Is there any church, Roman Catholic or Anglican, in which the brief service called Bona Mors still takes place, I wonder? It is the most uncomplicated of devotions and simply asks of God what the name of the service itself means: the grace of a 'good death'. Well, what is the good death for which we pray in the devotion of Bona Mors? We know what the world thinks a good death is: free from pain and achieved in such a way as to cause the least possible distress to relations and friends; timely, tidy and hygienic. In Britain and in Europe there are powerful forces who are so sure about what makes a good death (and what constitutes a good life) that they will seek to engineer all of this to order, perverting medical science to bring human lives to an end as and when they see fit.

All of this of course is to be firmly resisted by Catholic Christians and by all right-thinking people of good-will. But what is our conception of a good death? Well, long ago, that little devotion of Bona Mors made it clear that a good death was a death in accordance with God's will, who brings every human life, short or long, to its proper fulfillment. Any attempt to circumvent or anticipate what might be in God's plan for us would certainly not be a good death. A good death for the Christian must be a death in conformity with the good death of Jesus Christ, who fulfilled the will of his Father in his death upon the Cross.

A good death should also be a death prepared for through the ministry of holy Church: anointing, confession, viaticum, the commendation of a departing soul - each of these will have its place and so the Bona Mors devotion made much of entreating God to deliver us from a death that might be sudden or unprepared. And the last part of a good death of course is a good funeral by which I do not mean a hearty memorial service, but rather the pleading of Christ's sacrifice for the soul of one departed.

You see, what really distinguishes our understanding of a good death from that of the society in which we live, is that they think a good death is a matter of neat and painless endings, but we understand that it is all about new beginnings. The human soul is set free from earthly limitation and temptation (do you remembers Catherine of Genoa's joyful cry of relief on her deathbed, 'no more earth, no more earth'?) and enters into that process of purification and cleansing which we call purgatory.

It was my privilege to minister in his last illness and death to a steadfast and faithful Anglo-Catholic schoolmaster who had long lived and worshipped in my parish. Brian's principal pastime was to write poetry - humorous, reflective or religious - and if you ever needed a processional hymn for some unlikely or obscure saint, he could always be relied upon to provide a few well-written stanzas. Brian had lived a good life and he certainly died a good death - the kind of death I've been describing. Well, he wrote a poem which he called 'Testament' and I read it at his funeral mass several years ago. It sums up much of what we mean by a good death and points us unambiguously towards heaven:
 

Come not with ornate grief
Around my bed;
Remember my belief,
When I am dead,
That death is not the end,
But a re-birth;
And pray for me, each friend
I have on earth.

O weep not for me gone!
With happy mind,
My daughters and my son
I leave behind
And all their loved ones too;
Know that my soul
Is for a purging due,
Can be made whole.

Pray that, all purging past,
All faults forgiven,
My spirit shares at last
The joy of heaven;
With quiet at the core
May worthy be
The Godhead to adore
Eternally!