Liturgy

ISSN: 0458-063X (Print) 1557-3001 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ultg20

Learning Together to Let Death Come

Melinda A. Quivik

To cite this article: Melinda A. Quivik (2018) Learning Together to Let Death Come, Liturgy, 33:1,
56-62, DOI: 10.1080/0458063X.2017.1375817

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0458063X.2017.1375817

Published online: 22 Nov 2017.

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LEARNING TOGETHER TO LET DEATH

COME
Melinda A. Quivik

Saint Benedict’s famous Rule, which has guided communities of faith for
over 1,500 years, advises the faithful to “keep death daily before one’s eyes.”1
Remembering that our lives will end creates a realistic context for the choices
we make regarding how we spend our time and respond to change, what
we do with “ourselves, our time, and our possessions,” signs of God’s
gracious gifts named in a customary offering prayer.2 In the face of death,
priorities get rearranged. Sometimes keeping death before our eyes gives
us the courage to do the hard thing. Sometimes that hard thing may be to
let a habit, a desire, a restraint, a self-concept, even a relationship end in
order to embrace another path. This can mean letting a habit, a desire, a
restraint, a self-concept, even a relationship, die.
Because this change can be difficult, the church invites us into practices
that help us to remember, to contemplate, and in fact, to sit with death. Once
each year, for instance, on Ash Wednesday, we remember we are dust
and will return to dust. Ashes rubbed onto our foreheads thrust us into
appropriate humility by confronting us with our fundamental substance:
dust, soil, humus. This realization is surely why a pastor administering ashes
sees such ponderous expressions on people’s faces on that day. We line up for
the ashes in order to be confronted by what is coming. We do it individually,
singly, receiving the ashes alone, and yet we come to receive them in the
company of our sisters and brothers in Christ.
At other times, as well, we face death. Throughout the year, Christians
are called to visit those who are sick or dying. This ministry, this practice,
often means looking death in the eye and growing spiritually because of it.
Recently, while editing material for a book on funerals, one contribution
drew my attention to the far-ranging consequences of ministry with the
dying.3 Pastor Paul Palumbo of Lake Chelan Lutheran Church in Chelan,
Washington, described the congregation’s experience visiting with, convers-
ing with, and eventually simply sitting with church members who were
dying. When congregation members realized that a number of people in their
church, nearing the end of life, were in hospice or nursing homes and in vary-
ing stages of dementia, they began an intentional ministry of accompanying
the dying. Some people they visited had the ability to converse and pray;
others had passed beyond the civility of normal chatting. None of them,

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Liturgy, 33 (1): 56–62, 2018 Copyright # The Liturgical Conference ISSN: 0458-063X
DOI: 10.1080/0458063X.2017.1375817
the congregation believed, should be ignored by the church with its great
treasures of reassurance. But it was not always easy.
To facilitate its ministry with dying people, the congregation published
Peace at the Last, a slim book of psalms, prayers, songs, and elegant
watercolors by congregation member Wendy Schramm.4 Visitation ministers
take the book with them when they call on elderly church members because it
gives them words and images to share, especially when calling on someone
who may not have the capacity to speak. Attentiveness to those who are
dying taught those engaged in this visitation ministry––and the
congregation as a whole––that it is possible to accompany each other through
the final days. The practice also taught them truths about living that freed
them from the fear of dying and from the need to survive.

Lessons from Sitting with Death

Pastor Palumbo’s writing about this visitation ministry included a
provocative sentence that hinted at how facing death had opened the
congregation to broader understandings of its own mission. No longer did
it seem important to cling to the past or even to the present. Rather, they
saw that God was calling them to notice the future being shaped by God’s
guiding hand toward renewal and peace. Learning to sit with the dying
not only helped individuals embrace God’s mercy and hope; the experience
of greater familiarity with and acceptance of death began to change the
way the congregation, as a whole, conceived of its very existence.
The congregation had learned that aging––and therefore dying––
congregations (of which there are many in most of our denominations) too
often searched for ways to appeal to newcomers “as if new life in Jesus
was not enough.” Instead of noticing what we have, too many churches
clamor for something else, struggling to return to an earlier time when the
Sunday School was bustling, there were five choirs, and the parking lot
was full. It is easy to forget that, in losing members, we do not lose what is
of greatest value: “new life in Jesus.”
Fear of dying can have enormous repercussions for worship. In the
name of “evangelism”—with its subtext of focus on bringing in new
members—churches have been encouraged to change liturgical patterns, prin-
ciples, heritage, habits, and even theological convictions. Liturgical scholars
have long cautioned that when we make even small changes to our worship
in the interests of a goal like survival, we may lose our true mooring. What
has happened to alter our worship when we are afraid of dying?
• In recent decades, many of our churches have spent tens of thousands
of dollars on projectors, assuming that visuals will tell the story of the
triune God because people have morphed into a new form of learning
and attentiveness––the idea that we are more “visual” than we were
before Internet technologies changed our communications.
• Projecting on the wall the order of worship and the language of the
songs has removed the need for hymnals. Yet, without a permanent
book of worship, the worship pattern is not visible for the assembly

