Heavenly Community

"No one can possibly go to heaven alone--or it would not be heaven."

So concludes a paragraph from one of the Daily Meditations by Richard Rohr, Franciscan author and speaker. He does not explain. And he sounds very certain.

Of course he expects the reader to figure it out by considering the overall reflection:  that the spiritual journey is from isolation to connectedness. Every relationship with people, animals, other cultures, and God is a manifestation of love.

But what about heaven?  We may die alone, I think Rohr is saying, but to enter heaven is to be part of a community of souls who experience a fullness of joy because they are unconditionally loved.  Those who have read beyond the Inferno of Dante know that the poet shows the souls in Purgatory working and singing together on their way to Paradise--in marked contrast to the isolated souls in Hell--and that once there, they are "seated" in a vast, circular  amphitheater, united in their relation to God, whose love they reflect.

So however we imagine heaven to be, it is not a place of loneliness and isolation. Sartre in "No Exit" famously suggested that Hell is other people. In fact, Hell means being cut off from others, from love; and it seems to me that quite often such a hell is experienced on earth. We imagine heaven as something totally different.

To paraphrase St. John of the Cross: I don't know what it will be like there; I only know a great love awaits me.

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.

Dying and the Community

I just learned that a man I have known for more than twenty-five years died last year.  This news came as a great shock, even though he was neither young nor in great health.  The shock came from not knowing when I phoned his home to ask how he was doing.

He was not a close friend but always stayed in touch with people by forwarding humorous emails; he established a community online in his retired years, for which I was grateful. I am glad to remember him in that happy context.

His widow told me he was firmly opposed to having a funeral or an obituary or anything public. In this, I guess he is not unique, but it troubles me that no public notice, available in the media or online, is made of deaths. It seems to me that each birth and each death in a community is of vital importance and deserves to be known.

The reason for such privacy also bothers me. Is it a sense of shame about dying, some hidden fear?  Why does a man want to slink away like an animal in the woods and expire unsung, unheralded?  It seems to me his friends, including those of us who shared in his many emails, should be told so they can support the family with their thoughts and prayers.   I would think his family deserves to feel such support.

But it is not for me to be critical of my late friend or his family, only to remember him among all the others I have known who have left this world.

As John Donne wrote in his famous Meditation XVII ("For whom the bell tolls"), "each man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind."  He was writing, of course, as a Christian in a society united by the shared belief that no one can be isolated from the community into which they are born and baptized.

It is impossible today to apply that way of thinking to our diverse, pluralistic society. But I still think everyone deserves a bit of public recognition at the end of life's journey.

Death and nature

It is hard to say anything new about death, yet the NYTimes piece this week by Margo Rabb (1-26-15) caught my attention.

Her basic point, which hit home for me, was the difference in compassion between how doctors treated her at the time of her parents' deaths--coldly, impersonally--and her more recent experience at the vet, when her cat, Sophie, had to be euthanized.

I have often noticed how loving and sweet the staff are with my nervous cat and her owners, how impersonal medical personnel can often be with me.  I sometimes wish I could be taken to the vet.

But what I found arresting in Rabb's op-ed piece was her statement about how the death of an animal can be different from a human death: it is felt as an inevitable part of natural change: the cycle of life and death, the seasons and the years.  She says the death of her parents was for her unbearable and inhumane because human beings spend so much of their lives "railing against the idea of dying, or pretending that it doesn't exist, or dreaming of eternal youth, or wishing to prolong our lives. . . ."

By contrast, the death of her cat seemed natural and "exceptionally human." 

Rabb's article is a good example of the way in which the personal can become the universal.

Autumn and Mortality

I have lived for the past four decades in central Florida, where autumn does not really exist, where the rhythm of life is distorted.  Here, a few leaves fall, and in January, the sugar maples turn red, but until Christmas time, usually, the weather remains warm, and the air conditioning is on, at least part of the day. So we are deceived with a sense of endless summer.

We are cheated of a rare beauty, not only of autumn leaves and bare branches shaking in the chilly breeze but of nature's slowing down and preparing to die a bit--a healthy bit of memento mori. 

