Jeff Sharlet: I have very little to add to the media storm following John Paul II’s death this afternoon. I was addressing a meeting of Gegrapha, a Christian journalists association (of which I’m not a member) at the New York Evangelical Seminary. We were alerted to the death by the sound of bells, followed by bagpipes — very traditional religious media. The group paused and said a prayer for the pope; and I was surprised for a moment by how sad it made me. I’m rarely saddened by the deaths of public figures, especially those who are very old. And I have no special love for the pope, nor any spiritual connection to his authority; indeed, I dread the inevitable tributes which will claim that the pope defeated communism, a mass public exercise in bad history. But the bells that marked his death also gave voice to the sentiments of those who mourn his passing, more effectively than most do themselves. The bells distilled what about the pope made all those Catholics who didn’t live according to his dictates, who suffered for them, mourn anyway: the sound of great bells is collective, that of an instrument too grand for any one person to make on his own, a beautiful noise that has for centuries reshaped the flow of time, marked the mundane as sacred, at least to someone. The bells announce: Someone has lost something sacred.

There is another form of religious media to consider with the pope’s death, that of the body. More widely read than any of his books were the images of the suffering, dying man; a message, many believe, that was the pope’s final teaching. The pope wrote his theology on his own broken body, and reproduced it by means of millions of images carried by secular media. And yet, this suffering is not a text that should be too glibly read; we should not assume to immediately understand its meaning. If we take John Paul seriously as an intellectual — and we should — then we should take his last statement seriously, too, as a set of ideas. Those who’d reduce the pope’s suffering to an easily-translated political program are, literally, fools, clowning on a dead man’s body. Those who find in the image of the man a message as banal as “the triumph of the spirit” inadvertently make a humanist out of John Paul. And those who turned away from what they perceived as grotesque, whispering about vanished dignity, choose for themselves a kind of illiteracy.

But it’s a long way from illiteracy to literacy; and I don’t claim to be able to fully read the pictures of the dying man. Anyone who has ever watched a person slowly die, close-up, knows that it’s a story easily told — “then, he died” — and even more easily misunderstood. Those who make a moral out of another’s death serve the needs of the living; they’d do well to recognize that their storytelling is metaphorical cannibalism.

I’m inclined to make no meaning out of death, to as much as possible refuse mediation. Not because death is so awful, but because to declare the meaning of a death is to play God, and to reduce the complexity of a life to a moral is to engage in the crassest utilitarianism, the essential act of what John Paul, for better and worse, named the culture of death. The truest story about a death is, after all, the simplest: “Then, he died.”