Sermon: A Queasy Subject

The commemoration of the transfer of the relics of St Cuthbert into the place we call the feretory, the shrine at the heart of this building which is itself a shrine, is not perhaps the most promising basis for preaching a sermon in the year 2009. At least that was my first thought. Then it occurred to me. Here is the basis of some reflections on two things that human beings find really compelling and curious.  Those things are dead bodies and power.

I enjoy meeting strangers when travelling or on holiday. However, since I have been ordained I have come to dread the bit when the conversation comes round to ‘what you do for a living?'. It's not that I am ashamed of my calling, but I know that the conversation is going to go in one of four directions - either I get to hear about someone else's religious convictions and experiences in full detail, or I to hear why they are an atheist or have lost their faith, or I become their confessor and counsellor for as long as the conversation goes on or the journey lasts, or I get ignored from them on. However, one thing that always cheers me up in such circumstances is that it would be much worse if I were a funeral director or if I worked at a crematorium or as an embalmer.  

Be that as it may, Durham is going to be full of people  interested in all matters to do with death this coming week as the University is hosting the ninth ‘Death, Dying and Disposal' conference. Over 200 people from the humanities and social sciences will be focussing on questions about emotion and identity in death, dying and disposal.  Personally I anticipate it being a fascinating week. The conference is coming to the cathedral for a lecture on the undecayed body of St Cuthbert from 687 - 1827 and I am myself giving a paper about the Church of England and Funerals Today.  (I won't say much about it now except to say that I will begin from my observation, that clergy enjoy funerals more than baptism and they find the highest levels of appreciation not from their congregations but from bereaved families.) 

A few of months ago I persuaded the conference organiser, Professor Douglas Davies, to lead a study day on related themes for the clergy of the diocese. One of the things that came out of that day was that while the clergy were really very interested in  what you might call the ‘emotion and identity' agenda, there was some concern about the word ‘disposal' in the title of the conference.  The clergy do not like the idea of disposal very much at all, but neither, I suspect, do the laity.

However, if you have a dead body on your hands you have to do something with it. There are different ways of going about it but ultimately the question about disposal is not ‘if', or even ‘when', but ‘how' or ‘where'.  You might not like this question but I hope that you can accept that in essence Durham Cathedral is the answer to one specific case of ‘disposal'. ‘What are we to do with Cuthbert's dead body?' thought his Lindisfarne monks.  Basically they did not know how to make a decision about that and so they wandered around with it for years.  When at last they got it to the peninsular they carried on burying it and then digging it up to bury it in a better place until it finally came to rest in its current place in 1104.

What are we to do with dead bodies?  Different cultures have different answers for this question. Cremation is now the most popular disposal option in Britain but it is not an option for Muslims or Orthodox Christians, and Catholics have only fairly recently relaxed about it and some still see it as second best.  Next door to a crematorium at which I used to be a regular visitor, a mausoleum has recently been built and over the years it will be filled with the bodies of people whose cultural identity is Mediterranean.  I remember seeing it being built and wondering what it was going to be, and then discovering, and then having a slightly negative, uncomfortable emotional response. Basically, I felt a bit queasy about it.  And I expect that people in that town felt queasy when the churchyard at the parish church was closed and the municipal cemetery was opened in 1837, and then, well over a hundred years after that, when a crematorium was built on the site of the municipal cemetery many people would have felt uncomfortable about that too. 

Among the questions that this raises are quite deep ones about what we think a corpse is.  Is it just so much ‘stuff' to be disposed of, or does it remain in some sense the locus, the place, the habitation of a person?  And then there is the question of ownership. To whom does a dead body belong? Presumably not the original owner but equally you could never say that a body is ‘second hand', though there are bits and pieces of us which are of great value if transplanted into another body.  But does anyone actually own them? And should money ever change hands for them? There are also real questions o f identity which were brought into the clearest possible focus when someone was given a face transplant.  (This first too place in France in 2005)What on earth is it like to see yourself in the mirror after a face transplant?  It is not that you would look like the donor but neither would you look like yourself.

I hope that I have convinced you that the question of the meaning and identity of a dead body is a complex one and that it necessarily engages the emotions. Those queasy feelings we get when we think about this are all part of the meaning and the process.  It is, I want to suggest, impossible to deal with this subject entirely rationally. Our emotional responses matter too. Personally I am very comfortable about this because for me emotion is not the opposite of thinking but a particular form of thinking which takes place not in the convoluted corridors of the cerebral cortex but over the whole body, Thus when you feel something you are simultaneously experiencing a reaction and beginning to respond to both the cause of that reaction and to the reaction itself. Thus, as we get older, so we feel different emotions. This is both because we have had more experience and because our bodies are different and react differently. 

The question of bodies, dead or alive, is always going to be an emotional one. Your body is not going to let the mind get things all its own way when the body is itself the focus of attention. So if you imagine being in a car accident you will experience both fear and a kind of sympathetic hurt. We groan as if in pain when we see others attacked or injured.

All this is both complicated yet ordinary stuff, and provides a necessary background to any reflection about what it means to be in a cathedral whose purpose is to provide a resting place for one particular man's body.  The modern, secular, rationalist response to this would be that it is nonsense. Fine to have a museum to keep Cuthbert's memory alive, but there is nothing more significant about his bones than anyone else's. The medieval response would have been different again.  At this time the bones were important because they themselves had power. The saintly capacity of Cuthbert remained in his physical bits and pieces after the end of his mortal life and the whole tale of his undecayed body became part of this myth that the holy man was in death just as holy if not holier. But rather than moving on to the nearer presence of God, that body remained present in time and space though but not subject to time. 

The metaphysical problems caused by not being subject to time but yet being subject to the constraints of space might muddle us up, but they have never been a problem for the custodians and beneficiaries of Cuthbert's relics. The pilgrims had to go somewhere - so why not here?  That is one way in which power comes in, and it behoves the custodians of powerful things and places in any age to reflect carefully on the way they benefit from and use that power.  The body of Cuthbert might not corrupt but the power associated with owing it certainly has the power to do so - all power corrupts.  The custodians of the Cathedral, whether they be monks or canons, owe it to themselves and to Cuthbert to remain vigilant in this area. The fine line between the power of holiness and the power that holiness confers is a crucial one to patrol.

The power of Cuthbert's relics remains a live subject, even if it touches the medieval imagination more than a modern one. But both mindsets, the very sacred and the very secular, have their weaknesses. Their resolution will only come, I suspect, if we find ways in our own time both for opening up uncomfortable conversations about things we would prefer not to talk about- like dead bodies and institutional power - but at the same time learn how to communicate and relate in such a way that we listen to the wisdom of bodies, both live and dead bodies, which is communicated to us through the experiences we call feelings.

Our relationship to the bodies of the deceased is a profoundly complex, human and religious one.  If Cuthbert's relics do indeed have any power to bless we should pray that some of that blessing is given to the participants in the Death, Dying and Disposal conference this week. For it is possible that aided by their work , we as a church, academy and culture might begin to move towards a new era of intellectual, emotional and spiritual wisdom, one in which we have a more integrated and mature understanding not only of Cuthbert's relics but of the mortal remains of each and every human being.  

I don't like to end a sermon with a question but today I am going to make an exception.  If disposal is not the right word, and it does not seem to be, then what is?