That's why my wife, Lynn, with her great poetic sense, insisted that we visit friends in Newport, Rhode Island in October. We have just returned with pictures of autumn in New England, the best kind, where leaves turn brilliantly red and yellow next to churches and other structures built during the Revolutionary War period.

The tavern we ate in last week dates from 1676, and our hotel was on Purgatory Road. On Farewell Street, we found several ancient cemeteries, their headstones barely visible after so many centuries of salty air. We came for the trees but savored the history, too, and the pumpkins lined up in front of a white clapboard church visited by George Washington.  Autumn does not get any better, any more American.

And anyone looking for a bit of authentic Halloween in old churchyards on narrow lanes filled with dead leaves or in vast, "haunted" mansions should come to Newport in late October, when the beauty of the island sparkles and its great Ocean Drive is quiet, less traveled.

Such a trip was tiring and expensive but worth it for two people who miss the chill of autumn.  We need occasional reminders to turn inward and reflect, as the year, like our lives, nears its end.

On Gratitude

I was surprised recently to find Cicero quoted as saying, in my paraphrase, that gratitude is not only the greatest virtue but the parent of the other virtues.  What did this "pagan" (pre-Christian Roman) know that many of us today have forgotten?

Some good answers have come from David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk and author, most recently of A Deep Bow: Gratitude as the Basis of a Common Religious Heritage. He has made gratefulness the heart of his spirituality and prayer life.

His key point is important for people turned off by religion who turn to various forms of spirituality in their search for meaning: the link between religion and spirituality is gratitude.

I paraphrase Brother David:  We cannot possibly be grateful to ourselves; gratitude necessarily implies another person. We cannot be grateful to things or to impersonal powers like nature. And as soon as we omit the personal element, gratitude ceases. why? "Because gratitude implies that the gift I receive is freely bestowed, and someone who is capable of doing me a favor is by definition a person."

There are theological implications here about God that I won't explore. I am thinking instead of the freely given gift and the need for thankful recognition. In other words, a positive response in an often uncaring world.

At a recent funeral I attended, the speaker said: amid the tragic loss and grief, we must be grateful for the life that has now ended, for all the good he did.  That, for me, is an essential element in any memorial service or funeral:  a sense of gratitude to God for the uniqueness of each individual life.

So perhaps what motivated Cicero's assertion 2,000 years ago was the optimism implied in gratefulness--and the self-giving, because giving thanks is not always easy or automatic. It requires us to reach beyond our own concerns to recognize the reality of the good in others, even amid all the pain and horror that surrounds us.

Fear and the Big Sleep

The fear of dying, which seems to be hard-wired into our human psyches, is as mystifying as it is universal. It is the ultimate terror.

Do we fear the end of our consciousness, the end of our singular identity, the loss of the world and our loved ones; or it is the how and the when of dying that we really fear?  This latter issue is a big part of my own fear, which underlies all other anxieties and worries.

In thinking about the self, what part of me will remain when the rest has turned to dust?  Is my true self the same as my soul?  Such questions are rarely productive except in stimulating an increased sense of mystery.

Stephen Cave, author of Immortality, says in an interview that there are ways to manage the great fear of our own death:  Think less about yourself and more about other people, he says; in other words, love thy neighbor. How else can our death come to seem less significant to us, less an indignity to be dreaded and more of a welcome release into a new dimension or at least a peaceful sleep without end?

I suppose realizing that sleep, a very long sleep, might not be unpleasant; it might even be something devoutly to be wished (the language of Hamlet, Shakespeare's great meditation on death, keeps coming back to me).  One line in that play has meant a lot to me, even though the melancholy prince of Denmark is not consoled when he hears that "all that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity."

My wife loves to walk in cemeteries, including our own "future address," as she calls the place we will be buried. She is quite happy communing with the dead; I do so at home, through reading and prayer, thinking about writers and saints who are still as alive as my loved ones.

So, if we are persons with a developed spirituality, a philosophy of life that includes death as a necessary component, we can look to an unknown new dimension that awaits us as we "pass on."  By the end of the play, Hamlet is less tormented as he comes to accept the reality of Providence and of mortality, not just as the end of the "slings and arrows" of life's misery but as a necessary part of creation, a window into a new world beyond this one.

