Apologies to the late Canon Henry Scott Holland
In my reflection for Easter Sunday I accused Canon Henry Scott Holland of subscribing to the view expressed in the poem of his authorship “Death is Nothing at All”.
Well, I should have had enough faith in theologians (!) to know that an eminent theologian like Holland probably didn’t think that death was nothing at all;just a matter of slipping into the next (much more pleasant) room. My research on the web soon led me to suggestions that in fact Scott Holland’s words were actually an attempt to articulate what many of us sometimes wish was true about immortality and afterlife; not what the Canon or the Christian tradition actually hold. For evidence of this, see here and here.
I’m very intrigued as to how these musings of Henry Scott Holland on erroneous wishful thinking about mortality were in recent decades wrenched out of context and turned into an appallingly saccharine poem of superficial comfort to be used as a reading at (mostly secular, thank God) funeral after funeral.
My apologies to the late Canon Henry Scott Holland!
The poem is not “wrenched out of context” as it was meant to describe a certain attitude about death that many people choose to take as a comfort … and so it is performing exactly that function and does so every time it is invoked. Even if it has been taken out of the context intended, it verifies Holland’s contentions that it has been used this way. To say that it is “appallingly saccharine” reflects your opinion only. How sad for you to be a person who would rather apologize to a dead man than allow the living some comfort.
It is a bad idea to cite the opinions of others as a basis for a theory. Your opinions are then only as good as those others’, and worth very little.
Very little of what is said or written is taken and judged in its entirety…. for instance: I just happened upon your op piece in searching for the full version of this poem because we are using at my mother’s funeral; it reflects what we believe SHE would want us to believe about her death. I have no idea what came before or will come after your opinion. I have no idea what the purpose of this blog is… and so it occurs to me that I may be speaking out of my ass.
Oh well, that’s life.
Debra, I certainly am sorry if my comments offended you in a time of great sadness.
But, to clarify my perspective, let me say that I wrote this post from a (personal) Christian perspective; and from that perspective I think that the attitude towards death encouraged and promoted by the poem really is quite dangerous. There is a legitimate ‘Marxian worry’ about this attitude. If death really is “nothing at all”, surely there is less imperative to safeguard and uphold the sanctity of life; or to act against and counteract earthly suffering. And Holland thought that too, which is why he was trying to poetically bring out the essence of this way of thinking about our mortality; in order to contrast it with what the orthodox Christian tradition teaches about immortality and Resurrection.
Of course, the idea that death is nothing at all is upheld and promoted within contemporary Christianity; and Christians in my view need in the face if this fact to carefully examine the eschatological content of the Christian theological tradition.
Anyway, again, I am sorry for any offence I may have caused you.
Also, this post should be read in the context of my Easter Sunday reflection.
I find your comments heartless and symtomatic of most clergy now and earlier. I speak as someone whose father died in a car accident when I was 14. I also speak as someone who had multiple surgeries as a child and who was left lame permanently. I also speak as someone who was diagnosed with cancer when I was 36, and who had to undergo chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery. I also speak as someone whose mother died prematurely of cancer and suffered unspeakably. I no longer subscribe to Catholicism or to any other religion.
You and those like you do not want to offer any comfort to the suffering. You use your “religion” as a cloak to insulate you from those who are suffering around you. I’ll start listening to someone like you when I see they have EMPATHY and COMPASSION. You don’t. All you know how to do is to pontificate and run down someone else’s efforts at comfort.
My feelings are well reflected by A.E. Housman: (You’ll probably denigrate him, also.)
XII
The laws of God, the laws of man,
He may keep that will and can;
Not I: let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;
And if my ways are not as theirs
Let them mind their own affairs.
Their deeds I judge and much condemn,
Yet when did I make laws for them?
Please yourselves, say I, and they
Need only look the other way.
But no, they will not; they must still
Wrest their neighbour to their will,
And make me dance as they desire
With jail and gallows and hell-fire.
And how am I to face the odds
Of man’s bedevilment and God’s?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.
They will be master, right or wrong;
Though both are foolish, both are strong.
And since, my soul, we cannot fly
To Saturn nor to Mercury,
Keep we must, if keep we can,
These foreign laws of God and man.