Making Friends with Death

Today, on a beautiful spring day, when I visited my favorite lakeside park, where snowy egrets were nesting above flowering azalea bushes, where boats with happy passengers glided by on deep blue waters and people were picnicking, why was I thinking of death? 

The reason, as several friends know, is that I have, crazy as it may seem, committed myself to do a talk with discussion at my church in a few weeks in a Lenten program called Making Friends with Death. It is a topic I have long postponed exploring, much less sharing with others.

I begin with the usual fears we have about death even though we know that trees shed their leaves, and animals and people die every day. The people are the only ones who object, calling it an outrage, the ultimate horror and enemy that cancels all we have been.

In a recent article in Commonweal, the Irish literary theorist Terry Eagleton has some suggestive, although incomplete, things to say on the topic of how to think about death.  As soon as one reaches a certain age, it seems inevitable that death and dying should become not merely something that happens to other people but an ever-present reality for each of us.

A friend recently wrote to me: "Now that I am 65, death seems friendlier."
I wish I had that optimism, for I have long had a terror, mainly about the how and the when my life would end, and with it my memories, my voice, my personality, my consciousness, all that is my self.

What will remain?  We don't know. I quote the great mystic and poet John of the Cross: "What will take place on the other side, when everything for me will be changed into eternity, I do not know: I only know that a great love awaits me."

It's impossible to fathom what existing outside of space and time, in a bodiless dimension, might mean. Dante and other poets give us metaphoric interpretations of the afterlife, but it is ultimately a great mystery: believers trust that they will be with God while others see nothing but an endless sleep, a total annihilation of the individual.

So it is a great challenge for a person of faith to look at the New Testament, at Christian tradition, and at his or her own experience and feel confident that when we die we do not end anything, as the Trappist Thomas Keating says, but experience "the final completion of the process of surrender into God." 

Christians, as Eagleton says, believe in the power of the resurrected Christ, which means that death is redeemed; yet at the same time, we see the physical process of death and decay as an abomination, our enemy, since it involves such an irreparable loss.   Death may be natural, but we don't like it or want to be around when it happens to us.

So my presentation will be provocative, daring, and difficult but I hope illuminating, at least for me, as I complete my thoughts on the great mystery that awaits us all.

Stumbling with the Cross

Lent is about half over, and what have I done? Nothing special. The Pope has gone to confession in full public view, like an ordinary mortal (good for him!).

Instead of confessing my sins, I have been preoccupied with growing old and being aware of a number of frail people older than I who face death. There is considerable suffering all around me. And fear.  I try to turn this awareness into a Lenten prayer.

Thomas Keating, the Trappist monk who has done much wonderful work in promoting contemplative prayer, writes out of his own physical frailty that we who endure pain and aging are stumbling along with Christ as he carries the cross: all who suffer are united with him in "the oneness of the human    family." We are not alone, and suffering is not pointless.

Jesus, who faced the fear of death that haunts all of us, showed (James Alison writes) that we need not be afraid of the shame and disgrace of dying. He did so willingly, in the full flowering of his manhood, not in old age; he did so without being embittered or resentful.  He put his suffering and death in the context of love.

Now, as I contemplate the fate of my friends and family who undergo the pain of growing old, I can join with them in union with the cosmic Christ and see that  there is strength in the love that connects us.