Die Before You Die

It's cold in the river, it's cold in the ground

This winter, I learned how to dig a grave.

Where I come from, death is an industrial process. It wasn’t always this way: England, bless it, has an ancient heart, but it beats under a long-mechanised carapace. The Machine we made has corralled our deaths as it has corralled our lives. Everything must fit the pattern.

When relatives of mine died back home, they were taken away by a paid undertaker we didn’t know, to be embalmed and then put on display in some small, cold room in the undertaker’s commercial premises, before being taken in a long black car to a newbuild crematorium on the outskirts of a suburban town. In this bland and passionless place, in a pre-booked thirty minute slot, there would be a short service with some recorded music and some brief eulogies, perhaps delivered by a priest we had never met and who had never known the ‘deceased’. Then the body was taken away to be burnt by an anonymous crematorium employee who we never saw. A few weeks later, we would receive an urn full of grey dust, which it was illegal to scatter in most places without a licence.

Here in rural Ireland, where I have lived for a decade, things are done differently. Ireland’s ancient heart has a modern carapace too, but it is much newer and, like most things in this country, has been inefficiently and unequally applied. Around these parts, the Machine still only has partial control. Some things - and especially death - are still done in the old way.

Early this year, an elderly neighbour of mine died, and it gave me my first really personal experience of the way death is handled here. We attended mass in his house; an intimate affair over and around his open coffin in his tiny front room, with family and neighbours packed tightly in. He spent that night in the house, with close family members sitting up beside him, and the next night in the church he had attended for years. The next day came the funeral, the burial and the gathering afterwards at the pub, for the exchange of memories and the discovery - through the arrival of people from all over the country and the world - of just how far a very local life can reach.

But before a man can be buried, he needs a grave to be buried in, and around here that job is not left to some anonymous cemetery employee or municipal official. The tradition is that the men of the neighbourhood go to the graveyard with their shovels for an afternoon and get the job done themselves. It was an honour for me to be asked: it felt like, after ten years of living here, I had finally become, in some small way, a part of the place. Now I was to help dig the grave of a man I had been told dozens of tales by over the years. I’m supposed to be the writer, but when I sat in the armchair next to him in his small front room, I was the one being regaled with stories. There was never any shortage of them.

Digging a grave, and then shovelling the hard clods back onto the coffin lid the next day, has a tendency to make a man stare his life, and the end of it, in the face. The first few inches were sticky clay, and then we got down to the rock. Huge lumps of limestone and granite. By the time we were at three feet we needed the pickaxe. There had been a hard frost the night before, but at least the winter storms had passed. The cemetery was out in the country; the only sound were rooks and passing horses. The occasional tractor, but rarely a car. The Shannon flowed quietly past the bottom of the field. There was a holy well in the graveyard, and we dug beneath the silent ruins of an early medieval Abbey. Beginning with the old monks, people had been buried here for over a thousand years.

It took us hours. We fortified ourselves with cider and jaffa cakes. Dragged away from my words, clay on my boots and my coat, I felt like I was, for once, doing something real. The body knows when it is doing real human work, and the body of a writer can usually hide from it easily enough. But there is no hiding from the grave, or the digging of it. Cracking clumsily into the rocks with the pick, shovelling out the clay, I perhaps should have been thinking about mortality or inevitability, and sometimes I was. Soon enough, I saw, I would be lying in a place like this, and then all of these silly, ephemeral words would be as forgotten as me. Mostly, though, I was thinking about how hard the bloody ground was, and how I wished I was stronger.

Still, here we were, getting it done. We kept going until we had the hole we needed, because there was no alternative. There is nothing more real, it turns out - nothing more timeless and simple and taxing and true - than digging a grave for a man you have known, and then helping, beneath a cold winter sun, to lower him down into it.

---

Abba Macarius the Egyptian, a fourth century Desert Father, was once approached by a young monk seeking advice about how to achieve salvation.

Go to a cemetery, said Macarius, and insult the dead.

Obedience is one of the foundation stones of the monastic life, so the young monk did what he was told without question. He spent the night in the nearest cemetery, abusing those who were buried there in the vilest language he could think of. He even threw stones at their graves. The next morning he reported back to Macarius.

Excellent, said Macarius. And did they say anything to you when you insulted them?

Well … no, replied the monk.

Good, said Macarius. Now go back to the cemetery again. This time, I want you to praise everybody who is buried there.

Back went the monk, for another night among the graves. He summoned up every flattering and complimentary word he could think of to refer to the interred corpses. He called them apostles, saints, heroes. When the morning came he reported back again to his elder.

