern smile that means, “We know our manners but don’t like what you said.” Yet one elderly couple stopped to talk. “We’ve never heard a sermon on death here,” I recall the wife saying. “We needed one. We’re old and we know what’s coming.”
The Covid-19 pandemic has swept away the illusions that led the congregation—and much of the world—to ignore death. The virus will kill only a small minority of the world. Yet its prevalence has reminded people everywhere that if Covid-19 doesn’t kill them, something else will. Thisrealization recalls a truth central to the Christian tradition: No one will get out of life alive.
Over time Christians developed a set of practices to help us tell this truth and to prepare for death. In the Middle Ages this was called the ars moriendi, the art of dying. Today, a quick death often is seen as ideal. Yet the ars moriendi holds the opposite view: It’s a good thing to see death coming and to have time to prepare. Time and habit provide the chance to live fully and—even at the last hour—become a mature human being, one who tells the truth.
I know this firsthand because my dying wife tells the truth. When she was referred to hospice some time ago, after a long and painful decline, she simply noted, “I don’t want to die. I want to finish raising our son.”
The coronavirus has swept away the illusions that led so many of us to ignore death. Confronting the truth of our mortality can yield remarkable freedom and love, writes C. Kavin Rowe https://t.co/3JPBhijGWp
— WSJ Editorial Page (@WSJopinion) April 24, 2020