ON DYING: HIS & OURS.

Death on a Friday
Afternoon
Meditations on the Last Words of Jesus from the Cross
Richard John Neuhaus
Basic Books, $24, 272 pp.

The Eternal Pity
Reflections on Dying
Richard John Neuhaus, editor
University of Notre Dame Press,
$25, 180 pp.

In my pre-Vatican II youth, one of the high points of Holy Week each year was the Three Hours service on Good Friday afternoon. Our family usually attended this in a neighboring parish, where Scripture readings, hymns, and silent meditation were skillfully interwoven into a long liturgical collage, and where the organist (a stern-looking old gentleman with the intimidating name of Mr. Boyd-Smack) played Dubois's thunderous "earthquake music" at the point when we recalled Jesus' death. The heart of the service, however, was preaching: a guest homilist would offer extended reflections on the "seven last words" of Jesus--the sayings of Jesus while he hung on the cross, culled from the four Gospels and compressed into the framework for a continuous narrative of the Passion. Such Good Friday services, of course, were standard Catholic fare from the late seventeenth century until the middle of the twentieth century, and expressed the deep conviction, shared by Protestants and Catholics alike, that the Passion and death of Jesus are the climax of his revelation of God's love and reconciling mercy, in the midst of human weakness and sin.

In Death on a Friday Afternoon, Richard John Neuhaus, editor of First Things and outspoken commentator on the religious debates and "social wars" of contemporary America, offers us a new essay in this venerable genre: extended meditations on the seven gospel sayings of Jesus on the cross, which grew out of the author's attempt to preach such a service in a New York parish several years ago. It is a serious, wide-ranging book that struggles to deal, in nontechnical language, with some of the central themes in the perennial Christian preaching of salvation through Jesus: the connection of death with sin, the value of Jesus' death as proof of love and atoning sacrifice, the quality of the hope in the face of death offered believers--a hope that in its authentic form never trivializes or suppresses the violence and finality of death, but that assures us the God of indestructible life is our companion even in death's darkness.

Almost simultaneously, Neuhaus has published a second volume, The Eternal Pity: Reflections on Dying, as part of the University of Notre Dame Press's promising new series of anthologies on practical morality, The Ethics of Everyday Life. This book is a beautifully chosen (and handsomely produced) collection of literary pieces reflecting on the ways death strikes the human heart: poems by Donne, Herbert, and Dylan Thomas, stories by Tolstoy and Flannery O'Connor, philosophical and journalistic essays, even some selections from the Qur'an. Neuhaus prefaces his anthology with a condensed but thoughtful overview of how death has been viewed by the great religious traditions of the world, by Western philosophy, and by various strands in our own culture; he ends his essay with a moving narration of his own near brush with death from undetected intestinal cancer, in the winter of 1993, and of the transforming effect that experience has had on his faith and hope as a Christian. That event, in fact, as Neuhaus recounts it, seems to stand as the personal backdrop for both books: a dramatic confrontation with darkness that led him to wrestle anew with the meaning of both Christ's death and our own.

Those familiar with Neuhaus's arch and uncharitable musings in the editorial pages of First Things may be surprised to discover a different voice in these two books. Flashes of social criticism occasionally appear, as in Neuhaus's trenchant reflections on the gnostic tendency of much contemporary American religion or our psychoanalytically rooted "idolatry of the conflicted self," and there is just a hint of condescension in some of his allusions to the late Raymond Brown's work (although Neuhaus admits his indebtedness to Brown's The Death of the Messiah). For the most part, however, the tone is pastoral and constructive, as both books invite the reader to approach the threat and the mystery of death in a contemplative spirit. "A measure of reticence and silence is in order," Neuhaus observes in his introduction to The Eternal Pity. "There is a time simply to be present to death--whether one's own or that of others--without any felt urgencies about doing something about it or getting over it." And such reverent, unhurrying silence is all the more necessary, he often reminds us, when one is approaching the saving mystery of the death of Christ.

The real strength of both books, I think, is that they invite us to take death seriously, rather than to reach for religious or cultural palliatives, and to hear in the gospel of the crucified Christ a message of consolation that does not avoid the tragedy of death, but that paradoxically finds life in it. Observing the widespread tendency of modern culture to suggest that death is "no big deal," Neuhaus insists: "For those dying their own death and the death of those they love, death is a very big deal indeed. Don't tell them that it doesn't matter, that they'll get over it, that things will look brighter tomorrow. Death is, in the words of Saint Paul, 'the last enemy' (1 Cor. 15:26). The only consolation to be trusted is the consolation that is on the far side of the inconsolable."

It is only against the background of the serious, sometimes wrenching views of death that Neuhaus has assembled in The Eternal Pity, in fact, that one can fully appreciate his reflections on the meaning of the cross in Death on a Friday Afternoon: the anthology not only documents many of the literary allusions in his meditations, but undergirds his sense of the church's need to return to profound and patient reflection on the meaning of Jesus' death for us. Neuhaus's approach to Jesus' death is solidly traditional, reflecting the background of his thinking in both the Lutheran theologia crucis and in classic Catholic soteriology. Although framed around the "seven last words" of Jesus, Neuhaus admits, "the book is not entirely meditative...arguments are also advanced, and there is some vigorous wrestling with traditional doctrine...about the death of Christ." So Neuhaus reminds us of the Pauline teaching that the death we humans experience is always rooted in our "long, terrible history" of sin, and that sin requires expiation, atonement, purgation: "something must be done." The free action of God the Son to take sinful humanity on himself, to make it fully his humanity, and to let sin work out all its bloody force in his own humiliation and death, continues to puzzle and scandalize us, to challenge all our powers of theological reasoning: "The order of things is shattered." Yet this mystifying affirmation of a God who became human to die with us, for us, in our place, and to rise triumphant from death without simply turning death's sin-colored reality into a myth, is surely central to the Christian proclamation of God's reality, to our understanding of who and what God is: "The perfect self-surrender of the cross is, from eternity and to eternity, at the heart of what it means to say that God is love." And the consolation which the cross offers us, as we face death ourselves, is precisely that "we are not alone," but have been "brought into the good company of God"--"we are implicated in the mystery of sin and redemption. We are participants in this drama, although exactly how we do not know."

Doctrine and argument, then, are central to Death on a Friday Afternoon--doctrine at the heart of the Christian message, yet traditionally so challenging to our powers of argument and analysis as to resist any clear theological consensus on how it might best be understood. It is in its attempts at theological argument, in fact, that the book reveals its greatest weakness. Neuhaus has attempted here to combine different rhetorical styles and different goals: homiletic meditation on scriptural texts, critical observations on contemporary culture, and a spectrum of theological approaches, classical and contemporary, to the saving value for us of Christ's death. The result is a rather rambling set of reflections that has occasional passages of real insight and power, but also its share of platitudes, and that offers us disappointingly little by way of a unified message or a clear interpretive focus, either theological or spiritual. In the end, The Eternal Pity seems to me the better book, both in the portrait of human responses to death that the anthology assembles, and in Neuhaus's carefully crafted introduction. In both its terseness and its variety, it offers greater unity of vision and richer nourishment to the soul.

Brian E. Daley, S.J., teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame.