The Rt Revd Gordon Mursell Bishop Gordon is a well-known preacher, author and tutor in spirituality. The art of dying in the English Spiritual Tradition was presented at Hospiscare's Holy Living, Holy Dying held in Exeter 2 November 2009.

1. THE ART OF DYING IN THE ENGLISH SPIRITUAL TRADITION
And specially [pray] for all those souls
that have most need to be prayed for
and have the fewest friends. (Anon. (12th cent.), The Lay Folks’ Mass Book, Bidding
Prayer IV).
LIVING WITH DEATH
“As you are, so once we were. As we are, so shall you be” (common inscription on medieval
tombs)
Removed
in the Midst of his Usefulness.
Reader
“be ye also Ready.”(Memorial at Wigtown Parish Church, Scotland, to
Alexander Cowdie (1808-62).
COMMUNION WITH THE DEAD
There was a man who, as he walked through the cemetery, always recited the De profundis
for the dead. Once, when he was running away through the cemetery with his enemies after
him, the buried, each one armed with the tool proper to his craft, quickly rose and defended
the fleeing man with might and main. His pursuers, terrified, retreated in haste. [Jacobus de
Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. W.G.Ryan, Princeton UP 1993, vol.II p285]
DEATH AND LAMENT
“Why did you bring me forth from the womb? Would that I had died before any eye had
seen me, and were as though I had not been, carried from the womb to the grave. Are not the
days of my life few? Let me alone, that I may find a little comfort before I go, never to return,
to the land of gloom and deep darkness” (Job 10:18-21, included in the late medieval Dirige,
or Office for the Dead).
LEARNING FROM DEATH
Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
[Fool'd by] these rebel powers that thee array;
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body's end?
Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store.
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more.
So shalt thou feed on death, that feeds on men,
And death once dead, there's no more dying then.
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2. (Shakespeare, Sonnet 146)
WISDOM IN THE FACE OF DEATH
Death meets us every where [sic], and is procured by every instrument and in all chances, and
enters in at many doors; by violence and secret influence, by the aspect of a star and the stink
of a mist, by the emissions of a cloud and the meeting of a vapour, by the fall of a chariot and
the stumbling at a stone, by a full meal or an empty stomach, by watching at the wine or by
watching at prayers, by the sun or the moon, by a heat or a cold, by sleepless nights or
sleeping days, by waters frozen into the hardness and sharpness of a dagger, or waters thawed
into the floods of a river, by a hair or a raisin, by violent motion or sitting still, by severity or
dissolution, by God's mercy or God's anger; by every thing in providence and every thing in
manners, by every thing in nature and every thing in chance. (Jeremy Taylor, [The Rule and
Exercise of] Holy Dying (1651) 1:1).
THE MYSTERY OF DEATH
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
(Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind, 1820)
I know. It is not easy to explain
Why should there be such agony to bear?
Why should the whole wide world be full of pain?
But then, why should her hair
Be like the sudden sunshine after rain?
Turn cynic if you will. Curse God and die.
You've ample reason for it. There's enough
Of bitterness, God knows, to answer why.
The road of life is rough,
But then there is the glory of the sky...
(Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy (1883-1929), from Tragedy)
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