Sermon Archive
Tess
Sermon preached by Ken Boyd at Holy Communion on 21 October 2001
Isaiah 65 17-25; 2 Thessalonians 3 6-13; Luke 21 5-19
Our black Labrador Tess died last Monday. Her pedigree name was Grey Gloaming, Black Orchid, and her coat gleamed to the last. But for a day and a half she had refused all food and lain very still. When she got up to take some sips of water, she could hardly stand, and by Monday morning, when the vet came, it was clear that a decision had to be made.
Lord, look down on Thy Servant! Bad things have come to pass.
There is no heat in the midday sun, nor health in the wayside grass.
Her bones are full of an old disease - her torments run and increase.
Lord make haste with Thy Lightnings and grant her a quick release!
When the vet phoned later that day, he confirmed that nothing more could have been done: the cancer in her liver had spread inexorably. But, but...
When the body that lived at your single will,
With its whimper of welcome, is stilled (how still!)
When the spirit that answered your every mood
Is gone - wherever it goes - for good,
You will discover how much you care
And will give your heart to a dog to tear.
It all happened very quickly, and before last Monday was over, we were hearing news of the dreadful air crash on the suburbs of New York. Literally dreadful, because at this stage no-one knew whether it might not have been yet another terrorist suicide attack. "I know they are all around us" a New Yorker living in London told me on the phone later last week. As events in this new Afghan War moved ever more rapidly forward, no-one, whatever their views on the American bombing or the West's new allies, could be sure what the consequences might be. Would the 'war on terrorism' achieve its goals and make the world a safer and a more sharing place? Or despite all the humanitarian aid and famine relief, was the military action creating more martyrs and a wilder whirlwind for the world to reap?
In the midst of all these world events, when thousands of people had died or were even now dying, when there were so many to mourn, what room can there be left in human hearts to mourn the death of a dog? On Remembrance Sunday, the day before Tess died, we remembered the innumerable young men of a century ago, of whom Wilfred Owen asked, 'What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?' Last Christmas, in the snow, Tess was by my side as the Cumbrian cattle rushed over inquisitively to survey us on our walk. They too, soon after, were to die, in the interests of eradicating foot and mouth disease. When there are so many to mourn, of what account, if any, is one?
The sheer numbers who have died, who even now are suffering and dying, are just too many for our limited human minds to take in. In an age of instant communication, we see the mutilated body of a Taliban soldier on our television screens, long before his comrades, who have fled, or his family, if they have survived, can return to recognise him and give him a decent burial. And that makes all the difference. We see, but cannot recognise him as those who knew him in life would do. In our eyes, he is not himself, but one of many; and although seeing him as one of many may rouse us pity or to indignation, and so to charitable giving or political action, it does not get to the heart of what we are seeing. At best, the images we see from Afghanistan, or New York, may make us add our individual charitable or political contribution to trying to make the world a safer and more sharing place. But at worst, all these terrible images may simply overwhelm us and numb us, and the more we see, the less we may recognise, and the less we recognise, the less we may care.
That is why, when there are so many to mourn, it is right also to mourn the one, even when the one is a dog. The difference between the two dead bodies I saw last week, Tess on the rug, the Taliban soldier on a newspaper page, is not in any relative worth we can assess objectively. The two are incommensurable. The Taliban soldier, whatever he may have done, was once 'a child/ Beside his mother's knee'; and if we could see him with her eyes, I believe, we would be irresistibly moved to pray for his soul to take 'his long journey backward/ From darkness into light'. We would be irresistibly moved, because we would not just see, but recognise him.
There is a very real difference between seeing and recognising - or more precisely, between seeing an image or even an actual body, and recognising a person. Because, with the vet, we took the final decision when we did, Tess was spared from her disease spreading to her brain. So, up to the very last time she raised her head from her forepaws and turned it towards us, it was with a look of recognition. The difference between merely seeing and recognising a person, or a dog, is that we recognise them, because they recognise us. Recognition, by living creatures, is mutual. The Taliban soldier was once a child, not just beside his mother's knee, but looking out through his eyes and beginning to recognise her, as she, through her eyes, recognised him. The loss of a dog, I know, is not the same as the loss of a person: the two, again, are incommensurable. But when we lose a dog to death, what essentially we are losing, and what makes our loss not just sentimental or selfish, is the loss of what looked out through her eyes, and through her eyes recognised us, as we recognised her.
