On Dying: His & Ours. - Review - book review

Commonweal, Dec 15, 2000 by Brian E. Daley

Death on a Friday
Afternoon
Meditations on the Last Words of Jesus from the Cross
Richard John Neuhaus
Basic Books, $24, 272 pp.

The Eternal Pity
Reflections on Dying
Richard John Neuhaus, editor
University of Notre Dame Press,
$25, 180 pp.

In my pre-Vatican II youth, one of the high points of Holy Week each year was the Three Hours service on Good Friday afternoon. Our family usually attended this in a neighboring parish, where Scripture readings, hymns, and silent meditation were skillfully interwoven into a long liturgical collage, and where the organist (a stern-looking old gentleman with the intimidating name of Mr. Boyd-Smack) played Dubois's thunderous "earthquake music" at the point when we recalled Jesus' death. The heart of the service, however, was preaching: a guest homilist would offer extended reflections on the "seven last words" of Jesus--the sayings of Jesus while he hung on the cross, culled from the four Gospels and compressed into the framework for a continuous narrative of the Passion. Such Good Friday services, of course, were standard Catholic fare from the late seventeenth century until the middle of the twentieth century, and expressed the deep conviction, shared by Protestants and Catholics alike, that the Passion and death of Jesus are the climax of his revelation of God's love and reconciling mercy, in the midst of human weakness and sin.

In Death on a Friday Afternoon, Richard John Neuhaus, editor of First Things and outspoken commentator on the religious debates and "social wars" of contemporary America, offers us a new essay in this venerable genre: extended meditations on the seven gospel sayings of Jesus on the cross, which grew out of the author's attempt to preach such a service in a New York parish several years ago. It is a serious, wide-ranging book that struggles to deal, in nontechnical language, with some of the central themes in the perennial Christian preaching of salvation through Jesus: the connection of death with sin, the value of Jesus' death as proof of love and atoning sacrifice, the quality of the hope in the face of death offered believers--a hope that in its authentic form never trivializes or suppresses the violence and finality of death, but that assures us the God of indestructible life is our companion even in death's darkness.

Almost simultaneously, Neuhaus has published a second volume, The Eternal Pity: Reflections on Dying, as part of the University of Notre Dame Press's promising new series of anthologies on practical morality, The Ethics of Everyday Life. This book is a beautifully chosen (and handsomely produced) collection of literary pieces reflecting on the ways death strikes the human heart: poems by Donne, Herbert, and Dylan Thomas, stories by Tolstoy and Flannery O'Connor, philosophical and journalistic essays, even some selections from the Qur'an. Neuhaus prefaces his anthology with a condensed but thoughtful overview of how death has been viewed by the great religious traditions of the world, by Western philosophy, and by various strands in our own culture; he ends his essay with a moving narration of his own near brush with death from undetected intestinal cancer, in the winter of 1993, and of the transforming effect that experience has had on his faith and hope as a Christian. That event, in fact, as Neuhaus recounts it, seems to stand as the personal backdrop for both books: a dramatic confrontation with darkness that led him to wrestle anew with the meaning of both Christ's death and our own.

Those familiar with Neuhaus's arch and uncharitable musings in the editorial pages of First Things may be surprised to discover a different voice in these two books. Flashes of social criticism occasionally appear, as in Neuhaus's trenchant reflections on the gnostic tendency of much contemporary American religion or our psychoanalytically rooted "idolatry of the conflicted self," and there is just a hint of condescension in some of his allusions to the late Raymond Brown's work (although Neuhaus admits his indebtedness to Brown's The Death of the Messiah). For the most part, however, the tone is pastoral and constructive, as both books invite the reader to approach the threat and the mystery of death in a contemplative spirit. "A measure of reticence and silence is in order," Neuhaus observes in his introduction to The Eternal Pity. "There is a time simply to be present to death--whether one's own or that of others--without any felt urgencies about doing something about it or getting over it." And such reverent, unhurrying silence is all the more necessary, he often reminds us, when one is approaching the saving mystery of the death of Christ.

The real strength of both books, I think, is that they invite us to take death seriously, rather than to reach for religious or cultural palliatives, and to hear in the gospel of the crucified Christ a message of consolation that does not avoid the tragedy of death, but that paradoxically finds life in it. Observing the widespread tendency of modern culture to suggest that death is "no big deal," Neuhaus insists: "For those dying their own death and the death of those they love, death is a very big deal indeed. Don't tell them that it doesn't matter, that they'll get over it, that things will look brighter tomorrow. Death is, in the words of Saint Paul, 'the last enemy' (1 Cor. 15:26). The only consolation to be trusted is the consolation that is on the far side of the inconsolable."