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Reflections ROWAN WILLIAMS In the following reflections, I shall comment on six themes that have emerged during the course of today’s discussion, and that I hope may be explored more fully in the course of this seminar.1 I shall begin with practical and pastoral questions around death and dying raised by Harriet Harris and Sajjad Rizvi. It struck me very strongly, listening to them both, that there was a question about how and whether we own our death. We live in a culture where ‘‘ownership’’ is often seen as the most significant relationship we ever have to anything, and I suspect that some of the passion, anger, and pain around discussion of assisted suicide, for example, has to do with the feeling that religious prohibitions are somehow denying us ownership of our own experience, ownership of our own death. That being said, we have also been introduced to two very different ways of exercising power in approaching death, whether our own or someone else’s: either the medical power to prolong life by a kind of flexing of scientific muscle, or the moral power to ‘‘end my life when I choose.’’ But both approaches are, in a sense, about taking control. From both of our traditions we have heard about what it might mean consciously , graciously, to relinquish control—a challenge both to the dying person and to the medical caregiver. It is often assumed that religious attitudes to endof -life questions are all about prolonging life at all costs, which is an absurdity. But we only get past that particular sterile standoff, I think, if we address this question of whether we are approaching our own death or the death of someone else basically in the spirit of wanting control or in the spirit of creative letting go. We have also been reminded of that particular cluster of questions represented by the idea of dying before you die—both a Sufi and a Christian commonplace already present in St. Paul’s language about dying every day. He speaks of how his ministry to the community involves a kind of ‘‘dying’’ so that 117 118 Surveys life may come into existence in the other, in the neighbor (see, for example, II Cor. 4:7–12). My second cluster of themes has some connections with the first. There was a question this morning about how our talk of heaven, hell, and the resurrection impacts upon our experience here and now. To talk about dying every day is, of course, one way in which it impacts us. The experience of the community of faith has something about it that encourages us, nurtures us, in the practice of letting go: letting go so that the neighbor may live, not in a self-hating or (in the wrong sense) self-denying way but in a way that acknowledges that part of the providence and purpose of God in the community is achieved by my learning to make room for my neighbor—and therefore saying no to my urge to control and contain my neighbor. That is all part of the daily ‘‘dying’’ that is involved in and enabled by our fundamental relationship to God—the sense in which we relate truthfully and constructively to God only when we learn to make room for God, at the expense of what we feel comfortable with and what we can control. I think the answer to the question about the impact and relevance of our talk about heaven, hell, and resurrection lies here. Are we now living our way into the kind of relationship that will make heaven a joy? That’s what it means to say ‘‘Heaven begins here’’—to say, with Christian scripture, that our citizenship is in heaven (Phil. 3:20). After all, what are we going to do in heaven (assuming we get there!)? For both the Christian and the Muslim, the answer is: we are going to enjoy God for God’s sake. If that is, by the grace of God, how we spend eternity, we had better start getting used to it. It’s as simple as that. The question of the present impact of our talk about the last things is to do with what we do in heaven, with the relationship we begin now—the quality of our looking at God, and looking at our neighbor, which begins here and now. And to speak of hell is, in the broadest possible terms, to speak of a...

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