What was it that looked out through her eyes, and where, if anywhere, has that gone? A day or two after Tess died, late at night on the BBC World Service, I heard a discussion between scientists who had studied what are called 'near-death experiences' - the experiences, of another life awaiting, reported by many people who have been unconscious and on the brink of dying, but brought back from it at the last moment. One of the scientists who had studied these experiences was convinced that they could be fully explained in terms of the chemistry of the brain. These experiences could not yet be fully explained, partly because it seemed that some of them must take place at a time when no brain activity could be recorded. But eventually, this scientist said, scientists would be able to understand this, and there was no reason to suppose that these experiences involved any kind of spiritual reality external to what was going on in the brains of the people having them. But another scientist demurred. The first scientist's conviction that such experiences were 'all in the mind' of the people having them, was not a scientific conviction, he said, but a personal one. We simply do not know, and perhaps never can know scientifically, whether what such people experience is experienced with and only within the brain, or through the brain - whether the brain produces these phenomena, or whether the brain is merely the means by which we become aware of them.
What looked out through Tess's eyes and recognised us, may have been simply the product of her brain, and with the death of her brain, what looked out may now be dead and gone for ever. But if we accept that, we must do so, as the scientist said, not as a fact but as a matter of faith. It may seem odd nowadays to describe the idea that all ends at death as a matter of faith. But it is certainly not a fact. The facts are that humans and animals die, but also that throughout history, until today, the majority of humans have believed in a spiritual reality surviving or transcending death. One argument against that belief, of course, is that it is a necessary fiction, or noble lie, with which people console themselves until they have the courage to see things as they really are. But there is something more than a little suspect about the confident claim that we, unlike people in the past, can now 'see things as they really are'. Knowing, through science and technology, how to solve many more problems than in the past, does not mean that we have turned the ultimate mystery into a set of solvable problems; and assuming that we have, may be a sign less of courageous realism, than of burying our heads in the sands of time. It may be a sign that man, as Blake put it, 'has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern'.
But is the alternative to claim that Tess, and the Taliban soldier, and all the millions who have died, now belong to the new heavens and a new earth, spoken of by Isaiah in our first lesson this morning, where the wolf and the lamb will lie down together, and none shall hurt or destroy on all God's holy mountain? Unless Isaiah's prophesy is about some future time before the sun cools - a future which certainly hasn't arrived yet and historically seems highly improbable - what it appears to imply is some radically different mode of existence to life as we know it. Is such an alternative credible? Even in the modern secular world, many people, more often in private than in public perhaps, and more often in the actual presence of death than when it seems a remote possibility, appear to believe something like this. There was, for example, the note that Lisa, who cleans for us, left in reply to ours telling her of Tess's death: "I will miss her too," she wrote, "I always get the impression that all loved ones, including pets, are watching over us and with us when we need them, after they have passed." She is far from alone in having that impression.
Is it a rational impression? If Tess, then do not also the Cumbrian cattle, and sheep too (for sheep, scientists have told us recently, also recognise one another) belong to a vast spiritual reality silently surrounding us? Where, to put it at its most banal, could there be room for them all? But perhaps that kind of question, like the remarks people sometimes make about heavenly perfection becoming boring, tells us more about the limits of our imagination, than the limits of eternity. We ask such questions perhaps, because we are seeing all things through the 'narrow chinks' of the cavern in which we have closed ourselves up. But might it not be, as Blake also put it, that 'If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite'?
About the infinite and eternal, clearly, there is no place for dogmatism, or, as St Paul said long ago, for speculation. There is only the choice - between regarding the most marvellous thing about us - that we are able to recognise one another - as 'like the snow falls in the river - /a moment white - then melts for ever', or as 'that which drew from out the boundless deep' and 'Turns again home'.
'The more we understand individual things', the philosopher Spinoza said, 'the more we understand God'. Perhaps that is why, in the end, it is right to 'give your heart to a dog to tear'. For is not that what Christian faith teaches us that God has done for us? We know this, not as a fact, but as an experience - an experience we share here in bread and wine - an experience creating hope of yet understanding even as we are understood. In our deeply troubled times - when we hear, as this morning's gospel puts it, of wars and tumults, earthquakes, famines, pestilences and terrors from heaven - that experience and that hope strengthen our determination to heed Jesus' words, when he tells us not to be terrified, but to endure, and so gain our real lives, in time and in eternity.