This Sunday it is Hallowe’en and up and down the land little children will be dressing up in ghoulish disguises, knocking on doors and filling a bucket with copious amounts of sweets.  Meanwhile their vigilant parents hover in the background keeping a watchful eye. It is great fun and children love it. It is not something I did as a child. It seems to have been more of an American import whose popularity has grown over the last forty years in line with the retail opportunity it presents. However, we did have bonfire night on November 5th preceded by ‘mischief night’ on the 4th where we used to knock on doors and run away quickly before they were answered. There were naughtier children who were more serious about their mischief and whose behaviour bordered on the dangerous and even criminal.

Of course these festivals which mark the end of the autumn and the start of winter have their roots deep in our past and the Celtic festival of Samhain. The last day of October marked a pivotal time when people believed that the boundary between this world and the next became especially thin enabling contact with the dead. People would enact rituals, dress up in animal skins as disguise against spirits and make lights out of gourds. In time the pagan festivals were taken over by the Christian Church with All Saints day being held on 1st November and All Souls on the 2nd.  But what all these festivals have in common is the recognition of the mystery of death.

In some ways I think it is sad that our big traditional festivals have in the last century become sanitised and trivialised, largely being turned into entertainments for children and extended retail opportunities. Easter is now about chocolate and rabbits, Christmas about eating and presents, and Hallowe’en about plastic skeletons hanging from houses, artificial blood and children with plastic fangs!  

There is a natural cycle of birth and death which is celebrated in these ancient festivals yet we seem to have lost the richness of their depth. We have become so ‘rational’ and ‘material’ that we rarely engage in mystery.  Although I would never choose to return to my Anglo-Catholic roots what it did offer was that sense of mystery. The chanting and the incense lifted you out of the material into  a sacred space.  We now tend to see a mystery as a problem to be solved rather than an experience to be explored.  And perhaps the mystery we struggle with most is death.  We all know we will die and yet find it hard to accept the idea of our own, personal non-existence.  Death often happens in hospitals after attempts to prolong life for as long as possible. It is seen as the final failure, the thing which happens when all attempts to keep life going come to nothing.  We want to brush it away, not really look at it, let somebody else deal with it. 

But sometimes death is a great friend and the deathbed can be an amazing place. People who work with the dying, particularly in hospices, often recount amazing stories of the dying seeing deceased friends and family welcoming them to the next place of being. On occasion patients who have been limited by dementia or who have been in coma become lucid days before they die. John O’Donohue describes the privilege of being able to sit with someone who is dying. That space of transition is sacred. For some people the realisation that they are going to die gives time for them to say things they have been putting off saying, to forgive and to be forgiven.  Although it is deeply sad sitting at a death bed, it lifts you out of the ordinary. Time stops, it expands, it shrinks. You become intensely present and aware of just how fleeting life is. After the death you cannot help but reflect on where the person has gone.  How can they be here, then not here?  There is so much more to understand about the process of dying and one very pertinent question is whether  it might be possible to prepare yourself for your own death.

In my explorations  of ‘consciousness’ I have read quite widely about death and one man whose work is well worth exploring is Peter Fenwick. Peter is now retired but he was a neuro-psychiatrist  and Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He spent many years working with the dying and also studying people who have returned after a near-death experience. His book, “The Art of Dying” gives many accounts from patients, relatives and nurses about the process of death. His message is a very positive one. It would seem that for many people the experience of dying is one of being met by deceased family members and of entering a space of light and love. It is not an experience to be feared. But he does suggest that, if possible, we prepare for our own death by increasing our understanding of it and, when the moment arrives, remaining curious about the journey we are about to undertake.  It would seem that death of the body may not be the end of consciousness.