Death is nothing at all, Canon Scott Holland famously said. But that wasn't the thrust of his sermom.

Go into any card shop in search of a sympathy card and one text is always likely to appear. Henry Scott Holland’s meditation ‘Death is nothing at all’ has grown in popularity round it and there can be few clergy who haven’t groaned when asked to read it at a funeral. It appears on countless internet bereavement sites as words of ‘comfort’, one even in memory of a cat. It talks about the person who has died just having slipped into the next room and includes the phrase ‘call me by the old familiar name’. It implies everything is the same and will stay that way, we are as we were and the person who has died remains as they were.

This meditation, this view that ‘death is nothing at all’, has always puzzled me because, however strong our faith, to say that death is nothing at all just seems either a denial of the facts or arrant nonsense. As Victoria Wood put it, in her sitcom Dinner Ladies, death is not nothing at all - it is awful.

Was this really what Henry Scott Holland (1847-1918) thought? He became a canon of St Paul’s Cathedral in London in 1884, after teaching at Oxford University. He was a contributor to the then controversial book Lux Mundi, which in 1889 urged the Church to take on board the new social and intellectual movements of the time. He was committed to a social gospel, one that drew attention to the plight of those in inadequate housing and earning low wages. In 1910 he returned to Oxford as Regius Professor of Divinity.

I tracked the poem down to a sermon that he preached in St Paul’s Cathedral on the afternoon of Sunday 15th May 1910, which was published under the title, The King of Terrors. The whole sermon lasts about 30 minutes and it goes on a bit, saying the same thing many different ways at length - typical of its time. No ten minute pithy reflection here! At the time the body of King Edward VII was lying in state down the road in Westminster. The text for Canon Scott Holland's sermon was 1 John 3:2, 3, and this sets the context for it.

In his sermon Henry Scott Holland preaches about how death can affect us. For some, he says, that is it. They consider that there is nothing else beyond and death is the end of everything. “There is no light or hope in the grave; there is no reason to be wrung out of it. Life is the only reality, the only truth….” Not surprisingly that bit hasn’t been turned into a greetings card.

Death can make us wonder, make us ask if that is it. There is a finality about it and some things do come to an end, and as time passes we become more aware of that. As Scott Holland notes the Psalmist raged against God that ‘the grave cannot celebrate Thee’. This, he says, is our “cry in our angry protest”.

But the sermon goes on to say that death can affect us in another way, possibly even at the same time. As we look on the face of one who has died, in the hospital ward or at a hospice, or in the chapel of rest, they can look so peaceful that it does seem that they have just slipped away for a moment. Nothing has particularly changed, they just look as if they are asleep. It is as if we can “call them by their old familiar name”, as if “life means all that it ever meant”. It feels so natural, especially if it comes at the end of a life well lived. This is where his famous piece of prose comes from: it is his illustration of this illusory feeling that nothing really has happened. It’s there in his sermon to give some colour to this point.

Some people will of course find that they get so caught up in all that has to be done when someone dies that it is as if they are in a haze. So many people to phone... arrangements to be made... legal papers and financial papers to go through. Some only have a few weeks to sort through someone’s personal effects before they have to hand over their room or house. It is not quite as if ‘nothing has happened’, but the full implication of the person's death does not always strike home straight away. We can be in a bit of a daze. The verse is a colourful way of expressing this illusion of death and the daze we can find ourselves in at the time. But as Canon Scott Holland points out: “Alas! It will pass from us. The long, horrible silence that follows… will cut its way into our souls”.

There is a third part to Henry Scott Holland’s sermon. And this is where he moves his hearers (or readers) on from their doubts and denial that there has been any change. This is where he talks about the great Christian hope, that, in the words of Charles Wesley’s hymn, we will be ‘changed from glory into glory’. We don’t fully see what we will become but what lies ahead is more glorious than what we have now.

At this point he draws on the text from the first letter of John (3:2,3):

“Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.” (NRSV)

As a colourful way of saying this is what it can feel like at a particular moment - like W H Auden’s ‘Stop all the clocks’, used to full effect in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral - then it can have a place. After all the Psalms help us express our feelings, some of which are not too virtuous: “let the mischief of their lips overwhelm them! Let burning coals fall upon them!” (Ps 140:9b-10a). But if we use Henry Scott Holland’s illustrative words as an expression of Christian hope we sell him and the gospel short.

© Ian Black 2003

Note

Text of ‘The King of Terrors’ can be found in Facts of the Faith: Being a collection of sermons not hitherto published in book form by Henry Scott Holland, edited by Christopher Cheshire (1919) London: Longmans, Green and Co. pp 125-134

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