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 week after week. The projected pattern can be changed by the worship
leaders without input from the assembly. The common ownership of
worship is disrupted.
• Some churches have stopped including the Confession of Sin because,
as I heard someone explain it once, “Sin is such a downer.” When that
happens, the people do not hear the words of forgiveness and the
impression given is that there is nothing to forgive. For those who are
honest about their own failings, this is a hard omission.
• Hoping to attract people to a church that offers familiar spaces (coffee
shops, theater seating, and snazzy bands), congregations sometimes
decide not to include the words of the ancient creeds in worship,
hoping to avoid seeming dogmatic. (Some traditions, of course, have
long avoided the creeds, writing faith statements anew, even annually,
based on a conviction that Christian faith is always in need of revision.
Such a practice is an entirely different matter and does not jeopardize
embrace of a theological heritage.)
• In the rush to sing peppy songs of praise, churches may have neglected
to voice the lament that inevitably comes into our lives. We ignore the
truth—sorrow along with joy—at the cost of mental and spiritual health.
Where growth is the goal without regard for honest depictions of the range of
human experience and for practices that have been handed down through the
ages, we might ask about the source(s) for its Christian identity.
An apocryphal urban legend has it that a church that grew swiftly on
the strength of a worship pattern that emphasized the triumph of the
resurrection––joyful music, scripture reading and sermon, a call to faith or
more singing––learned a hard lesson. Knowing only songs of praise for God’s
goodness, the congregation was not prepared to sing anything else when one
of the children in the church died. At the funeral, there were no songs that
spoke of sorrow, begged for peace, or asked God, as do so many psalms,
“Why?” or cried, “Help!” In the end, the people could not abide the church’s
shallow spirituality. Not able to experience the range of human emotion, the
truth about life itself was lost. As the story goes, the people left. The church
died. We might say that death resulted from having smoothed out the
tensions and the paradoxes, the conflicting images and understandings
offered by our faith to such an extent that it achieved what Marva Dawn
has called the “dumbing down” of Christian theological convictions and left
the congregation without a cornerstone.5
Just as with individuals, when institutions focus chiefly on survival, the
costs can be too great. If we live with a secularly acceptable faith that eschews
painful truths, what are we living for? Can we have what Jesus called “abun-
dant life”? What does such a theological worldview do with the crucifixions
that occur in daily life for countless people all over the world?

Practicing Patience, Gaining Wisdom

Instead of blindly angling to fill the church so that it might once again
have bustling sanctuaries, if we let go of a past ideal, we learn that we can

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rest in the current reality where Jesus is present, where the Holy Spirit is at
work, and where God the Creator has given us the power to have abundant
life. Rather than being afraid of dying as a congregation, we are invited to
notice how alive we are in God’s realm. We can then see how institutions
of the church might, even in dying, come to new life. Instead of fixating on
survival out of a fear of death, we might look to where new life is close at
hand and nurture that gift in ourselves and in our churches. This is a way
to learn, from dying, what it means to trust in resurrection.
Watching for the Holy Spirit’s work in our midst may cause a
congregation to carefully, prayerfully, and sensibly assess its options and
let its current status show it a new path. According to the visitation
experiences of Lake Chelan Lutheran Church members, ministry with the
dying teaches patience and an acceptance of death that becomes invaluable
throughout the members’ lives. It teaches the graciousness of last breaths
and the calm that comes with endings. It teaches the possibility of lament
in the context also of thanksgiving. In other words, death is not experienced
as a reality that carries only one emotion, just as faith is not a simplistic turn
toward joy alone.
Giving up the notion that “visiting” must involve lively and friendly
chatter frees people to just sit with the dying. Our culture does not readily
teach us that just being with another person has value, but for those who
know the wide range of capabilities of dying people, a major option is just
to be present. Seminary students learn in pastoral care classes about the role
of the pastor as a nonanxious presence in a congregation and about the power
of just showing up. This learning is not, however, reinforced in the society or
even in the church. Yet, the teachings of sheer presence reverberate far
beyond a visit between one individual and another.
Simply listening to the voice of the Holy Spirit in the life of the silent (or
agitated) elder who is nearing the end of life teaches the deep truth of
Christian witness to Jesus’ resurrection. We have no need to fear death. We
neither need to love death or accept it without a struggle for life, nor do
everything possible in order to avoid it. Pastor Palumbo says it in this way:

