There’s fear or fascination as cultures confront death

If Western society discussed death more openly, would Halloween’s appeal hold such sway?

Rahil Patel

Rahil is a former Hindu monk, and author of Found By Love. He is a Tutor and Speaker at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics.

A bronze statue of a resting angel sits atop a low stone grave.

A grave in a Dresden cemetery.

Veit Hammer on Unsplash.

Watching Christians jump and sing “death is defeated” was a strange experience.

As a new believer in Christianity from a Hindu background, I was struck by how Christians approached death. While I had seen reincarnation as a path to heaven, I couldn’t understand why the church either hesitated to talk about death or celebrated it so intensely. Why were Christians sometimes dancing and other times, silent about death?

During my early years in Christ if ever the topic of death arose from the fun times I was having with Christian friends it was almost always met with a dead silence - excuse the pun. On one occasion, the husband of a close friend in our small church community had passed away due to cancer. I was one of the first to make a call to his widowed wife. When my friends heard that I had done this the response was unusual, “well done Rahil!” “That’s so good Rahil.” Strange. I was sensitive over the phone, but it wasn’t that hard. Then I asked the others if they were going to make a call and the response was equally peculiar, “erm, I can’t” or “I just can’t do that... ” Puzzling.

Recently, I came across the GodPod podcast, which shed some light for me on this hesitation. In an interview with Dr Lydia Dugdale about her book The Lost Art of Dying, a surprising statistic caught my attention: “In the 18th century, one-third of church sermons were about death and eternity.” I had to play that line back multiple times. In contrast, today’s sermons often focus on personal purpose, calling, or spiritual gifts. All important, but are we missing a vital balance—one eye on eternity, the other on our present lives?

Why didn’t the British or ‘international’ media film the funerals taking place in Britain? Why hesitate with death at home and yet have a somewhat fascination with it in the East?

This avoidance of death became even more apparent during the Covid pandemic. When the Delta strain hit India in 2021 it caused a massive widespread devastation and death. The funeral pyres were filling the sacred river banks up and down the country. At one point there was no more wood left to burn the bodies. It had run out! Urban crematoriums were overrun and so people left their deceased loved ones to simply float down the nearest river in the hope that the next life would be easier.

I followed the detailed footage of the funeral pyres and bodies choking various holy rivers. It was meticulously covered by the western media. Even PM Boris Johnson at the time cancelled his trip to India because the Covid death crisis was “out of control.” It’s Interesting how the western media flippantly assumed that death could be controlled. And then an eminent academic in India wrote a remarkable article for Project Syndicate. Brahma Chellaney’s opening paragraph was,

“When reporting on any mass tragedy, a basic rule of journalism is to be sensitive to the victims and those who are grieving. Western media, which double as the international media, usually observe this rule at home but discard it when reporting on disasters in non-Western societies.”

The author’s accurate observation demanded my attention. Why didn’t the British or ‘international’ media film the funerals taking place in Britain? Why hesitate with death at home and yet have a somewhat fascination with it in the East? Although Chellaney uses the concept of ‘grieving’ for his argument, there really isn’t such a spiritual concept across Indic faiths as Christianity knows of it. Of course, there is sadness and loss but grieving in the deep spiritual sense, not really. Is that why the Western media found it easier to cover death in the East? Because the secular (although Christian) West knows of the concept of grief so well at home? Or is it because the West do actually want to confront death without hiding and when they see other cultures do it so openly (and a tad bit casually) they are drawn to it? As morbid as it sounds (and I’ll do the British thing and apologise here) there might actually be a healthy interest with the way certain cultures embrace death that the west is seeking to find an expression for.

Brahmar Mukherji chaired the Department of Biostatistics at Michigan University. In an interview with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 2021 she stated that India as a society sees death differently which is why the death toll along with so many other complex and practical issues was so high in that nation during Covid. They embrace it more easily. I am not promoting reckless behaviour around rules. One can’t play with a rattlesnake and then call it faith. My hope is that the reader finds hope when confronting death with a Christian lens. Why have themes of Euthanasia and Assisted Dying become such a big thing in the West and not in the East?

