Death | Paying Attention To The Sky

Archive for the ‘Death’ Category

The “Intermediate State” Between Death and Resurrection – Benedict XVI

April 18, 2013

The disciple who is to become the type of all faithful discipleship rests on the bosom of Jesus. The Christian, in his faith and love, finds shelter on the breast of Jesus and so, in the end, on the breast of the Father. “I am the resurrection”: what these words mean emerges here from a new angle.

Taken from his 1988 classic, Eschatology, which remains a leading text on the “last things” — heaven and hell, purgatory and judgment, death and the immortality of the soul.

*************************************************

If the “Last Day” is not to be identified with the moment of individual death but is accepted as what it really is, the shared ending of all history, then the question naturally arises as to what happens “in-between.” In Catholic theology, as that received its systematic form in the high Middle Ages, this question received its answer in terms of the immortality of the soul.

To Luther, such a solution was unacceptable. For him it was a result of the infiltration of faith by philosophy. Yet his own enquiry into the matter produced an ambiguous report. In great majority, the relevant texts of Luther take up the biblical term for death, “sleep,” seeing in it a description of the content of the intermediate state. The soul sleeps in the peace of Christ. It is awakened, along with the body, on the last day.

Elsewhere one finds Luther in a different state of mind, for instance in his comments on the story of Lazarus. There he remarks that the distinction between body and soul whereby hitherto people had tried to explain Lazarus’ life “in the bosom of Abraham” was ein Dreck, “a load of rubbish.” As he explains: “We must say, totus Abraham, the whole man, is to live….”

The impression one takes away from this is that Luther’s concern was not so much with the denial of the life of the dead, but with an attack on the body-soul distinction. Luther does not succeed in replacing that distinction by any clear or even recognizable new conception. In our survey of the status quaestionis, we discovered that recent theology rules out an “intermediate state.” By doing so, it gives systematic expression to a point of view first developed by Luther.

1. Early Judaism
What does the Bible have to say? In the light of our investigation into the ideas of the New Testament about the resurrection we can already make one fairly general statement. To posit an interruption of life between death and the end of the world would not be in accord with Scripture. In fact, the texts permit a much more precise set of assertions than this, as the exemplary work of P. Hoffmann in particular has shown in careful detail.

The first point to notice is that both the primitive community and St. Paul belonged with the Jewish tradition of their time, just as had Jesus himself. Naturally, they situated themselves vis-a-vis the internal debate within that tradition by reference to the fundamental criterion found in Jesus’ own image of God. This produced in time a gradual transformation of the preexisting tradition, by way of its thorough-going assimilation to the demands of Christology. Our first task, therefore, is to get acquainted with the data of intertestamental Judaism — a complicated affair for which I must rely on Hoffmann’s study.

Let us look at some characteristic documents. The book of Enoch in its Ethiopian recension, datable to c. 150 B.C., offers in its twenty-second chapter an account of the abode of the spirits or souls of the departed. Here the ancient idea of Sheol, earlier taken as the realm of shadow-life, receives more articulated and differentiated description. Its “space” is characterized in greater detail. The world in which the dead are kept until the final judgment is no longer located simply in the earth’s interior, but, more specifically, in the West, the land of the setting sun, in a mountain where it occupies four different regions (pictured as caves). The just and the unjust are now separated.

The unjust await the judgment in darkness whereas the just, among whom the martyrs occupy a special position, dwell in light, being assembled around a life-giving spring of water. We already get a glimpse of how such “early Jewish” notions lived on in unbroken fashion in the early Church. The memento of the departed in the Roman Canon (now the “First Eucharistic Prayer”) prays that God may grant to those who have died marked with the sign of faith and now “sleep the sleep of peace” a place of light, “fresh water” (refrigerium) and repose.

The prayer thus identifies the three conditions which inhabitants of the Mediterranean world consider the proper expression of all good living. Patently, the idea coincides in all respects with the destiny of the just as described in Enoch.

A further stage of development can be observed in the Fourth Book of Ezra, written somewhere around the year 100 A.D. Here too the dead dwell in various “chambers,” their “souls” the bearers of a continuing life. As in Enoch, the just have already entered upon their reward. But whereas the author of Enoch defers the start of the punishment of sinners until the final judgment, in Ezra the pains of the Godless begin in the intermediate state, with the result that at a number of points their position seems to be that of a definitive Hell.

In Rabbinic Judaism, the dividing line between two kinds of human destiny is even more consistently observed. From the moment of judgment, which follows immediately upon death, two paths open up. One leads into the paradise garden of Eden, conceived either as lying in the East or as preserved in heaven. The other goes to the alley of Gehenna, the place of damnation.