What if … we understood our faithful accompaniment of the dying as a sign

of self-giving love? If, all along, the congregation has been giving itself away
by walking with dying people in its midst, then the death of the congregation
would be just one more reflection of that self-giving. Can we let go of the
seduction of “growth” and illusion of “success” and cling to the promise that
if we lose our life, we will save it? For individual and congregations, this is
the mark of a faithful life.6

This echoes Matthew’s Gospel with Jesus’ words to his disciples, “For
those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life
for my sake will find it” (16:25, NRSV). A mark of faith is to live by dying,
letting go of clinging in order to open for embrace. Nobody wants to die
alone—neither an individual nor a congregation. When we gather together
as a community to confess our sin on Ash Wednesday and to receive the
ashes, we also then receive the meal of Jesus’ body and blood, food for the
journey toward our own deaths. As the body of Christ, we are fed by both

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word and sacrament to face this death together. And if we are wise, we will
do so in a way that maintains the treasures of the ancient witness. We live,
then, in hope while we see what God has yet to reveal in us.

Assessing Our Preparation for Death

A congregation that wants to grow into the practice of sitting with those
who are dying and to learn from that experience is ripe for assessing its
capacity to move into that direction. If our responses to what is difficult lead
us to truncate or avoid the truth about life and death, we might consider
some remedies. Here are some questions to ask of your congregation.
What is the balance of lament and praise in your worship? Is lament a
part of worship at all? The Psalms are some of the best sources for prayers
of longing and sorrow. In churches that have taken to heart the urgings of
the Second Vatican Council’s liturgical reforms, a psalm is often sung as a
prayerful response to the first scripture reading. The psalm becomes the con-
gregation’s song of thanksgiving, praise, and pleading in relation to what it
has just heard from the Old Testament or, in the Revised Common Lection-
ary, from other New Testament books, especially Acts, during the Easter
season.
What is the imagery for death in the hymns most common to your
congregation? A look at death imagery in popular ecumenical hymns finds
that death is often either not named or is referred to as a vague comfort.
Some, although few, hymns name death overtly. The African American spiri-
tual, “Give Me Jesus,” for instance, sings of praying for Jesus’ presence at all
times of day, so that even “when I come to die … give me Jesus.” A holy com-
munion hymn, “Around You, O Lord Jesus,” celebrates the gifts of bread and
wine, promising that “until our final breath we will be true and never—in joy,
in grief, in death—depart from you.” The Spanish hymn “Pues si vivimos”
(“In All Our Living”) claims that both in our living and in our dying, “we
belong to God.” In “My Faith Looks Up to Thee,” death is a “cold, sullen
stream [that] shall o’er me roll.” A Latvian folk tune in a minor key gives
Susan Briehl’s “Once We Sang and Danced” a sense of the despair among
exiles who “sit among the ashes, all our dreams destroyed by death.” A hymn
by Martin Luther, “Out of the Depths I Cry to You,” begs God to “save us
from the grip of death.” “Go to Dark Gethsemane” says outright: “learn from
Jesus Christ to die.” A powerful hymn for Advent, “Soon and Very Soon”
(sounding much like a vibrant African American spiritual), asserts that there
will be “no more dyin’ there, we are goin’ to see the King.” In “All Praise to
Thee, My God, This Night,” sung to the Tallis Canon, we find perhaps the
clearest prayer regarding our relationship to death: “Teach me to live, that
I may dread the grave as little as my bed. Teach me to die, that so I may rise
glorious at the awesome day.” These are just a glimpse of how we might sing
about dying as we learn to accept it, knowing we are in God’s care.
In a similar vein, some hymns deal with losses of all kinds. “O God,
Why Are You Silent” by Marty Haugen, was written, in his words, “to
create a lament text that might reflect the deep sense of despair and loss that