No one knows what this other world will be like: it is the "undiscovered country from whose bourn [region] no traveler returns," Hamlet says, even though he has just had a visitor from beyond the grave: the ghost of his father.

So, like Hamlet, we remain ambivalent about what might lie ahead. It seems essential for sound health not to obsess about the afterlife (or lack thereof) but to live fully in the present, to break down the walls of the self, as Bertrand Russell said, and to think less of ourselves and more of others.

At the same time, it might be good to follow the Buddhist practice of reminding ourselves every day that death awaits in order to minimize the fear of our mortality.  This can be done without putting a skull on our desk or hanging up a skeleton in the house--unless it is Halloween and we are allowed, for once, to laugh at the ultimate dread and exorcize some of its power over us.

As a Christian, I value the words of St. John of the Cross: "I do not know what lies ahead for me on the other side; I only know that a great love awaits me."

Who are we, really?

I have awakened from a dream recently to realize that the person I was in my dream is not my present self but an ageless adult, sort of a composite of how I think of myself, as if I were permanently 35.

And I connected this realization to an earlier post (April 30: Genuine Freedom) and to other musings about the mysterious inner me, the "selfless self of self," as the poet G. M. Hopkins called it.

Who are we at the core of our being? That is the question. Am I the product of my conscious thought, produced by the brain, embodied in my mortal flesh, or am I an enfleshed spirit or, as I was raised to think in parochial school, a soul encased in a body?

Without considering for a moment the immortal center of my being called the soul, I think of all the many couples who, married in their twenties, find that they have drifted apart and become divorced in their forties, because they have changed.  What part of them has actually changed? Of course, we are changing and growing constantly biologically; our tastes and behavior and attitudes change as do our values.

But the man or woman of 45-50 who is more mature than the bride or groom of 25, with different interests from his or her partner, remains essentially the same person.  The question then is, what can psychology and philosophy tell us about who that person is, that self that might grow but remains essentially true to its original form?

"What are we at our core, before anything, before everything?"  This question, posed at the opening of an article by Abigail Tucker (in the Smithsonian 1-13) comes from a researcher at the Yale Infant Cognition Center, where scientists have been studying toddlers and babies to see if altruism is an innate human element. It seems too early to say for sure that the answer is definitively 'yes.'  But I cite this example as a fundamental question underlying much of the important work I sometimes read about being done by people with infinitely more knowledge than I have or will ever have about the complexities of the human personality.

I remember, too, a psychologist introducing to a workshop I attended some years ago the distinction between "the pattern" and "the person": when we think a friend or partner or colleague is unbearable, annoying, or otherwise unpleasant to be around, what we are reacting to is the behavior pattern that this person displays. I think of several people I know who seldom listen, talk incessantly about themselves and are clearly wound up emotionally. I shun their company.

Yet these people, beneath the surface, are bright, caring individuals who are lovable--if I can separate myself from the surface pattern to see the real person beneath. A challenging "if."  How close this approach is to Freudian or Jungian ideas of the psyche or self is something I do not know, but it helped me understand a basic human issue. Perhaps it is related to the belief of Robert Louis Stevenson and others ("Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde") who contended in Victorian times that the human person is not one but two--a divided self, half good, half evil.

Although this seems too simplistic today, there remains in us a sense that our real selves remain mysterious. Even as we shun encountering them, we meet them in dreams and see them reflected in films and literature.  If other people are hard to understand (and love), we tend to remain hard to understand even by ourselves.

One of the most satisfying examinations of all this, on the spiritual level, for me has been the work of Thomas Merton and in particular the study focusing on his idea of the true self by James Finley: Merton's Palace of Nowhere.  Merton, having read very widely, was attracted to Blake as a graduate student at Columbia and then, as a Trappist monk, steeped himself in the mystical tradition of both Christianity and the East.

I will try to sum up some key aspects of Finley's study of what Merton meant by our true identity in contrast to the false self we create as a public persona or mask.  The contemplative tradition of emptiness and silence, for Merton, is the highest form of self-realization; it reveals that the person I am is not limited to the individual I am.

Involved here is the loss of the false self when, in contemplation, our being becomes one with the being of God, who is Being itself.  The person, that is, transcends everything in his or her union with God. The self that we thought ourselves to be vanishes ("He who loses his life shall find it," as Jesus said) because of love.