Well done, said Macarius. And did they answer you, in return for all this praise?

Of course not, said the monk. They’re dead!

Yes, said Macarius. Now you must become a dead man too. Like the dead, you must take no account of either the scorn of men in this world, or their praise. Then you may be saved.

---

The world ought to be transparent to us, but it is not. The world must be transparent to God. Outside of time, where there is no time, the landscape of everything can be viewed by this Being (is he a Being?) who created it. Everything across the plains of time and space must stand out as if lit by sun.

Towards the end of his life, the Italian theologian Thomas Aquinas had a vision while serving the Mass. What Aquinas saw in his vision we cannot say, because he died without telling anyone what had happened to him. All we know is that he immediately gave up everything he was doing. After a lifetime’s theological inquiry, and a lifetime’s writing, he put down his pen and never picked it up again. He was in the middle of his great work, the Summa Theologiae, but he left it unfinished and just walked away.

I can write no more, he said. I have seen things that make my writings like straw.

All we see is straw. It is as if this life is lived in the centre of a haystack, and we are all longing for the sun that we know beats down on the stubble outside. But all we have here is dimness and dust.

---

Thomas Aquinas is often held responsible by Eastern Orthodox theologians for some of the key theological errors which led the Roman branch of the Church astray. Those errors in turn, they say, led to the internal Western schism known as the ‘Reformation’, whose ‘protestant’ rebels were themselves reacting against the impact of those errors. Catholic Christians naturally disagree. What we can say with certainty is that since Luther et al began their protest, the protest has never stopped. Protest, now, is what the West does. There has been so much protesting against the Church, in fact, that Christianity itself has died as the foundation of our moral order, and we are only now dimly becoming aware of what a catastrophe this is.

But while the Church has withered on the vine, the protests have continued in other parts of the garden. Secularism, modernity - really this is just one long protest. One long rebellion against creator and creation: against our history and culture; against our given nature; against anything at all which interferes with the pure and shining progress of our will. Post-Christian Western culture is all about protest; all about revolution. The cause barely matters. The protest is the point. What are you rebelling against, Johnny? Whaddya got?

Only now, here in 2024, there is nothing left for us to uproot, spit on or trample. You can’t be more punk than the punks, and the punks are starting to draw their pensions. Reduced to attacking ‘gender roles’ that have long been upturned, or fighting against an empire that ended half a century ago, or play-acting devil-worship on stage to a soundtrack of boring, computerised music, today’s wannabe radicals don’t realise how many times all of this has already been done. Oscar Wilde would have yawned into his absinthe at their lack of creativity. A culture of knee-jerk protest has run out of targets. In the age of sustainability, it is even having to recycle its own rebellion. There is nothing left to break.

Except one thing.

There is one final target: one thing that remains not-quite-broken. It is humanity itself. The body. The soul. ‘Nature’. And so this is the job of the remnant people of our culture of inversion: to finally break apart the essence of what it means to be human. And now that we have our digital web, our technosphere, our AI systems, our global silicon ouija board, we are on the brink of having all the tools we need.

We have long since taught our children that there is no God. Now we are teaching them that there is no humanity either. That their bodies can be changed at will into anything they like. Soon there will be no men and no women. Babies will be bred in artificial wombs. There will be no marriage and no family. Words like mother and father will be mocked or anathemitised. The algorithm will make sure of it. There will be nothing in the forest, nothing in the sea, nothing in the heart or in the spongy canals of the brain that cannot be remade into the new shape.

Everything is as straw now. Only it is not the Being beyond time and space who holds the winnowing fork, and it is not Death who holds the scythe. There is no Being, and soon there will be no Death. There is only us. Us and our machines.

‘The world’, observed St Barsanuphius of Gaza, who spent most of his life living in a cave in order to avoid it, ‘is such a monster, that if you turn around it will tear you to pieces.’

---

When a Christian-curious adult begins reading the Christian gospels properly for the first time, he may find himself surprised. In fact, this is pretty much guaranteed. The only question will be what it is that surprises him. This in turn will depend upon his preconceptions.

In my case, as someone whose picture of Jesus was painted for him in vaguely Anglican and evangelical school assemblies, I found it impossible to square the man I found in the New Testament with this ‘meek and mild’ ‘Prince of Peace’ I’d heard so much about. My impression, created by a clutch of well-meaning liberal R.E. teachers, was that this Jesus guy was a bit of a sap. Yet here he was making whips and thrashing market traders about with them. Here he was calling every religious leader he could find a hypocrite, when he wasn’t comparing them to rotting corpses. Here he was dismissing his own mother when she came to look for him. Here he was telling the rich that they were headed for eternal fire, and comparing his own loyal followers to the Devil himself.

