Life after near-death experience
Some have change of heart and spirit after brush with death
‘In the midst of life, we are in death,’ it says in the funeral service. In modern conditions, we are often made to feel that this is not true.
So I listened with unusual interest to BBC radio’s Start The Week host Andrew Marr who, though only in his early 50s, suffered a stroke in January. He has recently returned to broadcasting. Marr told his audience that he is not religious but that, as he has convalesced, he has found himself reading religious poetry and listening to religious music.
Why, in a culture which seems less and less interested in the formal teachings of religion, do many people feel that religious poetry and religious music matter more than ever?
Helping answer these questions were John Drury, author of a new biography of Herbert, Music at Midnight; novelist Jeanette Winterson; and composer Sir John Tavener.
Tavener explained that he had recently had a near-death experience. Since he had been ill, he had been looking back on his life a lot. And he remembered fondly a Protestant pastor of his youth “Life is a creeping tragedy,” the minister used to say, “That’s why we must be cheerful.”
At first, Tavener’s illness had “shut everything down. God seemed to have vanished;” but then, as he recovered strength, his belief in God and his capacity to compose music — which had always gone together — returned. Now his music had become “more essential; more terse.”
The next day, Tavener died. He had Started The Week, but he didn’t finish it. In the midst of life, we were in death.
John Drury read one of Herbert’s most famous poems, Love (III). It takes the form of a dialogue between the unworthy soul and Love (who is God, though not so named). The soul is inclined to refuse Love’s invitation to sit at his table, but Love, the perfect host, persuades him. In the dialogue, said Drury: “Love has fewer words, but they are sprightly. In the end, it is Love that matters.”
The next day, the end came for John Tavener.
I have always found Tavener’s music entrancing. To use a phrase of St. John of the Cross, one “dies to oneself.” The concept of dying to oneself makes physical death less terrible.
If you follow Tavener’s career, you can see the consistency of a quest that was both spiritual and musical.
In his creativity, he may have been restlessly egotistical, yet his beliefs turned egotism into almost its opposite. As he put it, referring to the requiem mass: “Our glory lies where we cease to exist.”
George Herbert wrote his poems but never attempted to publish them in life. As he was dying, he asked them to be given to a trusted friend, saying that they were “a picture of the many spiritual conflicts which have passed between God and my soul, before I could subject mine to the will of Jesus my Master.”
Luckily, the friend published the book, to the advantage of thousands of poor dejected souls. Herbert’s glory lies where he ceased to exist.
Jeanette Winterson quoted Seamus Heaney: “Poetry should be strong enough to help.” “Strong” wouldn’t be the first adjective one would associate with Herbert’s refined and gentle spirit, but it turns out to be the right one. His poetry helps.
The paradoxes that are central to the great religions come home with unique force. When I am weak, then am I strong; you must die to live.
In our culture, millions of people only think about these things too late, if at all.