The former are often younger, single people who have left the bosom of their families. Without work to get up for, and experiencing extended periods of introspective solitude and perhaps even loneliness, the night demons are free to do their worst. During lockdown, questions of what life is all about have pressed down hard on the single bedroom in the flat share. What is the use of having all the freedom in the world to make one’s own life choices, when all the options available look equally empty? From this perspective, death contains a kind of debilitating terror that can be dwelt upon, often over and over.

Those of the latter type have literally no time for such existential worries. Especially mothers with young children. Without the support and respite provided by nursery schools or childminders, the day and the night are dominated by a continual concern for the welfare of their dependents. As weeks turned to months, the constant and unrelenting responsibility for children or elderly and vulnerable adults has left many exhausted, drained and feeling like they have lost themselves in the care for others. There is a form of death in this experience, too — a loss of self that is often what the fear of death amounts to. “There is no me left,” as one of my congregation and mother of three explained to me the other week.

Further reading

Let's all meet up in the year 3000

By Tom Chivers

It was with her words ringing in my head that I read Tom Chivers’s intriguing piece in UnHerd about those who desire to live on and on, if not forever, then for a much greater length of time than our bodies presently allow. “Literally everything gets me thinking about death,” he admits. “I could be eating a Dairy Milk and think something like ‘Gosh, I wonder if I’ve already eaten the majority of Dairy Milks I will eat in my lifetime.’” I have a number of congregants who have expressed similar feelings.

Nonetheless, I wondered what that exhausted mother of three might make of this? Between wiping chocolate off the sofa for the umpteenth time, and stopping the children fighting with each other, and preparing their tea, would she be counting down Dairy Milks? I know, it’s not a fair comparison; Chivers was deliberately sending himself up. But even so, it got me thinking about how we approach death.

Martha Nussbaum, in a brilliant essay on why the immortal Greek gods sometimes fall in love with mortal human beings — Calypso with Odysseus, for example — explains that there are certain attractive virtues that the gods, being immortal, are unable to manifest precisely because of their immortality. Top of the list is sacrificial love. What sense can be made of sacrificial heroism, risking one’s life to save another, if one’s life is never really in danger? Odysseus risks everything for the one he loves, even his own death, and that makes him so much more attractive and commendable. And what sense can be given to the motherly love of the immortals, she questions, when there are never any issues about the welfare of their immortal children? Mrs Zeus is not bothered that the stair gate is closed. Her one-year-old wouldn’t hurt himself if he fell, so what’s the worry? Mrs Zeus wouldn’t say “there is no me left”. She would happily and calmly have her nails done as her kids played with matches and the petrol can.

More from this author

The bright side of death

By Giles Fraser

In other words, so much of what we value about human life — and sacrificial love especially — is bound up with intrinsic human vulnerability. What makes human beings so beautiful is precisely their willingness and ability to sacrifice themselves, their time, their health, their sanity, for others. As Chivers concludes: “you-cannot-die immortality is likely a curse, not a blessing. No one reads vampire stories or ghost stories – souls forced to wander the earth long after all their loved ones have died, unable to rest – and thinks ‘Yup, gotta get me some of that’. Immortality is the archetypal monkey’s-paw wish-that-goes-wrong.”

There are, of course, plenty who are ready to die. Those who have a sense that their time has come. But I think there’s another sort of death experience that’s worth pointing out: the giving up of oneself in such a way that all the self-focused anxiety of what-will-become-of-me seems to drop away.

Towards the end of the piece Chivers wonders: “Maybe this [cryogenic technology] is all just a nerd’s version of praying for the afterlife, although I think not.” And he is right to think not. In Christian terms, eternal life is not a life without death or one that has developed some curious mystical technology to avoid it. “Those who lose their life will find it” is an invitation to find liberation from the Dairy Milk problem by dissolving oneself in the love of others – an invitation of which motherly love is the most obvious and impressive example.

More from this author

My eulogy for Boris

By Giles Fraser

When St Paul writes that death has lost its sting, he is claiming that there is a glorious kind of freedom to be enjoyed when one gets beyond the obsessive anxiety of endless self-preservation. For those who have placed the centre of gravity of their lives outside of themselves, then the prospect of one’s own death can never be as it was before. Death loses its sting.

Most of us, though, experience the problem of death on a number of levels at once; both as a threat to our own singular unique existence and as the loss of self that takes place as we care more about things other than ourselves. Only those we call saints are able to travel fully beyond their own existential anxieties by losing themselves in the service of others.

I have met a few in my time. My old boss, the priest who trained me to become a priest, died a couple of months ago. An extraordinary man, he once told me – and I completely believed him — that he was totally uninterested in the question of what would become of him after death. That claim made a lasting impression on me, and still seems to be the mark of someone who has been liberated in just the way St Paul described. The more my old boss gave away of himself, the more of his own needs that he abandoned and set aside, the more he seemed to grow into a kind of serenity. And he met death with the same composed equanimity.

The transhumanist approach presumes too quickly the only answer to death is for us to go on and on forever — or, at least, for such an extended period of time that we will eventually choose death as a welcome relief. But I wonder whether all this desire for just more time isn’t itself a part of the problem, and indeed that it represents a kind of fearfulness that deepens our anxiety rather than deals with it.