There was one passage in particular which disturbed and confused me. We find it in the gospel of Luke, chapter fourteen, verse 26. Whoever comes to me, says Jesus, and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.

What was this about? How could it fit with the Old Testament demand to honour your mother and father? More to the point, weren’t we supposed to love everyone - all of our neighbours, and even our own enemies? Wasn’t that what Christianity was supposed to be about: loving everything all the time? So why were we supposed to hate our own family - and even our own life? A lot of Christians seemed to be trying to fudge this verse but it was very clear on the page. Hate was the word used. Hate your own parents. Hate your own life. Says God Himself.

What could it mean?

St Barsanuphius offers us a clue when he compares ‘the world’ to a ‘monster.’ We’ve all felt this often enough, but Barsanuphius was simply explaining the classical Christian teaching on the matter, derived in part from that passage in Luke. He was telling us the same thing that Christ told us when He told us to hate our own parents, or to let our own father go unburied and follow Him instead, or to give away all our riches. At the same time that we strive to love our neighbours and our enemies, we must strive to hate the world.

They never taught me that in school assembly.

What, though, is ‘the world’ that must be hated by the Christian? What does it mean? Should we hate everything? How? Why? What kind of religion teaches that, anyway? An almost-contemporary of St Barsanuphius, St Isaac the Syrian, explains it like this:

The world’ is the general name for all the passions. When we wish to call the passions by a common name, we call them the world. But when we wish to distinguish them by their special names, we call them passions. The passions are the following: love of riches, desire for possessions, bodily pleasure from which comes sexual passion, love of honour which gives rise to envy, lust for power, arrogance and pride of position, the craving to adorn oneself with luxurious clothes and vain ornaments, the itch for human glory which is a source of rancour and resentment, and physical fear. Where these passions cease to be active, there the world is dead.

So, there it was. These were our instructions, and they were the same ones that St Macarius was instilling into his novice by sending him on his trips to the cemetery. Spiritually, we must all descend into the grave. This is what a Buddhist would call detachment from what a Sikh would call Maya, because in all spiritual traditions it is understood that attachment to the things of this world is a trap that will keep you from the truth.

For a Christian, of course, the truth is Christ, and through Him, the creator of all things. ‘The world’ is what stands between us and that relationship. The world is not the same as the Earth. The Earth is the artwork of its creator: the glory of creation itself. The world is the human passions and their inevitable results, one of which is the ongoing destruction of that creation.

This, it turns out, is why Christianity has all those unfashionable teachings about refraining from lust, drink, gluttony, materialism and all the other things we never listened to our R.E teacher about. It is why Christianity, like those other spiritual traditions, teaches asceticism as a first principle. It is also why the world hates us in turn. This kind of thing, to the spirit of the age, is very threatening indeed. It seems to suggest - whisper it - that all the values our society has taught us from the cradle might in fact be entirely wrong.

See for which of these passions you are alive, instructs St Isaac. Then you will know how far you are alive to the world, and how far you are dead to it. St Barsanuphius explained the method in a bit more detail:

When the valve in the heart that is meant for perceiving worldly enjoyments is shut, then another valve opens, for perceiving spiritual enjoyments. But how do you attain this? Before all else, through peace and love for your neighbour. And then through patience. Who will be saved? He who endures to the end.

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If that Christian-curious adult, having worked all this through, decides to take the literal plunge and go and get himself baptised, he will soon understand two things. Firstly, that the world will never be the same again. Afterwards, you may look out through the same eyes in the same skull, but in some impossible-to-explain fashion, what you see from them will literally look different from the world you saw before your head went three times under the water. You will have been internally rearranged, at some cellular level, by a force you will never be able to understand. But you will know it has happened.

The second thing you will understand is that there is now no alternative to beginning that process of trying to die to the world. And you will start to see, with great discomfort, how hard it is going to be.

Becoming Christian changes you. Deciding to follow God changes you. Deciding that there is a God changes you. This last step is really the first, but here in the age of the Machine, in the void where meaning used to be, it is a radical and frightening conclusion. Because if there is a ‘God’, whatever that word even quite points to - if something, or someone, is out there, beyond time and space and yet somehow also woven into it - and if this something or someone issued forth all that is, in some great burst of love of creativity - and if there is a plan or a scheme to this existence - if there is a yes to all of this - then life has some purpose. There is some moral core to it. There is something you are supposed to do - and to be.