Which brings me to Halloween. It’s a leap, I know, but think about it: if Western societies and churches discussed death and eternity more openly, would Halloween’s macabre appeal hold such sway? Dressing up as a ghoul or a skeleton seems to be a playful, yet safe way to confront our fear of death—something we’re eager to do from behind a mask. That lighthearted, but jarring moment in the Barbie film comes to mind: “Do you guys ever think about dying?” Maybe that’s the real question we should be asking ourselves. Not just on Halloween, but frequently. How do we truly confront death—with fear, with fascination, or with the hope of something beyond?

Article

Climate

Comment

Politics

27 November 2024

7 min read

Neighbours, nimbys, and politician power plays

Is there a politics that takes both love of the land and climate concerns seriously?

Joel Pierce

Joel Pierce is the administrator of Christ's College, University of Aberdeen. He has recently published his first book.

A sign protesting a proposed wind farm stands on flat moorland.

A Scottish wind farm protest sign.

Richard Webb, Wikimedia Commons.

It was easy to forget the fury of the past few winters in the gentle light of the golden autumn which enveloped our corner of rural Aberdeenshire over the past month. The scars Storm Arwen tore through the landscape three years ago, toppling whole hillsides of trees, and the flood-soaked fields of last winter were hard to conjure when faced with the thousand colours that painted the landscape. The smoky green of pine forests in twilight, the shocking scarlet of apples my daughters picked from our neighbour’s tree, the little violet fireworks of elderberry clusters hanging above the path to our house, these chased away worries about the future and the past and demanding attention to the present. Amid this array, it was easy to see why Queen Victoria chose our corner of Scotland for her rural retreat over a century and a half ago. The changing of the season has something of the eternal, sacred, and inviolable in it. “Let the field be joyful and all that is therein; then shall all the trees of the wood rejoice,” sang the ancient Psalmist. Surely, if ever a land was obedient to this command, it was our valley’s, this October. Surely too, it is our duty to preserve it so that it can sing out for a thousand more such autumns?

This drive to preserve is evident in the signs that appear regularly on fences as you drive through our valley. “STOP MONSTER PYLONS” and “NO WINDFARM ON HILL OF FARE” they say in capital letters large enough to communicate their creators’ anger. Our valley, which connects the Highlands to the sea, is prime real estate for the sorts of development necessary to transform the UK economy, which still gets 77 per cent of its energy from burning fossil fuels, into one built on renewable energy. Our hills are ideal for turbines and our land must be crossed if transmission lines are to carry electricity from wind farms in the north to population centres like Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, and London. To many of my neighbours this sort of construction amounts to an industrialisation of the countryside, an irreversible scarring of pristine land in service of interests far away which care little for them. This view is common enough that almost all of the local village councils have expressed opposition to the developments. When my neighbours are characterised by senior government ministers as “the blockers, the delayers, the obstructionists”, I suspect it only hardens their resolve.

It is not hard to imagine Adam the gardener or Abel the shepherd attending to their land and animals with similar care to that of my neighbours.

Sometimes I wonder if what politicians have in mind when they think of my neighbours are the sorts of toffs featured in Rivals for whom the countryside is a playground of upper-class indulgence. I am not rich. Neither are most of my immediate neighbours, many of whom rely on waiting tables at the local farm shop or cleaning holiday lets to make ends meet. My understanding is that most of the local farmers consider themselves lucky if they turn any profit at all from their long and exhausting hours. Every year we wonder if there will be enough pupils to keep our local primary school open. Every winter we prepare for the inevitable interruptions caused by power cuts, school closures, and unplowed roads.

If I had to guess at what keeps my neighbours here it is the land itself, watching and admiring it, caring for it, aligning the rhythms of their life to it. Autumn can be wonderful, but so too is spring. I drive to work past newborn lambs trying out their stilt-like legs, anticipate the sudden return of house martins to their nests under our eves, and enjoy weekend walks up the hillsides amid the sun-yellow mazes of coconut-scented gorse bushes. Each season land presents itself to us, demands our attention, calls for our admiration.