But, besides the idea of paradise, the destiny of the just is represented by other images and motifs as well. Thus we hear of the “treasury of souls,” of waiting “beneath the throne of God,” and of the just — and especially martyrs — being received into Abraham’s bosom. Here again the continuity between Jewish and early Christian conceptions is striking. The idea of paradise, the image of the bosom of Abraham;’ the thought of the tarrying of souls beneath the throne of God: all these are present in the New Testament tradition.

But before we turn to the New Testament itself, something should be said about the writings bequeathed to us from Qumran. So long as the community represented under this name, the Essenes, were known only from Josephus, scholars were obliged to regard them as belonging to the Hellenizing strand within early Judaism, at any rate where our question in this present section was concerned. Josephus had summed up their views in the following words:

For their doctrine is this: that bodies are corruptible, and that the matter they are made of is not permanent; but that the souls are immortal, and continue forever, and that they come out of the most subtile air, and are united to their bodies as to prisons, into which they are drawn by a certain natural enticements but that when they are set free from the bands of the flesh, they then, as released from a long bondage, rejoice and mount upward.

But with the discovery of the original Qumran manuscripts, our image of the Covenanters has necessarily undergone revision. As K. Schubert, in his study of the Dead Sea community, commented on the text just cited:

In all probability, this description is nothing more than a concession by Josephus to his Greek readership…. The Essenes were not a Hellenistic-syncretistic group, but a Jewish apocalyptic movement.

However, we are dealing here with ideas of the afterlife conceived in markedly material terms, so much so that this same writer can say that the Essenes of Qumran “believed in a continuation of bodiliness, even though they accepted the passing-away of their bodies in the first instance. To this extent, Josephus’ description is perhaps not too far removed from the truth. He too ascribes to the sect a materialist understanding of the soul of the kind common in Stoic philosophy.

This shows how complex in this period the reciprocal interpenetration of the Hellenistic and Jewish worlds could be. The much favored dichotomy between “Greek” and “Hebrew” simply does not stand up to historical examination. The discussion of the Qumran texts also indicates that the mere maintaining of strictly material notions about the life to come does not in itself guarantee fidelity to the spiritual inheritance of the Old Testament. The heart of that option which entered history in Abraham’s faith cannot be grasped without finer differentiation than this. In this perspective, a number of contemporary contributions seem to belong to a continuing “Essene” tradition, in that the issue of materiality has overshadowed every other consideration.

2. The New Testament
It should be clear by now that the New Testament belongs to that Jewish world whose fundamental contours have been sketched in the preceding section. As a general methodological assumption, it is legitimate to suppose that Jesus and the earliest Church shared Israel’s faith in its (then) contemporary form. The acceptance of Jesus’ awareness of his own mission simply gave to this faith a new center, a nucleus by whose power the individual elements of the tradition were step by step transformed: first and foremost, the concept of God, but then following it, and in a graduated order of urgency, all the rest.

The Synoptic tradition preserved two sayings of Jesus the topic of the “intermediate state.” These are Luke 16:19-31 and Luke 23, 43, and they were briefly touched above. So far as the first, the story of Lazarus, is concerned, we may admit that the parable’s doctrinal content lies its moral, a warning against the dangers of wealth, rather than in the descriptions of Lazarus in Abraham’s bosom and Dives in Hell.

And yet, manifestly, the teller of the parable does regard these evocations of the afterlife as appropriate images of the real future of man. In this, the text clearly testifies to the fact that the earliest Christianity shared in the faith of contemporary Judaism about the beyond. So much we can say without even entering into the (quite independent) question of whether in the parable we are overhearing the ipsissima vox of Jesus himself.

Something along the same lines must be said about the second text, the dialogue of the Crucified with the good thief. Here too the Jewish background is palpable. Paradise is the place where the Messiah, concealed, awaits his hour, and whither he will return. But it is in this selfsame text that we begin to see the Christian transformation of the inherited Jewish tradition at work. That destiny reserved by Jewish tradition to the martyrs and the privileged “righteous ones” is now promised by the Condemned Man on the Cross to a fellow condemnee.

He possesses the authority to open wide the doors of paradise to the lost. His word is the key which unlocks them. And so the phrase “with me” takes on a transformative significance. It means that paradise is no longer seen as a place standing in permanent readiness for occupation and which happens to contain the Messiah along with a lot of other people. Instead, paradise opens in Jesus. It depends on his person. Joachim Jeremias was right, therefore, to find a connection between the prayer of the good thief and the petition of the dying Stephen: “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.”

With impressive unanimity, the New Testament presents the communion with Christ after death as the specifically Christian view of the inter-mediate state.

