Come, Sweet Death . . .

“Komm, Sußer Tod” – “Come, sweet death.” So begins one of Bach’s most memorable sacred songs. Many love it for its exquisite music—a slow, contemplative movement through 21 measures in C minor that includes all twelve chromatic tones. The music alone reminds us that we cannot hasten the last things, but must, as Shakespeare puts it, endure our going hence even as our coming hither.

The lyrics are sobering. Some even find them disturbing, as a friend of mine did who, loving the music, looked up the English translation and called to ask, “Was Bach suicidal?” One might well wonder what to make of the prolonged, urgent invitation to “sweet death” to come quickly, bringing “blessed rest” and relief from the torture and sorrow of this dark world. The lyrics were written by an anonymous poet, but the remarkable response they evoked in the composer raises the question why they were for him, and consequently for so many of us still, so powerful.

One reason for their resonance is that at some point most of us have felt that weariness. We know whereof the poet speaks. This world is a hard place. Many days, reading the morning news, I wonder how people whose lives are much harder than mine sustain the will to live–refugees, people who face violence and hunger daily, people whose villages have run out of well water, people who share squalid tenement quarters, or people of wealth who find themselves locked into lives that have ceased to feel meaningful. Some fall into deep depression. Some seek help in the love of family and friends. Some find solace and hope in a faith that both provides meaning and promises fulfillment here and hereafter. But sometimes even people of great faith long for death.

I think that longing is not altogether bad. To know that there will be relief and (as many of us believe) new life when we leave this one may give us patience to complete the journey, and a will to see it through. Credible people who have gone through “near-death experiences” and returned, almost universally come back with a deepened sense of purpose and no fear of death. They understand themselves to be here on assignment, having something to complete before they get to go home.

I have heard people in their final days, agitated and in pain, cry with the simplicity and urgency of a lost child, “I want to go home.” This world is not our home. One bright morning, as the song goes, we will “fly away home.”

To think of death as the way home may make it sweet, indeed. In that light it is, as Hamlet eloquently recognized, “a consummation devoutly to be wished.” The difference, though, between Hamlet’s suicidal musings and Bach’s “Come, Sweet Death” lies in confidence that we will be going home. “Home” is one of the most resonant archetypes, one of the most universal themes in human stories. It is where we come from and where we return, where we know ourselves to be known, and where we expect welcome. It is where we hope for and receive forgiveness and where we can be “like little children,” sure and certain of safety. It is where a place has been prepared for us.

Because of that, there is no hurry. “Death,” Wallace Stevens wrote, “is the mother of beauty.” Awareness of death can sharpen our sense of what there is here to be loved, to learn, to complete, to care for. Stevens, a secular poet, may have understood those words in a more tragic way: uncertain of any kind of life after death, the things of this world become sharply poignant and precious. But I think we can read them also from the standpoint of faith: knowing we die, and that in life and death we belong to God, we may see this world with all its stories, and despite its “darkling plains,” as a place still “vast and beautiful and new” where goodness and life survive in unlikely places and where we are sent on adventures—a word whose root means beginning—that serve divine purposes of which we now and then become exhilaratingly aware.

When we have served those purposes, we may rightly long for sweet death. For many of us that longing may not be satisfied as soon as we would like. Lingering is part of the modern way of death Americans face. Learning how to die, like learning how to live, is a challenge specific to each generation. The way we die now may give new poignancy to Bach’s slow song. We may long to “stand among the angels,” but find ourselves lying instead among tired, grieving, anxious family folk, busy nurses, hospice chaplains, and good-hearted friends who bring food we don’t want to eat. The words of the song are, among other things, a prayer for patience. Slow as it is, in Bach’s hands the poem becomes a long meditation on staying as well as going: it lingers and prolongs. It is not breathless, but measured and dignified. It calls us to be, like the “immortal, invisible” one who waits to receive us, “unhasting,” the longing itself a preparation for the great release into life that is to come.