A man for all seasons

The date of More's execution is July 6 — the same date as Jan Hus's burning in 1415, one hundred and twenty years earlier. History may not arrange such details deliberately, but people notice them.

More goes to his death with the composure he had been rehearsing for years. He had written about death, prayed about death, prepared himself for the possibility of this specific death since the controversy began. When it arrives, he is not surprised.

His wit survives to the last. When he reaches the scaffold — which is so poorly constructed that it seems likely to collapse — he asks the Lieutenant of the Tower for help mounting it: I pray thee see me safe up, and for my coming down let me shift for myself.

The crowd around the scaffold is large. Some are there to watch. Some are there to pray. Some are there because they have read Utopia and cannot believe this is happening to the man who wrote it.

He forgives the executioner. He says a psalm. He arranges his beard.

He is fifty-seven years old.

Five centuries later he is a saint in the Catholic church and an icon in the Protestant imagination — the conscience that no political authority could purchase, the man who found the line he would not cross and died on the right side of it.

The king who signed his death warrant went through two more wives, broke with two more popes, and died in 1547 still calling himself Defender of the Faith.

More's wit at the scaffold — I pray thee see me safe up — is not bravado. It is the overflow of a man so rooted in what comes next that the moment of dying has been relativized.

He had prepared for this. Not by steeling himself against feeling but by investing so heavily in the reality beyond death that the death itself became, in some sense, manageable. He could make a joke about the scaffold because he was not primarily afraid of the scaffold.

The people who die well are almost always people who have been practicing dying well — who have been releasing things, submitting things, trusting things forward, for years before the final moment.

What are you practicing? What are you releasing? What would your version of safe passage look like — and are you building the capacity for it now, before you need it?