Looking At the End

I have a very bad habit of skipping to the end of books to see how they conclude. This is particularly reprehensible when the book in question is a biography of a person no longer living, as you know perfectly well how it's going to end. One of the volumes I have on the go at the moment is Owen Chadwick's 1990 biography of Archbishop Michael Ramsey, one of my 'minor patrons' and once a mentor of my spiritual director. However I'm not talking today about Ramsey as such: that can wait for another time. 

Nearly at the end of Chadwick's book, he tells how, less than a year from his own death, the retired Archbishop attended the funeral of his friend and former colleague on the teaching staff at Durham University, Reggie Cant, who became a Canon of York Minster. Ramsey was already frail and nearly blind, and was helped to his place in the Minster looking, a friend said, 'like a great ruined crag'. The order of service for the funeral included two paragraphs by Canon Cant himself:

"Death itself does not frighten me so much as the thought of a long and feeble old age. The litany in the Prayer Book prays that we may be delivered from sudden death, but it means sudden and unprepared, and we are not meant to linger ... More difficult is to learn to hand over to God one's willingness to be old and feeble, to enter a second childhood in which one loses all one's adult dignity, and is stripped of all one's painfully acquired knowledge, and has to begin all over again, at the mercy of other people. ...

"My bodily life will be finished, and it will be a relief if the body is worn out, and the purpose of my life will have been achieved, and I shall be with God ... I shall see him face to face. It will not be pleasant, for my sins will have spoiled my taste for him. But I believe he wills to cleanse me in the saving death of Jesus, and I know that I will to receive his cleansing love here, and there; now, and then. Through his mercy I believe that I shall achieve my true end for which I was born, and towards which all my prayer and daily life have been pointing, the enjoyment of God for ever in communion with the blessed company of all faithful people."

Google Reginald Cant and you will find his history of York Minster, written in conjunction with GE Aylmer; but of his spiritual writings you will find none. I ought to search some out, perhaps; because, reading those words, I think, who could say better?