BBC Radio 4 2016-06-20

Good morning,

Regardless of how illustrious our lives, it is highly likely that the sermon at our funeral will take no longer than five minutes. A life summed up in five minutes! Sobering isn’t it when we apply it to our own lives where we often put ourselves at the centre.

So how would we sum up our lives today if we were given five minutes in which to do so? What would be important and what would be irrelevant? How would we want to be remembered?

For some, it might be what we have achieved or what we have left behind. For others it might be simply how we were. One friend said to me that when thinking of death, he came to the view that we spent far too much of our lives seeking the nouns rather than the adjectives and the verbs. In other words, our lives seem to pursue roles as if they defined us, and in a temporal sense they do as doors in life can open or close on the basis of an individual’s position in society. But should that be the case?

For Christians, and for many other religious traditions, clearly not, as the temporal world is one which is simply passing and finite. It is not the nouns that bring redemption or eternal salvation to a religious believer. It is the adjectives and the verbs. The words that describe how we were and what we did - not what we were.

Today’s recall of Parliament to pay tribute to Jo Cox and the glowing praise for her in recent days has brought that into sharp focus. But it is not just our lives that will be summed up in five minutes. This era in which we now live, is also likely to be summed up in five minutes or less when future generations come to learn about who they are and where they come from - their history.

What will they learn about us? What judgements will they make about how we faced the challenges of our age? Will they say that we gave greater importance to the adjectives and verbs or the nouns? Will they see our era as a remarkable one, which rose to the contemporary challenges and to the heights of human altruism, or one which sunk to the base of narrow self-interest? What will our collective societal legacy be? Will future historians describe this as a high-point in the history of human civilization, or something less noble, which we squandered despite all our material and cultural advantages?

Our five-minute summaries, whether approached as individuals or as a society, should strive to bring out the best of our humanity not the worst. More of a focus on how we were and not what we were would help.