In the two creation stories of Genesis, what it is to be human is to be made in the image of God and to be given the task of tilling and keeping the land, respectively. A way of reading these together is that humans are to be priests to creation, recognising and praising its beauty and caring for it in a way which reflects God’s love for it. In my last article for Seen & Unseen, I discussed philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s concept of practices and how the human activities he identifies as practices can order and give meaning to our lives and communities. Another way of thinking about these practices is that they are all, in some way, an expression of this original edenic imperative, to see, to respond to, and to care for God’s creation. If this is true of any practice, it is perhaps most transparent in rural ones. It is not hard to imagine Adam the gardener or Abel the shepherd attending to their land and animals with similar care to that of my neighbours.

The practices we engage in have a way of becoming enmeshed with our identity in such a manner that it can be hard to imagine ourselves without them. That is why, I believe, opposition to wind farms and pylons runs so deep here, and why, as geographer Patrick Devine-Wright has demonstrated, attempts to offset the financial downsides of developments through local grant programmes and other compensation do very little to swing public opinion in favour of development. As he demonstrates, at the root of such opposition is an affective attachment to the land, one that money cannot buy away and which resists even the most well-reasoned arguments which attempt to ignore it.

And yet, I know, my neighbours know, that all is not well with the land. Although we draw sizable crowds on Easter and Christmas, the most packed I’ve ever seen our parish church was when a locally born climate scientist came to present his research on Antarctica. He walked us through what it is like to live there, how scientists survive the winters, and what they eat, but all anyone was interested in the Q&A that followed is what can be done about climate change. It is hard to ignore it. It is there in the good and the bad: in the pleasant, nearly tropical breeze that ushered my children from house to house on Halloween; in a mild winter making ticks and Lyme’s disease a regular visitor; and in the onslaught of storms felling fifty year old forests in a single night and cutting road and railway connections to the rest of Britain for days on end. If we are to keep these changes from becoming more extreme, if we are going to bequeath to our grandchildren a countryside with the beauties admired by Queen Victoria and countless others, we need to slow this change. We need to move away from fossil fuels and to renewably generated electricity and given that, as I said above, 77 per cent of our energy is still made by burning carbon, we need to produce not just a little more electricity, but a lot. The answer to the oft repeated question, “Wouldn’t these be better, if they were built somewhere else?” is that, yes, they will need to be built somewhere else and here, and in many other places, if we are going to get anywhere close to a carbon-free future.

The land will be changed either way. Our choice is some scarring now, or a terminal decline later.

What might a politics look like that both took my neighbours’ attachment to the land and these realities seriously? What it shouldn’t be is one that castigates my neighbours for that attachment. That only feeds suspicions that what is really at play is an exploitation of the countryside to feed the excesses of the cities. Such exploitation runs deep in the folk memory of Scotland. The Clearances only lightly touched our valley, but a little travel here or there takes one by abandoned villages. Those who resisted then, clinging tightly to their land, also might have been called blockers, delayers, and obstructionists by modernising absentee landlords the sitting rooms of their Edinburgh townhouses, intent on replacing them with more profitable sheep.

However, the possibility exists for drawing my neighbours’ attachment to the land into the conversation about why these developments are needed. The land, the planet, is sick, and sometimes the scars of a necessary surgery are a price worth paying for survival. The alternative to roads rising up our hills to turbines and to transmission lines cutting through now fertile fields is a future of longer droughts, hotter heat waves, and more extreme storms, bringing with them infertile fields, forest fires, and landslides. The land will be changed either way. Our choice is some scarring now, or a terminal decline later.

But for such a rhetoric to work, politicians need to be serious about everyone bearing someone of the burden of climate solutions, both here in the UK and across the world. It can be tempting to give up hope in this regard. More than one article about our area has cited farmers complaining about how what we do won’t really matter anyway since China and India will burn away any positive effects of renewables here. But there are problems closer to home too. When UK governments and traders gush about the possibilities of new, power-hungry technologies like AI and cryptocurrency it can give any discussion of net-zero an air of unreality. Turbines and transmission lines can be part of caring for the land and can be shown to be in continuity with those other practices of care, but if other changes aren’t made, they will be as useful as a keyhole surgery on a patient who is bleeding out.