Neuer weather-beaten Saile more willing bent to shore,
Neuer tyred Pilgrims limbs affected slumber more,
Than my wearied spright now longs to flye out of my troubled brest
O come quickly, sweetest Lord, and take my soule to rest.

Euer-blooming are the ioys of Heau'ns high paradice,
Cold age deafes not there our eares, nor vapour dims our eyes :
Glory there the Sun outshines, whose beames the blessed onely see
O come quickly, glorious Lord, and raise my spright to thee.

Thomas Campion, from the First Booke of Ayres (1613)

All the insecurities and hopes of daily 16th century life in Elizabethan England are mirrored in Thomas Campion's composition - here beautifully sung by the renowned counter tenor, Drew Minter. Campion, (1567-1620), was a contemporary of Ben Jonson and Shakespeare. Like many people in London at the close of the 16th century he had many strings to his bow. He studied law and medicine and was a poet and a composer. But the verses are also an authentic mirror of what mediaeval women and men looked for as their short lives were brought to an end. They also strongly felt that whatever their failings were in this life God would, at the end, bring them to rest - O come quickly, sweetest Lord, and take my soule to rest. - but also, characteristically, the blessed onely see there the beames of glory.

One of Agatha Christie's characters, Henrietta, a sculptress, had just binned a plaster cast she had recently finished because, she felt,

'[the sitter's] spiteful little mind had seeped into her mind and had, unconsciously, influenced her hands. And now the thing that had been Doris was only clay - just the raw material that would, soon, be fashioned into something else.
Henrietta thought dreamily: "Is that, then, what death is? Is what we call personality just the shaping of it - the impress of somebody's thought? Whose thought? God's?"'(Agatha Christie, The Hollow. Fontana, 1946, page 17)

It is always the mysterious aspects of life lived out on earth that foster myths! Despite epoch-making discoveries into how our brains work we do not know what we mean by saying that we are conscious people. 'Consciousness' is not yet something that we can understand. But throughout the centuries we have made up our own minds about who we are and what happens to us after life, with or without the ideas of the dominant religion.( Maybe the Dr Who stories represent something of what we would like to believe, or fear, at this point in the 21st century!!) Many of the levels of story in the Old Testament come not from 'fact' or 'history' but from the tribe or group's grappling with the mysteries of life and how the god who led them also 'controlled' their lives. In Christian tradition we have all been influenced by this Hebraic tradition but also by the subtle influence of the Greek philosophers like Aristotle and Plato and the later Christian platonists.

So do we have some sort of 'impression' made on each one of us - whether this is by 'god' or some other influence? We are suggestible folk even if some of us are more dominantly our own person. The pre-modern era, ending soon after the end of the Elizabethan era we have just been considering, is well served by the ideas that Campion sings of: a life of bliss to come (but only for the good among us). For there was purgatory and hell too. What is interesting about recent (post-modern) language is that those two words seemed to have dropped out of most people's vocabulary - even, perhaps the most religious amongst us. For the present is not an age of affirming anything specific about what any 'heaven' could be like. Christians are here challenged to make the attempt to understand life, and whatever comes after it, in terms not of our own myth-making but in the more difficult and thought provoking relationship with the living Lord. And that is not as easy as it sounds - it is not a 'pious' cop-out as some would think!

That last thought implies that in Christian terms (not necessarily in what we think are ecclesiastical terms) what is to come after life and through death is that, at least, all that we have been and are, is remembered in the 'mind' of the Father. The promise in the New Testament has always been understood that, in the End, we also shall be raised like Jesus. In other words, Henrietta's assumption that the 'substance that is us might, after death, be 're-cycled' is not on the cards. Plato seemed to think that our 'soul' would go on being re-cycled, but whatever we mean by 'soul' and body is another question ...

But while the Christian tradition of a future 'resurrection' for all is a positive assumption, we are at a loss to understand what that means. In the terms of the vision of John the divine, the future will be the realisation of a new heaven and a new earth and that, for many Christians, is the final word. Perhaps for people like the poet and composer Thomas Campion and others, it was a poetic as well as a religious vision. They would have found it hard to differentiate. In some important ways we have lived on the inspiration of poets and musicians until the birth of the modern age. But now all has changed with our view of the universe. While there are great poets and writers today they are imspired by a different muse, shall we say? We are challenged to understand the meaning of modernity without losing our understanding of how a Jonson or Shakespeare or Campion lived from within their own horizons.

To end with a little reverberation of sublime poetic writing and with the faith that is at the root of all life -

Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready; it was granted her to be clothed with fine linen, bright and pure" - for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints. And the angel said to me, "Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb."

And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband; and I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away." And he who sat upon the throne said, "Behold, I make all things new."

The Spirit and the Bride say, "Come." And let him who hears say, "Come." And let him who is thirsty come, let him who desires take the water of life without price. ... He who testifies to these things says, "Surely I am coming soon." Amen. Come, Lord Jesus! (The Revelation of John the Divine)