Here is the dawning realization that Jesus himself is paradise, light, fresh water, the secure peace toward which human longing and hope are directed. Perhaps we may remind ourselves in this connection of the new use of the image of “bosom” which we find in John’s Gospel. Jesus does not come from the bosom of Abraham, but from that of the Father himself.” The disciple who is to become the type of all faithful discipleship rests on the bosom of Jesus. The Christian, in his faith and love, finds shelter on the breast of Jesus and so, in the end, on the breast of the Father. “I am the resurrection”: what these words mean emerges here from a new angle.

Posted in Death, Pope Benedict XVI, The New Testament, The Resurrection, Theology | Tagged Christian view of the intermediate state, Death and Resurrection, First Eucharistic Prayer, Fourth Book of Ezra, The book of Enoch | 2 Comments »

The Immortality of the Soul and the Resurrection of the Dead – Benedict XVI

April 16, 2013

In the long run, theology and preaching cannot tolerate such a quirky theological patchwork, full of logical leaps and ruptures. As quickly as possible we should bid farewell to this way of thinking which deprives Christian proclamation of an appropriate discourse and thus cancels its own claim to be taken seriously as a form of Christian understanding. Victor-Louis Mottez (13 February 1809 – 7 June 1897) was a French fresco painter, painter and portraitist. His “Resurrection of the Dead” was painted in 1870.

Benedict XVI begins his consideration of the issue with a survey of recent literature on the issue. This and the following posts are taken from his 1988 book Eschatology, which remains a leading text on the “last things” — heaven and hell, purgatory and judgment, death and the immortality of the soul.

*************************************

The State Of The Question
In the last few decades, a basic question has arisen about the immortality of the soul and resurrection. The ensuing discussion has increasingly transformed the panorama of theology and devotion. Oscar Cullmann put it cursorily, it dramatically:

If today one asks an average Christian, no matter whether Protestant or Catholic, whether intellectually inclined or not, what the New Testament teaches about the destiny of the individual human being after death, in almost every case one will receive the answer, ‘The immortality of the soul’. In this form, this opinion is one of the greatest misunderstandings of Christianity there can be.
Oscar Cullmann, Unsterblichkeit der Seele oder Auferstehung gische Literature Zeitung

Today, few would venture to offer the answer that was earlier a matter of course, since the idea that this answer was based upon a misunderstanding has spread with astonishing speed among the congregations of Christendom. How ever, no new answer of any concreteness has taken its place. The way to this change of attitudes was paved by two men: the Protestant theologians Carl Stange (18701959) and Adolf Schlatter (1852-1938), to some extent aided and abetted by Paul Althaus whose eschatology was first published in 1922.

Appealing to the Bible and to Luther, these men rejected as Platonic dualism the notion of a separation of body and soul in death such as the doctrine of the immortality of the soul presupposes. The only truly biblical doctrine is that which holds that when man dies “he perishes, body and soul.” Only in this fashion can one^, preserve the idea of death as a judgment, of which Scripture speaks in such unmistakable accents.

The proper Christian thing, therefore, is to speak, not of the soul’s immortality, but of the resurrection of the complete human being and of that alone. The piety currently surrounding death, impregnated as it is with an eschatology of going to heaven must be eliminated in favor of the only true form of Christian hope: expectation of the Last Day. In 1950, which had meanwhile gained so much ground. He pointed out that the Bible was perfectly familiar with the “dualistic scheme.” It too knew not only the expectation of the Last Day, but a form of individual hope for heaven. Althaus also tried to show that the same was true for Luther. And so he reformulated his position in the following words:

Christian eschatology must not fight against immortality as such. The scandal which in recent times we have frequently given by this fight is not the skandalon that the Gospel speaks of.
P. Althaus, Retraktionen zur Eschatologie

Though the discussion which followed Althaus’ article produced a broad consensus in his favor, his retractions had no impact on the continuing debate as a whole. The idea that to speak of the soul is unbiblical was accepted to such an extent that even the new Roman Missal suppressed the term anima in its liturgy for the dead. It also disappeared from the ritual for burial.

How was it possible to overthrow so quickly a tradition firmly rooted since the age of the early Church and always considered central? In itself, the apparent evidence of the biblical data would surely not have sufficed. Essentially the potency of the new position stemmed from the parallel between, on the one hand, the allegedly biblical idea of the absolute indivisibility of man and, on the other, a modern anthropology, worked out on the basis of natural science, and identifying the human being with his or her body, without any remainder that might admit a soul distinct from that body. It may be conceded that the elimination of the immortality of the soul removes a possible source of conflict between faith and contemporary thought.

However, this scarcely saves the Bible, since the biblical view of things is even more remote by modern-day standards. Acceptance of the unity of the human being may be well and good but who, on the basis of the current tenets of the natural sciences, could imagine a resurrection of the body? That resurrection would presuppose a completely different kind of matter, a fundamentally transformed cosmos which lies completely outside of what we can conceive.

