saint who had lived a life of heroic virtue, there was the prospect of eternal life in heaven. For the wicked, there was the prospect of eternal damnation in hell. It was a dramatic choice between endless joy and unending torment. But the Church has always been good at finding ways to soften its harshest teaching. And that’s what happened here.
In the thirteenth century, the Church invented a half-way house between heaven and hell called purgatory, from the Latin for ‘place of cleansing’. Purgatory was a moral laundromat, where sinners who had soiled their souls on earth were slowly bleached of their stains and restored to purity. It was painful for them, but unlike the souls in hell, for whom there was never any hope of escape, the souls in purgatory had the prospect of release to cheer them on. And the assistance of the living was another source of encouragement. It was believed that the prayers of those still alive on earth could hasten the cleansing of those in purgatory. The best way to speed them on was to have masses said for them in special chapels called ‘chantries’, from the French for chanting. Chantry priests were recruited by wealthy families to pray their relatives through purgatory, much the way a lawyer for a guilty defendant might enter a plea of mitigation on their behalf in order to reduce their sentence.
In 1505, the prosperous Nottinghamshire Markham family built a chantry chapel inside Saint Mary Magdalene and hired a priest to say mass there. On the outside of the stone panels of the little chapel, they painted a favourite subject of medieval artists called the Dance of Death. One panel showed a dancing skeleton holding a carnation, a symbol of mortality. On the other panel there was a richly dressed young man clutching a purse. The skeleton’s message to the young man was clear. As I am today, you will be tomorrow. And the money in your purse won’t help you. It was a memento mori, a prompt to observers – remember you must die – to make them think about and prepare for their end.
It’s a far cry from how we do things today. Now we spend a lot of time and effort not thinking about death. To face our own death is, quite literally, the last thing most of us will do – if we’re conscious enough at the time to do it even then. Even if we wanted to, the chances are we won’t have much control over how we leave the scene. Death and dying have been taken over by the medical profession; and there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that it sees death not as a friend we might learn to welcome but as an enemy to be resisted to the bitter end. And the end often is experienced as bitter, as a fight we lost rather than as the coming down of the curtain on our moment on the stage, something we always knew was in the script.
People in the Middle Ages didn’t have that luxury, if luxury it is. For them, life-threatening illness was as unpredictable and unavoidable as the weather, and they never knew when the lightning might strike. And, considering what came after, it made sense to be prepared for death. In contrast to health professionals today, who advise us to remember the dos and don’ts of healthy living in order to delay death as long as possible, the medieval Church was an advocate of healthy dying. It produced a guide on how to do it called Ars moriendi (The Art of Dying), a handbook for making a good end. Repenting and confessing your sins was the most important advice they gave the dying. And the reason why is captured by Hamlet in Shakespeare’s most famous play. The young prince finds his hated stepfather at prayer and decides to kill him:
Now I might do it pat, now he is praying;
And now I’ll do it: – and so he goes to heaven;
And so am I revenged: – that would be scanned:
A villain kills my father; and, for that,
I, his sole son, do this same villain send To heaven.
O, this is hire and salary, not revenge . . .
Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hent:
When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage;
Or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed;
At gaming, swearing, or about some act
That has no relish of salvation in it, –
Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven;
And that his soul may be as damned and black
As hell, whereto it goes.2
The message was clear. If you die before you’ve had time to examine your conscience, own your guilt and confess your sins, you’ll go straight to hell. And since you never know when the bell will summon you, the safest course is to be ready at all times, with your bags packed and your soul scrubbed clean. The other big piece of advice in The Art of Dying was about money. There are no pockets in a shroud, so you can’t take your money with you when you die. But disposing of it wisely while you are alive will help you secure decent lodgings on the other side. And there was a saying of Jesus that confirmed the message: ‘Use your worldly wealth to win friends for yourself, so that when money is a thing of the past you may be received into an eternal home.’3 Those were the important messages packed into that little cartoon on the wall of the chantry chapel in Newark’s parish church.
I had travelled to Newark on a golden September day to visit Kelham Hall, a few miles away on the banks of the River Trent. And I was wondering if it might be my last visit. I had been returning insistently over the years to prowl the grounds and remember my life there more than sixty years ago, then a young monk trying and failing to give his life away to God in a grand gesture of self-sacrifice. I knew this constant returning was an unhealthy obsession, but I couldn’t shake it. The Victorian parson poet Charles Tennyson Turner had already warned me of the dangers of trying to recover lost time:
In the dark twilight of an autumn morn,
I stood within a little country town
Wherefrom a long acquainted path went down . . .
The low of oxen on the rainy wind,
Death and the Past, came up the well-known road
And bathed my heart with tears, but sirred my mind . . .
But I was warn’d, ‘Regrets which are not thrust
Upon thee, seek not . . . thou art bold to trust
Thy woe-worn thoughts among these roaring trees . . .
Is’t no crime
To rush by night into the arms of Time?’4
These long-acquainted paths had witnessed great changes since I had lived there in the middle of the last century. Kelham Hall was no longer the home of a religious order that trained poor boys for the ministry of the Anglican Church. Now it was a stately hotel, and on the day of my visit it was hosting a large British Asian wedding. For the ceremony, the massive, domed chapel that had dominated my boyhood and haunted my dreams had been converted into a shrine to the Hindu God Ganesh. And it was filled with hundreds of joyful and colourfully dressed wedding guests. Did they catch the vibration of the hundreds of black-robed young men who had once tried to sacrifice themselves to God in this haunted space, now dominated by the friendly presence of the Elephant God? It certainly did not feel like it to me, but to my surprise this did not deepen my ‘woe-worn thoughts’. It banished them. I was touched by the cheerful indifference of the wedding guests to the ghosts that whispered in my ear. Suddenly, something lifted in me. And I knew I wouldn’t have to come back here again. What had been, had been. Now it was no more. I remembered Binyon’s ‘The Burning of the Leaves’:
Now is the time for stripping the spirit bare,
Time for the burning of days ended and done,
