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.

On "Silence"

I began this blog some years ago when I was writing and thinking a lot about silence--not as the absence of sound but as the presence of a spiritual reality that comes to those who practice contemplation.  I was, at the time, studying the work of Thomas Merton.

The silence in Martin Scorsese's film of that name, which I recently saw, is rather different, although the soundtrack is marked by quiet.  Rather it is the silence of God found in those who struggle with their faith amid terrible suffering.   As one of the Portuguese Jesuits says in this stunning film, set in 17th century Japan, "I would die for you if I knew you were there."

The interplay of faith, doubt and  temptation, rather than its characters, makes "Silence" distinctive. It could only be made by a director like Scorsese, whose Catholic faith underlies his work in subtle ways.  "Silence" is a three-hour, often bloody meditation on religious faith.

No wonder it received minimal attention at the box office and among many reviewers. I postponed seeing it until I could do so at home, via Netflix, because of its intensity and violence.  My first impression was to be struck by the beauty of the cinematography, which, with its light and dark contrasts, reminded me of Caravaggio, whose paintings are filled with Gospel stories illuminated by dark, sordid reality.

Here I found the converted villagers more moving and fervent than the actors portraying the Jesuit missionaries. These are peasants willing to suffer and die to protect the last priests in Japan, which was then repressing all foreign religion with violent executions.

Scorsese's film raises many questions for people of faith to debate: why is belief so often interwoven with doubt?  Why do people of faith often feel abandoned by God?  How can men of faith be seen by some (the church) as traitors to God (by apostatizing) yet heroic to others?  Why must human suffering be so terrible?

And finally, the cry from the Cross: "O God, why have you abandoned me?"

I recommend this beautiful film to all who want such religious questions presented in unforgettably striking images.

On Terrence Malick

I admire the creativity of Terrence Malick and find his theological concerns fascinating, but his films are not always easy to admire.

In his most recent movie, To the Wonder, goes even further than in his luminous The Tree of Life, going beyond conventional plot structure, character development, and dialogue with visuals and music to create a mood that can be beautiful at times, confusing at others, as when the camera jumps erratically from one character or scene to another.

It must have been hard for Ben Affleck, with so little to say, to perform his nameless role as an American who moves from Paris and, too briefly, to Mont St.-Michel and then to the American heartland (Oklahoma), where he brings his French lover. Unfortunately, her narrative in French is hard to follow in the pale little subtitles that are provided.

She mentions "the love that loves us" (God) and years to return to the sacraments when she encounters a priest, who is unhappy and searching for meaning; so we again have, as in the last film, the interesting overlay of Catholicism with Protestant America--clearly a fascination for the filmmaker. Richard Brody (the New Yorker blog 4-17-13) offers a fuller appreciation of this topic, including Malick's critique of religion as doctrine and the light that floods the movie, stemming from the place of wonder, the Catholic shrine of Mont St.-Michel that gives the film its title.

Roger Ebert, in his final movie review, praised Malick's search for beauty everywhere and his interest in isolating souls in need. His swirling dances, wheatfields, water and other symbols give the scenes a cosmic perspective, as if life is seen from eternity; and it is up to the viewer to piece all this imagery and silence together.

Even without the subtitles, you can tell that the big themes are here: faith, love, God, happiness, meaning...and beauty; and Malick gives us at times a feast of light and sound. Yet his effort fails to be coherent and interesting enough for me, at least, to avoid tedium.

As the priest asks God, "how long will you hide yourself?" part of  me applauds a filmmaker daring enough to deal with religious issues in a serious way while the other part of me wants to ask, "how long will this movie go on?"

I am sorry to say, with Ebert, that if The Tree of Life was awesome, this latest experiment is puzzling and pretentious.

Open to Love

What does religious faith mean in a secular age, when many people have no religious affiliation or belief, when atheism and agnosticism are commonplace among thinkers?

An important answer comes in the first official statement by Pope Francis, "The Light of Faith."  Unlike his many remarkable and refreshing impromptu remarks, this is an encyclical, thoughtfully begun by his predecessor, the pope emeritus, and completed by the new bishop of Rome.

Although I have not read the entire document, the excerpts published this month, and the many published reactions, give me a good sense of its importance. It is (in the words of an anonymous reader) an "open, searching document" designed to "reach out to those who are searching and doubting."
An existential, Kierkegaardian encyclical?

Well, perhaps not. But this work "by four hands," as Francis says, sees faith as more than assent to fixed doctrines or arguments about the existence of God.  The papal text moves beyond secular vs. religious, science vs. apologetics and all forms of fundamentalism and literal-mindedness whereby God becomes an object to be argued about.

"Lumen Fidei" (to give the encyclical its proper title) indicates that faith is not rigid but an expansive stance toward the goodness and love basic to the spiritual life. In other words, faith becomes a trust: that beneath and beyond the horror of the daily suffering and pain there is meaning, there is compassion. When we love, as Dante knew, we move in harmony with the energy that drives the universe.

As Charles Taylor has written, even in a secular age of religious choice, most people are not capable of being indifferent to the transcendent, which they may find in the beauty of art or nature.  This philosopher's work is relevant to what the two popes have written.

Faith is a journey, they write, which deals with "the lives of those men and women who, though not believers, nonetheless desire to believe and continue to seek. To the extent that they are sincerely open to love and set out with whatever light they can find, they are already, even without knowing it, on the path to faith." 

So we are given here an expansive, hopeful view of faith that does not deal with abstract truths or theological propositions but a path of trust that is "open to love."   This seems to me a solid foundation for what is becoming a papacy significantly concerned with social justice.