Again, the question of what, in this case, would happen to the dead person until the “end of time” cannot simply be pushed aside. Luther’s idea of the “sleep of the soul” certainly does not solve this problem. If there is no soul, and so no proper subject of such a “sleep,” who is this person that is going to be really raised? How can there be an identity between the human being who existed at some point in the past and the counterpart that has to be re-created from nothing? The irritated refusal of such questions as “philosophical” does not contribute to a more meaningful discussion.

In other words, it soon becomes obvious that pure Biblicism does not take us very far. One cannot get anywhere without “hermeneutics,” that is, without a rational rethinking of the biblical data which may itself go beyond these data in its language and its systematic linkage of ideas. If we leave aside those radical solutions which try to solve the problem by forbidding all “objectifying” statements and permitting only “existential” interpretations, we find ourselves confronted with a twofold attempt to take the matter further. This twofold attempt turns on a new concept of time, and a fresh understanding of the body.

The first set of ideas is related to the reflections we glanced at above in the context of the question of imminent expectation. There we saw that some writers tried to solve the problem of the imminently expected Kingdom by noting that the end of time is itself no longer time. It is not a date which happens to come extremely late in the calendar but rather non-time, something which, since it is outside of time, is equally close to every time.

This idea was easily combined with the notion that death itself leads out of time into the timeless. In Catholic circles, these suggestions received some support in the discussion about the dogma of Mary’s assumption into glory. The scandal attaching to the assertion that a human being, Mary, has already risen in the body was a challenge to rethink more generally the relation between death and time as well as to reflect on the nature of human corporeality.

If it is possible to regard the Marian dogma as offering a model of human destiny at large, then two problems at once evaporate. On the one hand, the ecumenical and speculative scandal of the dogma disappears, while on the other the dogma itself helps to correct the traditional view of immortality and resurrection in favor of a picture at once more biblical and more modern. Although this new approach received no very clear or consistent elaboration, it became generally accepted that time should be considered a form of bodily existence.

Death signifies leaving time for eternity with its single “today.” Here the problem of the “intermediate state” between death and resurrection turns out to be a problem only in seeming. The “between” exists only in our perspective. In reality, the “end of time” is timeless. The person who dies steps into the presence of the Last Day and of judgment, the Lord’s resurrection and parousia. As one author put it, “The resurrection can thus be situated in death and not the ‘Last Day’.” Meanwhile, the view that resurrection takes place at the moment of death has gained such widespread acceptance that it is even incorporated, with some qualifications, into the Dutch Catechism, where we read:

Existence after death is already something like the resurrection of the new body.

This means that what the dogma of the assumption tells us about Mary is true of every human being. Owing to the timelessness which reigns beyond death, every death is an entering into the new heaven and the new earth, the parousia and the resurrection.

And here two questions suggest themselves. First, is this not merely a camouflaged return to the doctrine of immortality on philosophically somewhat more adventurous presuppositions? Resurrection is now being claimed for the person still lying on his deathbed or on the journey to his grave. The indivisibility of man and his boundness to the body, even when dead, suddenly to play no further role, even though it was the point of departure of this whole construction. Indeed, the Dutch Catechism asserts:

Our Lord means that there is something of man, that v most properly himself, which can be saved after death. This ‘something’ is not the body which is left behind.”

G. Greshake formulates the claim even more incisively:

Matter as such (as atom, molecule, organ …) cannot be perfected … This being so, then if human freedom is finalized in death, the body, the world and the history of this freedom are permanently preserved in the definitive concrete form which that freedom has taken.

Such ideas may be meaningful. The only question is by what right one still speaks of “corporeality” if all connection with matter is explicitly denied and matter left with a share in the final perfection only insofar as it was “an ecstatic aspect of the human act of freedom.”

Be this as it may, in this model the body is in fact left to death, while at the same time an afterlife of the human being is asserted. Just why the concept of the soul is still disowned now ceases to be intelligible. What we have here is a covert assumption of the continuing authentic reality of the person in separation from his or her body. The idea of the soul meant to convey nothing other than this. In this amalgam of notions of corporeality and soulhood we have a strange mishmash of ideas which can hardly count as a definitive solution of our problem.

The second component in the characteristic modern approach to the idea of death and immortality is the philosophy of time and of history which constitutes its true lever. Are we really confronted with a choice between the stark, exclusive alternatives of physical time on the one hand, and, on the other, a timelessness to be identified with eternity itself? Is it even logically possible to conceive of man, whose existence is achieved decisively in the temporal, being transposed into sheer eternity?

And in any case, can an eternity which has a beginning be eternity at all? Is it not necessarily non-eternal, and so temporal, precisely because it had a beginning? Yet how can one deny that the resurrection of a human being has a beginning, namely, after death? If, coerced by the logic of the position, one chose to deny this, then surely one would have to suppose that man has always existed in the risen state, in an eternity without beginning.