And if the Christians (and not just the Christians) are right and this God has some special task for human beings - if we are to be co-creators, or stewards - if we are made in the image of this God - if we are to be judged on what we do with this image - then this means that in some important way our life is not really our own. Our will is not really our own. And in this case, everything we have been taught - which, here in the meaning-void is essentially do what thou wilt - well, then all of it rolls into the grave and rots away.

And then we are in trouble.

I suppose we all need to live our lives. Who can behave like Barsanuphius or Francis or Antony or Porphyrios? Well, actually, all of us could, but we tell ourselves it is impossible, impractical. I have children. I have a job. I have a family. I have an ageing mother. That ascetic stuff is elitist or medieval or something. Anything. Anything to avoid the instructions.

Go barefoot. Lose everything. Love everyone. Give everything to God. Prepare to die.

The instructions, alas, are quite clear.

But maybe they aren’t. Maybe we can find some loophole. Maybe Christianity can be made palatable to the world after all. Maybe those instructions were fine then but not now. Maybe they were just for those specific apostles, back in Gallilee in the first century. Maybe they’re just for monks and nuns. Jesus liked children, after all, and children need families and families need homes and homes are mortgaged and mortgages need jobs. So Christianity needs to be practical. Accessible. Modern.

It’s not a great distance from here to Faith, Flag and Family. Not a great distance, either, to liberation theology. Not a great distance to feminist theology or eco-theology or Christian nationalism. Not a great distance to God, Guns, ‘n’ Trump. Not a great distance to the rainbow flag on the altar, or the holy war against the Nazis in the Ukraine. Not a great distance to ‘cultural Christianity’ or faith as civilisational war. Only a tiny sleight of hand is needed to bend this most unworldly of faiths into a shape that the world feels comfortable with again.

Phew. For a moment there, I thought I was going to have to lose everything.

---

This rebellion we are living through, this Machine that is its endpoint: surely it is the endpoint, too, of the pursuit of the passions. The Machine is what the world will make if the world is left to its own devices. And if we embrace the world, rather than dying to it, then the rise and triumph of the silicon gods will be our eternal and Biblical reward.

I think about this a lot: far too much to be healthy. I think that in response to the emergence of the Total System of Machine modernity, it is Macarius and Barsanuphius and Isaac and all the long wisdom of the Fathers we should be attending to, and it is their instructions we should follow. We have to die to the world. This is not a recipe for quietism or cowardice or ‘retreat from reality’. It is a recipe for strength, and for clarity. Who is stronger than a monk who lives on salt and bread in a desert cave? Not me. I am weak and selfish and full of excuses, and I am not going to live like that. Neither are most other people. But this is not the point.

Every Sunday, during an Orthodox liturgy, the priest will emerge from the sanctuary with his censer of incense and swing it at all the icons on the walls. He will cense Christ and Mary and all of the saints. Then he will swing it at all of us standing in the nave, because we too are icons of God. All created things are icons - images - of their creator. The purpose of a human life, we are taught by our tradition, is to struggle towards theosis: union with that creator. Not to break ourselves apart and put ourselves back together into the shape chosen by our broken, grasping, egoic wills. Instead, to align those wills with the will of that strange, unreachable Being and to become, in the process, the shape we were always supposed to be. To seek communion with God, and with all life.

We protesters, we Western rebels, we Machine people, we chose a path that sounds similar but which in fact leads to exactly the opposite place. We are not trying to unite ourselves with God. We are trying to replace Him. To uncover the icon of God that these efforts efforts have smothered, we surely have to die to what this world wants of us; to what the Machine wants of us. To die to what we desire, and to die to our age’s cultural project: the replacement of nature with technologies of our own design.

To wash away all of this, we have to go under the water and emerge again clean. Instead of scrabbling in the wreckage that our culture has left behind, trying to piece it back together again, we should flee from the approach of our silicon gods. We should leave now for the desert of our hearts. There, in the cave of them, we should learn how to die.

We will all be under the grass soon enough. Whether we like it or not - and mostly we don’t - we have been called upon to strip away the worldly excrescences from our lives, so that we might see creation shining again as it was supposed to be, and so that we might see, even if in some tiny, flickering glimpse, our own place within it.

Easy to write. Hard to even begin.

But we have to begin, don’t we? We have to.