Thinking of Death

Dom. John Chapman’s letter dated 25 May 1919 to a Benedictine nun, from pp.138ff. of his Spiritual Letters.

Palazzo San Calisto,
Trastevere,
Roma.
May 25, 1919.

Dear Dame …

Before I had received your letter, I had naturally heard the sad
news.

You ask why you are afraid of death. It is only human. St. Teresa
describes her mental and even bodily sufferings, caused by her
violent desire to die and to “be with Christ”. And yet, she says, she
still had the human fear of death. And our Lord chose to suffer this
fear of death for our sakes. The separation of body and soul is a
wrench. On the other hand, I know quite well what you mean about
the feeling,—when you try to realise death—that there is nothing
beyond.

The reason is plainly because one cannot imagine it. One tries to
imagine a pure spiritual imagination of the soul without the body;
and naturally one imagines a blank. And then one feels:—“There is
no life after death”; and then one says to oneself:—“I am doubting the
faith, I am sinning against faith.”  All the time, one is only unreasonable,—trying to imagine what can be intellectually conceived, but not pictured.  It is different, I think, if you think of death naturally; not
unnaturally.

(1) To die is a violence (as I said) from one point of view; but from
another point of view, it is natural. And to most people it seems
natural to die, when they are dying. Consequently it is easy to
imagine yourself on your sick bed, very weak, and faintly hearing
prayers around you, and receiving the Sacraments, and gently losing
consciousness, and sleeping in God’s arms. (This is actually the way
death comes to most people,—quite easily and pleasantly.) And
looked at in this way, it does not feel like an extinction, the going out
of a candle; it seems, on the contrary, impossible to feel that this is
the end of one’s personality. But what comes next? We leave that to
God,—we do not try to imagine it.

(2) Only in prayer can you get near it—if the world ever falls away,
and leaves you in infinity—which you can only describe as
nothingness, though it is everything.
The moral of this is,—do not try to imagine ‘after death’, for
imagination is only of material and sensible things. Only try to realise
what it is to be with God.

One’s terror of death, after seeing a dead person, is merely
because it is unaccustomed. If you were an Undertaker, you wouldn’t
feel it! Nor even if you were a Nurse in a hospital. It is a thing to
laugh yourself out of. But it does not matter much. Some people are
afraid of mice or frogs. Some people are afraid of corpses. Some
people are afraid of ghosts. Others can’t stand the sight of blood. But
you can get accustomed to seeing pools of it, and people blown to
bits, and be cheerful and joking, and pass by taking no notice. It is all
a matter of habit. The Chinese don’t mind dying, provided they are
sure of having a really nice coffin. I can’t say the prospect would
appeal to me.

These are gruesome subjects! I think it is much better to be
accustomed to them, and to take them as a matter of course. The
worst of death is really the blanks it leaves in this world. But it often
fills up blanks in the next world; and we must rejoice when some one,
dear to us, takes the place prepared “from the foundation of the
world”, as our Lord tells us, for that soul;—(at least He says
“kingdom”, not “place”; I am misquoting).

I am sorry to have been so long in answering. But it is an effort to
write letters, when one is hard at work on other things.
Ever yours sincerely in Χρο,
fr. H. JOHN CHAPMAN, O.S.B.