But this view would abolish all serious anthropology. It would fall, in fact, into a caricature of that Platonism which is supposed to be its principal enemy. G. Lohfink, an advocate of the thesis that resurrection is already achieved in death, has noticed these difficulties. He tries to deal with them by invoking the mediaeval concept of the aevum, an attempt to describe a special mode of time proper to spiritual creatures on the basis of an analysis of angelic existence.

Lohfink sees that death leads not into pure timelessness but into a new kind of time proper to created spirits. The purpose of his argument is primarily to give a defensible sense to biblical imminent expectation which he takes to be the central theme of the message of Jesus. His concern is not with the body-soul problematic from which such speculation emerged but with the necessity, at least as he reads the Gospels, of a discourse that would throw light on the permanent temporal closeness of the Parousia.

Such imminence is feasible, according to Lohfink, if the human person may be said to enter through death into the peculiar time of spirits and so into the fulfillment of history. The idea of the aevum thus becomes the hermeneutically respectable way of saying that the parousia and resurrection take place for each person in the moment of death. Imminent expectation can now be identified with the expectation of death itself, and so warranted for everybody.

… we have now seen that a reflective concept of time, which eschews the naive assumption that time in the beyond is commensurable with earthly time, necessarily leads to our locating the last things — and not simply those concerning the individual, but the end of the world itself — in the moment of death. The last things have thereby become infinitely close to us. Every human being lives in the ‘last age’….”
Greshake & Lohfink, Naherwartung-Augerstehung-Unsterblichkeit

This proposal for a differentiated concept of time entails genuine progress. Yet the queries listed above are in no way rendered redundant by it. Looking more closely, one discovers that this concept of the aevum has simply been added on, in somewhat external fashion, to a predetermined conceptual construct. The point of this construct is the claim that on the other side of death history is already complete. The end of history is ever waiting for the one who dies.

But this is just what can hardly be reconciled with the continuation of history. History is viewed as simultaneously completed and still continuing. What remains unexplained is the relationship between, on the one hand, the ever new beginnings of human life in history, both present and future, and, on the other, the state of fulfillment not only of the individual but of the historical process itself, a state said to be already realized in the world beyond death.

The idea of the aevum is helpful when we are considering the condition of the individual person who enters into perfection while remaining a creature of time. In this domain the concept has a precise meaning. But it says nothing at all which could justify the statement that history as a whole, from whatever point of view, can be seen as already fulfilled.

It is odd that an exegete should appeal in support of this speculation to the “primitive Christian view” for which, in the case of Jesus, “resurrection from the dead follows immediately upon death,” a view which supposedly supplies the “real model of Christian eschatology” which the early Church somehow forgot to apply more widely.” For, to begin with, one can hardly ignore the fact that the message of resurrection “on the third day” posits a clear interim period between the death of the Lord and his rising again. And, more importantly, it is evident that early Christian proclamation never identified the destiny of those who die before the Parousia with the quite special event of the resurrection of Jesus.

That special event depended on Jesus’ unique and irreducible position in the history of salvation. Moreover, there are two respects in which one must bring the charge that all this is a case of aggravated Platonism. First, in such models the body is definitively excluded from the hope for salvation. Secondly the concept of the aevum as here employed hypostatises history in a way which only falls short of Plato’s doctrine of the Ideas by virtue of its logical inconsistencies

Perhaps we have lingered overlong on these theses. That seemed necessary because at the present time they have been almost universally received into the general theological consciousness. Such a consensus, it should now be clear, rests on an extremely fragile foundation.

In the long run, theology and preaching cannot tolerate such a quirky theological patchwork, full of logical leaps and ruptures. As quickly as possible we should bid farewell to this way of thinking which deprives Christian proclamation of an appropriate discourse and thus cancels its own claim to be taken seriously as a form of Christian understanding.

Posted in Death, Pope Benedict XVI, The Resurrection | Tagged elimination of the immortality of the soul, expectation of the Last Day, leaving time for eternity, one of the greatest misunderstandings of Christianity, Platonic dualism, resurrection of the complete human being, separation of body and soul in death, the end of time, the immortality of the soul | Leave a Comment »

Birches — By Robert Frost

March 8, 2013

It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound—that he will never get over it.

I love this poem: the wisdom of an older man who transforms memory and faces death informed by his life. And who is to say he didn’t go by climbing a birch tree, climbing black branches up a snow-white trunk toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more and dipped its top and set him down again, touching the smiling face of a loving God. God bless us all.

*******************************************************

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.

But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.

Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:

You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.

But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.

One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer.

He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.

It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.

I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.