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we feel in the face of personal, family, community, national or world crisis
or loss.”7 Haugen chose Bach’s Passion Chorale as the tune for its familiarity
and usefulness in assemblies containing people from different traditions.
Some of the newer hymnals include a section offering hymns of lament. If
such a collection does not exist for your congregation, it may be helpful
to take note of the songs you do appoint and what they have to say, if
anything, about death.
What is the primary focus of the sermon? Is the main speech a eulogy
focused on the life and person of the deceased or is it a sermon that preaches
the gospel of hope and peace? Who is the main character in the sermon?
How are funerals conducted? Is it a full worship service that includes
scripture readings, prayers for all the world, a commendation that gives to
God the one who has died, and perhaps even Holy Communion? Does the
funeral make use of the image of the Communion of Saints? Is a community
meal eaten afterwards?
To what extent is baptism expressed as dying and rising on Sundays and
at funerals? A study done some years ago by a liturgy professor asked
congregation members who had just witnessed a baptism what they under-
stood baptism to mean. Given the differing ways baptism is done, people
articulated a variety of understandings about it. If the baptized person
was sprinkled with water on the head, people tended to talk about faith
as ideas. If the baptized person was taken under the water in a pool, people
saw baptism as being drowned and coming back to life. Not every church
can create a font that allows for the imagery of death and rebirth, but a
congregation might sometimes hold baptisms in a local lake or river or a
swimming pool to make it possible to be taken under the water and come
up again. Death is central to Jesus’ resurrection and to ours.
Do congregation members participate in visitation with the dying? Is
there training for that visitation? In very small congregations, such a ministry
may not involve many people, but they might be encouraged to look at Peace
at the Last and gather together for prayer and discussion to help each other
learn from one another.
Does the congregation have a strong enough center to welcome change
with its inevitable losses? I once heard a pastor serving as an interim in a
dwindling congregation explain in a sermon that his calling to that church
at that moment was to preach the gospel so clearly that when it came time
for the congregation to decide whether to close its doors or expand its pro-
grams, the community would have the strength to do what was needed.
Either way: die or rise. Neither of those choices is easy. Neither growing
nor dying can be gracious without the power of the Holy Spirit to lead the
way.

Conclusion
Recently a new kind of gathering has come into being that gives
strangers and friends a place and time to talk about death. They are called
Death Cafes. These spontaneous gatherings of people in coffee shops
demonstrate that people want to share their fears and questions. Such

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conversations also acknowledge what is often hushed-up: we cannot ignore
death. And we cannot close down its effects. Ernest Becker’s 1973 Pulitzer
Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death showed that even when it is
denied, death is central to everything human beings do and say and
believe.8
Let the church become a place where death is not a stranger, where
questions are welcomed, where fear is assuaged, where familiarity with the
experiences of those who are dying can engender courage in the rest of us.
The point of this ministry is to comfort those who are dying and to give peace
and hope to relationships, families, and institutions that face an ending.
We need to cling to what is true, not to what is expedient. Since there is
no expedient way to avoid dying, coming to know it and welcome what
comes when, as the Quaker’s say, “Way closes,” can be a new avenue to find-
ing where and how “Way opens.” In the end and every day, as Evening
Prayer names it, we are “called … to ventures of which we cannot see the
ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown.” And we ask
God: “Give us faith to go out with good courage, not knowing where we
go, but only that your hand is leading us and your love supporting us.”9

Melinda A. Quivik is editor-in-chief of Liturgy and most recently

edited and contributed to In Sure and Certain Hope: A Funeral
Sourcebook (Augsburg Fortress, 2017).

Notes
1. St. Benedict, Rule of Benedict, Rule #4, point #47.
2. ELCA, Evangelical Lutheran Worship (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2006), 107.
3. Melinda A. Quivik, ed., In Sure and Certain Hope: A Funeral Sourcebook (Minneapolis, MN:
Augsburg Fortress, 2017).
4. Lake Chelan Lutheran Church Visitation Group, Peace at the Last: Visitation with the Dying
(Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 2016).
5. Marva J. Dawn, Reaching Out without Dumbing Down (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995).
6. Paul Palumbo, “Visitation with the Dying,” in Quivik, In Sure and Certain Hope (see n. 3).
7. Paul Westermeyer, Hymnal Companion to Evangelical Lutheran Worship (Minneapolis, MN:
Augsburg Fortress, 2010), 558, ELW #703.
8. Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York, NY: Free Press, 1973).
9. “Evening Prayer,” ELCA, Evangelical Lutheran Worship, 304 (see n. 2).

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