And this brings us back to Brennan Manning, whose death last month prompted a brief post here that expresses the same basic Mertonian idea very directly: The true self is the one loved by God; every other identity is an illusion.

Merton put it this way:  "Learning to be oneself means learning to die [to the self] in order to live. It means discovering in the ground of one's being a self, which is ultimate and indestructible..."  So, for him, the soul is the mature personal identity, the true self. Yet the question, "Who are you when you do not exist?"--the ultimate question we all ponder when we think of death--can never be answered by the mind. It requires what is difficult for many: a leap of faith.

I hope at least some of this makes sense and that it will lead readers unfamiliar with Merton to read him as well as Finley's classic book, which is challenging because the language of mysticism defies the limits of human language. But few questions are as important as who we are and what happens to us when we are here no more.

Pain, Suffering, and JFK

Reading Chris Matthews' recent book, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero, reveals (at least to me) some new facets of this president's complex character. Along with the glamor and charisma, the womanizing and idealism, and all the rest, there is the skinny, lonely kid who learned early on that he was not likely to live long. He also had to endure amazing coldness on the part of his ambitious family.

His favorite poem: "I Have a Rendzvous with Death." His family and friends are unanimous in saying, "he never complained"--even after multiple hospitalizations for pneumonia, stomach pain, severe back pain and surgeries, injections, Addison's disease, etc.

Instead of suffering, he chose humor, looking for people with whom he could share a laugh. And he turned to reading, creating an inner life based on the old heroic model of what Hemingway called grace under pressure. He was determined to live every minute as if it were his last, no matter what the doctors said, no matter how great the pain.

I suggested earlier that pain is inevitable; suffering is optional. The two terms are often used interchangeably, yet suffering, for me, is the mental anguish and worry that we tend to fall back on when faced with pain. There are times, and JFK is an example, of how we can choose not to suffer.

As I was reading this book, my wife, in another instance of the synchronicity that often occurs in my life, handed me a 2006 article by Margaret Roche Macey, who was then dealing with terminal cancer.

She begins with a reflection on watching late into the night for the moment when darkness comes and overtakes the light: to her surprise, it never actually came. Instead, "the darkness actually grew [since]...it had always been there just waiting for the light to leave..."

She then asks, Do we likewise always carry our death within us rather than wait to meet it in a hospital bed? From this question comes an insight that God (light) is within (inside the darkness), "at the center of all that you most fear."

JFK developed a strong will; Macey developed a deep sense of prayer leading to an insight that death, like darkness, is not an "other" experience--separate from us--but an inseparable part of life and thus not something to be feared.

Both Kennedy and Macey seemed to transcend pain and avoid suffering by turning inward to the Spirit. As I deal with my own (minor) back pain now, these experiences of courage and faith are of inestimable importance, as I know they are to many others.

Death and Eternal Consciousness

In a recent New Yorker article, Stephen Greenblatt, the noted Shakespeare scholar, includes in an interesting essay on the ancient philosopher Lucretius a revealing story about his mother. She was obsessed with a fear of death.

Not, her son writes, a dread of what might lie beyond the grave but of the act of dying itself, the end of her existence. She brooded on this, especially when any family member would leave the house; and her worries about her heart and her health, along with her intense anxiety, got passed on, as such things do, to her children.

The irony is that Greenblatt's mother lived to be almost 90. Yet what she suffered! Her son takes comfort in the words of Lucretius, from his 2000-year-old poem, "On the Nature of Things," an idea found in other literature: 'Death is nothing to us.' When we are gone from this earth, we won't feel because we won't be.

For the person like me who wants to believe in some idea of the soul, or of some immaterial me, living on, Lucretius is of limited comfort. Still, his is an important voice in the vast literature of mortality. What poet has not reflected on the cruelty or inevitability of death? On the need to value and be grateful for the years we are given rather than live in dread of the big sleep that awaits us?

I have come to see my death as a long, peaceful sleep, the end of the "slings and arrows" that age has brought: the slowing down of the body, the medications and doctors' visits, the pains and aches. I could not imagine going on forever with this body and will be relieved to give it up when the time comes.