I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Posted in Death, Poetry | Tagged Birches, Robert Frost | Leave a Comment »

A Catholic Anthropology vs. “Death with Dignity” – Derek Jeter

February 25, 2013

We live in a secular world that pulses at times with debates over euthanasia and “physician assisted suicide.” Accompanying social movements in favor of these options sometimes wrap themselves in the slogan “death with dignity,” one of those phrases that would seem to be brook no opposition.

Who would deny dignity to the dying, after all. Yes, you sir, you Catholic bastard! Your leader died hanging off a Roman Cross and you can’t generate the simple human compassion to let a fellow human end their own life of suffering. We’ll give you the pills, all you need is a little apple sauce, for Christ’s sake. That’s right, mix them right up and I’ll prop Granny up so she can have her last meal. You see, it’s a Eucharist of sorts. Can’t you see that, you blind ignorant fool. Hitchens was right, you religious are the bane of modernity.

So here we are again, the target of a mass movement with another powerful social message boiled into a catchy slogan that elides over some real critical Catholic anthropological issues that affect the human community. Give that gentleman with the “Death with Dignity” sign a seat next the lady with “A Woman’s Right to Choose” placard and that young couple distributing those “Equality of Marriage” pamphlets, if you would be so kind.

So why can’t we end life purposefully when it no longer seems worth its cost in suffering? Why not use some extrinsic standard as away to calculate a life’s worth? What’s so wrong with that?

The value of life is measured based on the quality of experiences it supports, its pains and pleasures, the degree to which it promises “happiness,” “contentment,” “well-being” and so forth. But the implications of this calculation are clear. Life constitutes a platform for various kinds of experiences, both desirable and otherwise. Hence, it is a relative good in relation to the experiences it both makes possible and imposes. In Evangelium Vitae, John Paul II criticizes this very sort of relativization, to which he attached the lapidary [vocab: Marked by conciseness, precision, or refinement of expression] phrase “culture of death.”
David Crawford, The Gospel Of Life And The Integrity Of Death

It’s not all relativization, however. Hand in hand with that is the absolutizing of life that manifests itself in obsessive attempts to prevent suffering and death, whatever the ethical cost and by whatever technical means. If doctors are sometimes asked to take positive steps to help end life, they are also sometimes asked to take every measure, however extraordinary, to maintain it. Think of the travails of the legendary Karen Ann Quinlan.

The relativizing and absolutizing tendencies therefore go hand in hand. From this point of view, the relativizing side is predominant with respect to life itself. Only the underlying experiences life supports are conceived of as absolute goods or evils. Hence, life and health are to be managed as instrumental goods by means of medical science and technology, and the same impulse that leads to the indefinite extension of life underlies the desire to manage death by means of clinically procured suicide.
David Crawford, The Gospel Of Life And The Integrity Of Death

The key phrase in the previous paragraph is to “manage death.” That’s what our good modern secular biotechnicians are after, not doctors pursuing wisdom but managers of medical science and technology instruments taking every measure, oblivious to any and all ethical consequences however extraordinary the measure, to maintain life.

“These practices turn death into an object of production. By becoming a product, death is supposed to vanish as a question mark about the nature of being human, a more-than-technological enquiry. The issue of euthanasia is becoming increasingly important because people wish to avoid death as something which happens to me, and replace it with a technical cessation of function…” Ratzinger goes on to say that this “dehumanizing” of death results in the dehumanizing of life: “When human sickness and dying are reduced to the level of technological activity, so is man himself.
[Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life]

When life and health are to managed as instrumental goods by means of medical science and technology, what appears to be the same impulse manifests itself in two separate actions: the first that leads to the indefinite extension of life underlies the desire of the second to manage death by means of clinically procured suicide. Scratch one, tickle the other – it’s all the same. The same nitwits who watched Karen Ann Quinlan waste away on feeding tubes and breathing machines would want to slip her an apple sauce desert laced with a high dose of barbiturates.

The Catholic Impulse
So what is the Church’s teaching on these matters? What is the wisdom of her finest minds? What does DJ say? Ah, but I repeat myself…

The impulse to dominate life and death departs radically from the idea of life as a gift and death as perhaps its most defining moment. It departs from the primordial wisdom contained in the thought we are “given” birth. That we are given birth stands for the larger proposition that our radical and continuing ontological dependency means that life can only follow the structure and logic of its original giftedness in every moment right up to the last…

The same logic governs death. Even if “life is tantamount to some form of activity,” “death is, by contrast, pure passivity, the `night, in which no one can work’ (John 9:4),” as Robert Spaemann puts it. This is why physician assisted suicide, as the name implies, cannot be an act of death but only an act of killing. Spaemann continues, “since we are aware of death and can suffer death in a conscious anticipation, we are able to transform the pure suffering into an actus humanus.” ['Robert Spaemann, Death -- Suicide -- Euthanasia]What can be a human act, then, is preparation for death, which can be a primary shaping force for life.
David Crawford, The Gospel Of Life And The Integrity Of Death

The above begins to inform us of the true meaning of compassion. Passion has long been taken over by its erotic meanings and lost its underlying truth of suffering, as in “the passion of the Christ.” Evangelium Vitae makes the argument that authentic compassion — as the word itself implies — means a “suffering with,” rather than the elimination of suffering at whatever ethical or moral cost.

