What happened to getting to heaven?

This is what we fear – no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell – nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

This is the fear that distorts human life by turning it into a frenzy of denial. As Larkin puts it:

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And when I myself will die.

This is life bound to death. It is the creation of the living dead. This is the great polarity in biblical conception, those who are dead because of their fear of death and those who live because they have already died. Fear of death and the desire to extend life beyond reason is the engine that drives the increase in spending on medical research and technology. For our dread of death has created a fantasy as Stanley Hauerwas says "that we can get out of this life alive."

So it is still true that the central concern of the Church is the cure and salvation of souls. Not as an extension of consciousness in a disembodied realm but as an existential shift that frees us from the dread of death so piquantly expressed by Larkin. Death is no longer the Lord of life, it is no longer the last word. This is the theme that runs through all the gospels but is particularly present in the Pauline epistles. To be human is to experience death within life, otherwise known as sin. But Christians live in the resurrection, they live a life that is a creation of the Word of God and as such cannot be dissolved, even in death.

What then is an adequate pastoral response to the dying? To sit at the bedside of such a one and reassure them that death is but a move around the corner to a better place is pastorally irresponsible. It is so because it hopes to achieve a cheerful outcome in terms of the world whose foundation has always been a fantasy. For is not secularism the highest fantasy? Such reassurance denies the reality of death and is a lie. It also displaces the real life and freedom that comes through a lifetime of prayer and worship that equips us to gracefully give ourselves over to death knowing that no horrors await us. It is a cheap trick. I confess that I have found myself speechless in such circumstances, there seeming to be such a gap between a lifetime of faith and readiness for death and the situation at hand. But that is my weakness, surely. It can never be too late to come to peace in the face of death.

As faith in late modernity fades we increasingly live under the auspices of death. Our fascination for it revealed in TV crime and its more graphic depiction of the dead body. Reality TV, even in the kitchen, feeds on animosity and anger, a kind of existential death to charity and love. We have achieved the remote murder of the enemy. There will come a time when each baby in the West will have its DNA sequenced before birth. All this and more exists under the auspices of death and the subsequent quest for the defeat of death. But death will not go away, as Larkin notes "Most things may never happen: this one will." It is how we deal with death that determines how we will live. Our obsession with youth and the good time, under the auspices of the market (a kind of death ruled reality), will not change the fact that we will die.

Larkin spurns the Church as:

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die.

The question is, do the above arguments prove him wrong?