The Individual, the Church, and the Ars Moriendi (the Art of Dying), Part 5

The Bible says in Psalm 39:4: “Lord, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is: that I may know how frail I am.”

The featured quote for this episode is from John Donne. He said, "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee."

Our topic for today is titled "The Individual, the Church, and the Ars Moriendi (the Art of Dying), Part 5" from the book, "The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come" by Rob Moll.

--- A Public Event

As bells tolled across England and Europe announcing another death from the plague, Christians were reminded at every moment that death was a public event and instructive to the church. While death was a spiritual event, according to Christian tradition, it was and is not a private affair simply between a Christian and God. Indeed, the loss of a single brother or sister in Christ wounded deeply the community of faith. "No man is an island," wrote Donne in his Devotions, "every man is a piece of the continent."

Two characteristics of death in the Middle Ages, says historian Phillipe Aries in his one-thousand-year history of Western attitudes of dying, lasted until the end of the nineteenth century: its familiar simplicity and public nature. "The dying person must be the center of a group of people," says Aries. As late as "the early nineteenth century, when the last sacrament was being taken to a sick man, anyone could come into the house and into the bedroom, even if he was a stranger to the family."

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