Genuine compassion can never be reduced to what alleviates suffering, nor to the sentiments that come from such acts. True compassion is an education in dying for both the sufferer and the one who gives compassion for that suffering. “She is sleeping. Why don’t you go back and get some sleep?” “No, I want to be here when she wakes up.” Death with dignity is a death in Christ, accompanied by acts of compassion, not the uninformed feverish activities of managers of medical science and technology.

Now before we get much further here I know I will have to deal with one of those managers asking how a good Catholic death of the middle ages is in anyway different from a good Catholic death in the 21^st century. The answer is no different at all in many ways although the previous ages gave us many more deaths that could have been prevented and deaths that may have been much more painful. I am not against alleviating pain and suffering. I am against suspending the dying process and controlling it so that it does not progress naturally.

Some in the Death with Dignity crowd seek to dispel the notion that self-destruction in such circumstances is an act of despair. They try to spin it as an act of transcendence, a radical act of freedom:

It is a question of refusing to submit to the diminished capacity and dignity that come with suffering, illness and dying. It is the refusal, the No that is important here. The act of will itself therefore seems to be the only possible point of transcendence. This final (and yes, desperate) assertion of the subject belies a more primitive impulse than the desire to escape from unbearable suffering. It manifests the yearning in the face of seeming helplessness to take life — by seizing control of death — into one’s own hands.

From this odd point of view — if this point of transcendence can be understood as an ersatz surmounting of death — the absolutizing tendency reemerges…. Both the idea of self-destruction as self-preservation and the technical pursuit of deathlessness are ploys to achieve forgetfulness. The terror nevertheless remains because at some point death must be faced. Paradoxically, then, the effect of these movements is to increase terror while all the time making it difficult to think very seriously about either life or death.
David Crawford, The Gospel Of Life And The Integrity Of Death

So what is thinking more seriously about life and death? Obviously in the secular world this kind of thinking hasn’t taken place and to begin it by viewing the life and death of Jesus would probably be the proverbial non-starter. Or would it? Circumstances seem to provoke a willingness to listen to Jesus. Flying a plane into a building where thousands are working is one I can think of.

Our life and the goodness of life is not a set of experiences we can use to justify the extension of life by any and all means possible. One of the reasons I can say this is because claiming “Life is a good” because it supports a set of experiences, however desirable, cannot possibly account for the fullness of life’s goodness however. This is because we cannot think of our lives as merely a set of experiences.

Like every other earthly organism, life for the human constitutes a constant struggle to remain in existence but man is at the same time, different from the rest of cosmic reality. If all organisms possess a “nature” that encloses their “growth, maturity, decline, and death,” it is not the same for man. His existence is “not the unfolding and fulfillment of `nature,’ but the enactment of a `history.” [Romano Guardini, The Last Things: Concerning Death Purification after Death, Resurrection,Judgment, and Eternity] Organisms cannot be said to have a history, yet the human person’s life is only intelligible as such. Aristotle reminds us of the ironic saying that we should count no one happy so long as he is still living.

“So constitutive for [human] life is the possibility of not-being that its very being is essentially a hovering over this abyss, a skirting of its brink thus being itself has become a constant possibility rather than a given state, ever anew to be laid hold of in opposition to its ever-present contrary, not-being, which will inevitably engulf it in the end.”
Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology

Like history in general, personal history cannot possibly be “one damn thing after another” until the last thing. Form is necessary for a whole, and being a whole is necessary for personal history. The quest to manage life and death implies a rejection of this final and defining form. The endless ability to redo things or start again would guarantee this. In the end, technical deathlessness, were it actually possible, would drain life and action of their drama and importance rather than extend or heighten them. Horizontal deathlessness would therefore not in fact be human deathlessness. It would be more like death by ennui.
David Crawford, The Gospel Of Life And The Integrity Of Death

In the Catholic anthropology, man is called to a fullness of life which far exceeds the dimensions of his earthly existence, because it consists in sharing the very life of God:

The loftiness of this supernatural vocation reveals the greatness and the inestimable value of human life even in its temporal phase. Life in time, in fact, is the fundamental condition, the initial stage and an integral part of the entire unified process of human existence. It is a process which, unexpectedly and undeservedly, is enlightened by the promise and renewed by the gift of divine life, which will reach its full realization in eternity (cf. 1 John 3:1-2).