And if the body, with its brain, is gone, how can consciousness survive? If I cease to be my conscious self, in what sense can I say I survive in an afterlife? What part of my "true self" continues? Any answer we give is a speculation about the ultimate mystery.

If we become one with God, does our individual essence cease to be? Not according to orthodox Christian belief. One contemporary theologian, John S. Dunne of Notre Dame, even speculates in his book The Circle Dance of Time about an eternal consciousness.

He wonders if our union with God after death may be conscious rather than a perception of God as an object. Distinguishing between consciousness and perception, he suggests, following Nicholas of Cusa, a mystical theologian, that there is a oneness with God that is "nonetheless conscious." And if we can say there is oneness with God after death, "we can also say there is consciousness after death." (emphasis added)

I have never heard anyone else suggest quite such a possibility. No one knows what such consciousness would consist of: whether we remain aware of ourselves, of others, of life on earth, etc. I am sure that every poetic rendering of heaven, including Dante's, is totally inadequate in expressing what being in the presence of Ultimate Reality would be. Such an experience is beyond words, beyond knowing.

In my youth, I lived with a fear of death, not as acute as Mrs. Greenblatt's; but I could see that the fear of the unknown end, which could come at any moment, was at the root of my other anxieties. Now, as one of the benefits of being a senior, I have found greater peace with this reality. I see myself at the moment of death entering a realm of pure light and peace, not knowing what to expect except that it will be good. As John of the Cross wrote, "I don't know what lies beyond for me; I only know that a great love awaits me."

His is a voice of faith. For all those who, understandably, lack a faith in eternal life, death does not mean a new beginning, but it is not something to be dreaded. It might just be a long, long welcome sleep. And maybe they will wake up surprised to "be" in a wholly new realm.

To sleep, perchance to dream

The approach of Good Friday is an appropriate time to reflect on death and on what happens when we die. Not that I need an excuse for such speculation.

The fear of death for many is probably due to the sense that this most final and inescapable event, over which we have no control, means the end of life as we know it. Even if part of us lives on, it is impossible to imagine what such a life might be.

Even if death means extinction, Socrates taught, it would be a wonderful gain, an endless sleep with no dreaming. He thought that a dreamless night of peace is infinitely preferable to our ordinary nights in which the unconscous mind keeps on producing images.

This assumes that the death of the brain ends conscious as well as unconscious life. Yet myth and religion have always portrayed the souls of the dead as having some identity. They speak and retain their names. Christianity (Catholicism in particular) has always insisted that the souls live on in God. The saints are said to intercede for us with prayers and are linked with those who walk in this life. Of course, the nature of heaven is a mystery about which there is only speculation.

In The Circle Dance of Time, Notre Dame theologian John S. Dunne explores various faith traditions in speculating about the possibility that, like the souls in Dante's afterlife, our post-mortem selves have a kind of consciousness. In the Hindu Upanishads, he says, there might be a conscious union of the soul with the ultimate reality.

Dunne makes a distinction between consciousness and perception: such a union might be conscious without meaning that is a perception of God as an object. This implies a oneness with God that is nonetheless conscious: we blend into the reality of God while retaining some spark of identity. Thus it might be possible to say that there is consciousnes after death.

After several readings of Dunne's challenging chapter "Reasons of the Heart," I found by accident--or Providence--a statement by Thomas Merton, whose study of the mystical tradition in Christian theology led him to assert (with greater confidence than I could ever muster in such territory) the following:

"When we all reach that perfection of love which is the contemplation of God in his glory, our inalienable personalities, while remaining eternally distinct, will nevertheless combine into One so that each one of us will find himself in all the others, and God will be the life and reality of all."

So, it would seem, according to this teaching (which I hope is true), that while we merge in the great eternal ocean of God's being, we still retain our essential individuality. Merton does not reference Dante's Paradiso, but those who have read it can picture the souls leaving the celestial rose to make a guest appearance in one of the heavenly spheres before returning to the One divine reality that is beyond depiction.

As for me, whether or not heaven is a state of contemplation, I take comfort in Merton's summation belief in God as Being itself (not a being) who exists in us as we exist in God in the present and forever. And I like to think that my essential self, freed of my memories and desires along with my body, will not be totally extinguished. The whole thing promises to be an interesting experience that I look forward to being fully aware of.