Surprised by Hope: Original, provocative and practical

by N.T. Wright

The practice of putting objects in coffins along with the dead, to comfort or help them in the life to come, was until recently described by students of culture as an interesting practice now abandoned in the modern West; but gifts for the dead are making a comeback, with photographs, jewellery, teddy bears and the like being placed in coffins.20 Nigel Barley relates stories, told by a crematorium official, of widows placing in the coffin a packet of digestive biscuits, or the deceased’s spare glasses and false teeth. On one occasion a widow put into her husband’s coffin two cans of the spray adhesive that the dead man had used to paste on his toupee, causing an explosion that bent the furnace door.21 What sort of belief, if any, does all this reflect?

We have learnt to distrust people who love accusing and punishing others. In the same way, we have learnt to dislike and distrust theologies in which accusing and punishing takes centre stage. The Hebrew for ‘the accuser’ is after all hasatan, ‘the satan’.

Beauty matters, dare I say, almost as much as spirituality and justice.5

some communities manage to sustain levels of art and music, often rooted in folk culture, which bring a richness even to the most poverty-stricken areas. But the shoulder-shrugging functionalism of post-war architecture, coupled with the passivity born of decades of television, have meant that for many people the world appears to offer little but bleak urban landscapes on the one hand and tawdry entertainment on the other. And when people cease to be surrounded by beauty, they cease to hope. They internalize the message of their eyes and ears, the message that whispers that they are not worth very much, that they are, in effect, less than fully human.

Thus the church that takes sacred space seriously, not as a retreat from the world but as a bridgehead into it, will go straight from worshipping in the sanctuary into the council chamber – to debate matters of town planning, of harmonizing and humanizing beauty in architecture, in green spaces, in road traffic schemes, and (not least in the rural areas which are every bit as needy) in environmental work, creative and healthy farming methods, and proper use of resources. If it is true, as I have argued, that the whole world is now God’s holy land, we must not rest as long as that land is spoiled and defaced. This is not an ‘extra’ to the church’s mission. It is central.