I have known people smile as they die. I want what they have.

Historically, of course, the somewheres came first. Even the gods of the ancient world were the gods of a particular place and people. Dagon was the god of the Philistines. Baal was the god the Canaanites, Marduk the god of the Babylonians, Yahweh the God of the Jews. All these gods were somewheres. The first proponent of the ‘anywhere’ philosophy was probably St Paul, for it was Paul who deliberately broke the link between a belief/value system and ethnicity/geography.

Jesus wasn’t a Christian. He wasn’t the first Christian. He wasn’t even a Christian with an interesting Jewish backstory. Nowhere does the carpenter from Galilee suggest that he wants to start a new religion. On the contrary: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” he tells a woman in Matthew’s gospel.

Yes, Jesus would constantly argue with the religious authorities of his day. But argument with religious authority is itself a longstanding Jewish tradition. Jesus was Jewish, completely Jewish – he had a Jewish mother, he was circumcised according to the law, he kept kosher, his Bible was the Bible of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, he attended his local Galilee synagogue, he taught in the Temple throughout his life, he made pilgrimage to the Temple for the special feasts. And he died Jewish, mocked as the King of the Jews. The very idea of Christianity was not even invented in his lifetime. Jesus was very much a somewhere – Jesus of Galilee.

Most of Jesus’ early followers were also Jewish, but not all of them. And for these people, the question began to arise whether being a follower of Jesus required following the Jewish law – and, in particular, whether it required the Jewish practice of circumcision. This question prompted a furious debate among Jesus’ followers, with some maintaining that Jesus-following required the full commitments of Jewish religion, and some maintaining that it did not. St Paul was the leading proponent of the second view.

More from this author

A book that will turn your ideas upside down

By Giles Fraser

Paul was also a Jew himself, indeed a Pharisee by training, but he was also a Roman citizen, born into the Jewish diaspora in what we now call Turkey – and thus the nearest thing to a citizen of the world that a Jew could be. For Paul, the God that he recognised in Jesus was absolutely the God who was promised to Jews in the Hebrew scriptures, but – and this was his world-changing idea – it was also a God who was promised to all humanity.

It now seems obvious to Christians that the God spoken about by Jesus is a God who seeks the salvation of all people, irrespective of race, nationality or culture. But it wasn’t at all obvious to many of Paul’s contemporaries, and it took some arguing on his part. “In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek,” Paul insisted. You don’t need to be ethnically Jewish to have a special relationship with God. With Jesus, the special deal that God had made with the Jewish people had been extended to include all non-Jews.

It wasn’t that Paul denied the idea that God had established a special relationship with the Jewish people in the first place – all those who are “in Christ” are “Abraham’s offspring” he maintained, and the Jews were the chosen people – but now, Paul declared, being chosen was open to all.

There were many more conservative-minded Jesus-followers who resisted Paul’s internationalisation of what was hitherto distinctively Jewish theology: some maintained the old-fashioned Jewish way of Jesus-following for some centuries, though theirs was an increasingly minority position, and increasingly persecuted.

In terms of the debate between the somewheres and the anywheres, the anywheres had won. And when the Roman Empire was converted to Christianity in the fourth century, the link between what came to be known as the Christian religion and the ethnic/geography of Jesus’ Judaism was broken forever.

In other words, Jesus was a ‘somewhere’, Paul was an ‘anywhere’. All of which is quite a challenge to me as a Christian but also as a dedicated ‘somewhere’ communitarian. Instinctively, my own Jesus-following feels increasingly sympathetic to the non-Pauline Jewish Christianity that was squashed in the first few centuries. Nonetheless, I have to accept that St Paul’s revolution in theology – breaking the link between values and place – made possible a flourishing of important ethical thinking, not least the development of international human rights.

And my own church at the Elephant and Castle in south London is one small example of the consequence of Christianity breaking the link between god and ethnicity. In my pews there are people from all over the world, and it matters not where they come from: neither Jew nor Greek, neither Nigerian nor Armenian, neither English nor German – for you are all one in Jesus Christ. In Pauline Christianity, the water of baptism is thicker than the blood of family. Or rather, baptism produces a new family beyond that of biology. Which is why many in my church refer to each other as brother and sister, even though they are not biologically related.

More from this author

Is Jeremy Corbyn anti-Semitic?

By Giles Fraser

It could be argued that this new family of baptism creates another form of somewhere-ness, an identity rooted in Christ, not in where you come from or who your grandparents are. In other words, it creates a different form of community, both open yet rooted – a merger of Pauline internationalism and a rootedness in the specifics of Jesus. And this is interesting because the moral case against internationalism is precisely its lack of rootedness and social solidarity.

So could it be – and I offer this tentatively – that the church offers some sort of clue as to how it is possible to combine being both a somewhere and an anywhere? Because as I look out at my church on a Sunday morning, I see a community both diverse and yet together, indifferent to ethnicity yet also rooted in the specifics of place. 

I have this line from a Wallace Stevens poem that often goes round and round in my head as a sort of constant puzzle. “But play, you must / A tune beyond us, yet ourselves.” That, it seems to me, is the challenge: an ethic that is beyond ethnic and cultural provincialism, yet also rooted in the specifics of what makes us who were are, the specifics of time and place. Isn’t that the challenge of the day?