Where do the Dead Go?
Where do the dead go?
That’s what I want to know.
Some people seem to be so sure
they know exactly where the dead go
But do any of them really know?
Even those who believe in the returning one
coming from wherever he had gone
was vaguer than vague on where he’d been
and sparse on details on what he’d seen
then off he went to the many mansions
leaving us behind with just as many questions.
The more that I’ve lost to the great unknown
the more I‘ve polished this ultimate question.
Where have all the dead gone?
Am I left with just ashes and bones?
Have they ended and left no trace,
because there is no onward place.
Ancestors have always been worshiped
remembered in shrines, enveloped
in our dedicatory abilities,
our candle lighting affinities
the flares of their lives like comets,
in the night skies of our spirits.
So again, I am asking, yearning to know
Where is it the dead go? Does the soul grow,
and then wear out like shoes or clothes
or is it like a bowl or account that accrues
and accrues until it amortises its dues?
Taking us beyond this plane of existence
to a realm that is our mortal inheritance.
I suppose I will never know where the dead go?
Until I myself take that road, that camino,
allow that good night to end life’s embargo
and then I will know, just where the dead go.
Wilma and I have just spent four days in Barcelona celebrating our 34th Wedding Anniversary. Just before I went I recorded my latest Anxious Poet’s Podcast entitled The Sacred Question.
In it I explored the notion of unearthing our current sacred question. I had been working with a group of NHS chaplains leading their reflection & spiritual development day. In order to help them look at the work they do I asked them to see if they could surface a sacred question about their ministry at the moment. As they all went off for a half hour’s quiet to ponder this, I also took the time to surface my own question.
I sat in the garden at Whirlow Spirituality Centre listening to the spring birdsong and immediately this question welled up in me. Where do the dead go? It took me by surprise. I hadn’t been contemplating mortality or loss. However, it was so instant and insistent that I felt this question demanded my attention. I began to try and craft a stanza or two and there it sat in my phone notes.
Then off we jetted to Barcelona early on the 4th April. We stayed in a hotel near the Plaça de Catalunya and Las Ramblas. Having orientated ourselves and had a good night’s sleep we headed off for our pre-booked guided tour of La Sagrada Familia, Antoni Gaudí's renowned and unfinished church. Our guide Sylvie’s commentary in three languages, through mobile headsets began outside the holy doors dedicated to Faith, Hope and Charity. All the carvings reflecting the holy family to which the whole temple is dedicated.
Then we entered the beautiful rose carved doorway and were utterly overwhelmed by the breathtaking beauty of the play of light and colour in this act of architectural genius. It is an utterly outstanding experience. Wilma was moved to tears and although the building was really crowded there were moments that were truly numinous. Both of us have been formed by the catholic tradition and this gave us a way of reading the church as a huge canvas telling the biblical narrative of the life of Joseph, Mary and Jesus. It goes beyond denominational religion however, it is a powerful homage to the archetype of family as well as an evocation of the natural world. It is as if the sword of the great angel barring our entry into the Garden of Eden had been lifted.
As we sat in the chapel set aside for quiet mediation, after our tour, we breathed in the remarkable emotional power of the place. This was no ultramontanist monument dripping with conservative piety - Gaudi and those that followed him paid close attention to the way architecture can reflect the natural world. The curves and lines, the way the pillars were like trees, the way the light bathed the stone all work on you subliminally and had an incredibly calming effect.
Color in certain places has the great value of making the outlines and structural planes seem more energetic.
Antoni Gaudi
It was at that moment my sacred question came back to me. Where do the dead go? Sitting in this place that is, at the same time an invitation to some new eden here on earth and the captivating idea of some heavenly realm full of light and beauty, I felt able to contemplate my question closely.
As the poem above, that I went on to write, makes clear I have become far more agnostic about the great mysteries of life. I don’t doubt the ability of religions to point towards the deep archetypal realities we carry in our souls and that are reflected all around us in the natural world and in our mythical and imaginative inheritances. I am far less confident about dogmatic and doctrinal certainties whatever authority asserts them.
Something about the temple I was experiencing in Catalonia chimed with this sense. At the start of a Catholic Mass the priest invites the people to celebrate the sacred mysteries, this was the invitation presented to me, by the Sagrada Familia. To be caught up in reverential uncertainty about the wonderful, perplexing, unnerving, beautiful questions that our life presents us with.
There is no reason to regret that I cannot finish the church. I will grow old but others will come after me. What must always be conserved is the spirit of the work, but its life has to depend on the generations it is handed down to and with whom it lives and is incarnated
Antoni Gaudi
Gaudi died in 1926. The final towers of the Church will be completed in 2026. In the quote above he seems to intuit some of what I am trying to speak of in these thoughts and in my poem. None of it of course, is a definitive answer to the question where do the dead go? It would not be a very good sacred question if it was.
I will end these thoughts with the words of another Spanish imaginative genius who lived around the same time as Antoni Gaudi. It says to me that we make our life by living and we make our death by dying and then …..?
Traveler, there is no path.
The path is made by walking.
Traveller, the path is your tracks
And nothing more.
Traveller, there is no path
The path is made by walking.
By walking you make a path
And turning, you look back
At a way you will never tread again
Traveller, there is no road
Only wakes in the sea.”
Antonio Machado, Border of a Dream: Selected Poems