Bells and smells! This, like “happy clappy”, is a pithy, if somewhat flippant, description of a certain sort of church service: Anglo-catholic rather than evangelical. It was certainly true for the memorial commemoration for those who’d died during the previous twelve months.
For someone not used to such proceedings there was a moment of alarm when smoke began billowing from a side chapel. Was the Devil making a surprise appearance or could it be the church was on fire? Neither as it turned out, it was merely the thurible being stoked up.
The service was solemn and formal, the hymns sung as tuneless dirges punctuated by coughs as the incense smoke caught in throats as it was wafted over sacred texts and in the general direction of the congregation. Then there was the homily.
It wasn’t a sermon as such, just a casual verbal digression around the theme of saying goodbye. Delivered without notes, it was well constructed and dealt poignantly with those significant goodbyes signalling fundamental changes in people’s lives.
Death was, of course, the final goodbye. Or was it? The priest conjured an image of all “who’ve gone before” standing decorously around Heaven in a state of bliss praising God and waiting for the rest of us to join them. Perhaps poppy essence was one of the incense herbs.
Atheists often claim that fear of death and personal extinction is the root from which religion grew, and continues to grow. Plausible, except the history of thinking on the possibility of life after death hasn’t always been so encouraging as to merit taking solace from it.
In the ancient world death was vaguely survived in the form of shades, barely being at all. Achilles is cited after his death on the battlefields of Illium as hankering after the drudgery of a peasant’s existence in life rather than the status of a prince in Hades.
While Christianity posited Heaven, the post mortem destination of most people, as sinners, was hell. The prospect of an eternity subjected to the vilest tortures inflicted constantly by pitiless devils was none too encouraging.
Stoicism was, in many ways, a precursor of Deism in that it favoured the use of reason, not superstition. MarcusAurelius, the Stoic Roman Emperor, thought life after death a possibility, though if there wasn’t it didn’t matter. Either way, death was inevitable and a natural phenomenon which it was pointless to fear.
While there are things that last for eons, everything is finite. However, every last constituent particle is recycled, not a single one “dies”, that is, goes out of existence. The universe is a process of ceaseless change that may itself be finite or infinite: whatever the speculation, no one really knows.
Eternal life is beyond comprehension. There again, so is God. For Deists there does not need to be a reward for what they advocate. If it could be absolutely proven that death is indeed final it would not invalidate the concept of God as each individual life in itself is an integral part of the creative process.
That there is a discernable process, and that it is dynamic, with destruction and creation being complimentary aspects, governed by identifiable laws is what leads Deists to posit God as the source. No anthropomorphic God dispensing privileges to humanity, but something way beyond limited human definitions.
Whether this entails the continuing employment of conscious experience developed in the course of a life has to be an open question. If life flows through a person as electricity flows through a light bulb, then as that current continues after the bulb has burnt out, so might the current of life continue.
Whatever the final consequence of death, a person remains significant to those who knew him or her. So when the surviving partner wishes to attend a service of commemoration it is incumbent on others to respect such a wish.
While dismissing any supposed supernatural properties, rituals can be a positive aspect of the drama marking an occasion. The bread and wine of the Eucharist does not, of course, become the body and blood of a saviour. But, as a stylised shared meal, taken in spiritual circumstances, such an act can have significance.
A Deist may choose meditation, personal or communal, a poem or piece of music or simply contemplate creation with awe and wonder rather than clouds of smells and clangour of bells.
Yet in the highest of high-church ceremonies a Deist can recognise the significance of a shared fundamental, God. Life, however brief or extensive, is a repudiation of notion that creation is pointless and meaningless. Otherwise, why bother to celebrate it at all?
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