At the same time, it is precisely this supernatural calling which highlights the relative character of each individual’s earthly life. After all, life on earth is not an “ultimate” but a “penultimate” reality; even so, it remains a sacred reality entrusted to us, to be preserved with a sense of responsibility and brought to perfection in love and in the gift of ourselves to God and to our brothers and sisters.
Evangelium Vitae

As a Catholic, I demand a death that allows me to contribute to the history of my life. My death as part of my life in Christ.

Posted in David S. Crawford, Death | Tagged death as an object of production, Death with Dignity, Evangelium Vitae, life and health as instrumental goods, physician assisted suicide, relativizing and absolutizing of life, Robert Spaemann, The value of life | Leave a Comment »

Nobody Gets Too Much Heaven — Derek Jeter

February 18, 2013

The above may seem like the ditziest entry to have on a Catholic spirituality site, but my notion of love has come under a kind of assault recently by the notorious Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici who has played such a key role in my tragic Loving Luisa posts. Careful: This woman might start hanging around monasteries for further victims.

I started to write another Loving Luisa post to add to that continuing opera but it makes me so at such odds with myself it was impossible to continue. So let me talk Bee Gees for a while. When I was seducing young women in the late 70s and 80s this song provided a musical backdrop. Now the way I love is so dramatically different but the passion this song invokes in me has never really changed. Nobody gets too much loving anymore. Not in this fallen world, even when I was getting my brain sexually drilled by 20 somethings I was never getting any love. And I never knew it, of course.

And now when I have moved beyond profane love, I thought I had met a perfect woman who actually fell in love with me first – who was genuinely sad when she thought she wouldn’t see me. It took me a week to figure out what she was experiencing. Sadness at not seeing me? What could it be? It had been so long since anyone had even looked at me with any sense of appreciation at all. And all I needed to do was focus on her. As long as all I had to do was concern myself with her well-being and good, the love flowed effortlessly back to me. I was so happy.

High as mountain and harder to climb? Not at all. And it fueled me with hope. I sensed for the first time that oft misunderstood line from St. Ireneus: “the glory of God is man fully alive.” It may have been profane love but I wasn’t committing any sin that Dante hadn’t trail blazed earlier. It was teaching me about divine love. Beatrice, Luisa, what’s the difference here? Hence all those Dante posts I dropped on you dear readers. My loves tend toward the wide screen.

The glory of God consists in the realization of this manifestation and communication of His goodness, for which the world was created. God made us “to be His sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of His will, to the praise of His glorious grace,”(Ephesians 1:5-6) for as St Irenaeus states; “the glory of God is man fully alive; moreover man’s life is the vision of god: if God’s revelation through creation has already obtained life for all the beings that dwell on earth, how much more will the Word’s manifestation of the Father obtain life for those who see God.” The ultimate purpose of creation is that God “who is the creator of all things may at last be all in all, thus simultaneously assuring His own glory and our beatitude.”(1 Corinthians 15: 28)
Paragraph 294, The Catechism

And to think my heart was being understood by an atheist added another dimension of understanding that was magnificently paradoxical – God’s practical joke on the Catholic Apologist Blogger.

“And if flows through me and it flows through you and I love you so much more. You’re my life.” That is the love of God. God does become your life. The way Luisa would become part of my life in a way. Not THE way but just “a” way.

“I can see beyond forever. Everything we are will never die. Loving is such a beautiful thing.” Our glory and his beatitude.

Sin means that those who see God must first pass through death, and it is likewise thus for those who persevere in true love, whether in the family or in the consecrated state. This is precisely the meaning of an ecclesial state of life. After the Fall, these can only be the practice of death — the leveraging of death into the death-like loss of self that is love.

The “death-like” character of love is found in the fact that what we finally desire in love is to give ourselves away. De Lubac has expressed this paradox by telling us that what we really desire in “beatitude” is to serve, in “vision” to adore, in “freedom” to be dependent, in “possession” to be in “ecstasy.” Like Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Luisa had found herself a prize (“I don’t care if you don’t want me, I’m yours.”)

Love’s dangers, vulnerabilities, and sufferings point to something more primitive than sin, something just beyond the reach of our existence. There is a paradox, a certain necessary tension, in this death-like foundation for love…Man, created in the image of God and therefore possessing the mysterious depth and capacity, and therefore “desire,” for communion with God, is incapable of attaining from his own resources this one and final, and therefore in a real sense “only,” fulfillment. The only act that can yield this fulfillment is the act of reception. Ratzinger tells us that death therefore forces a choice. It is the choice between the disposition of loving trust and that of trying in futility to take life and death into our own power.

The above paragraphs were culled from a marvelous essay on The Gospel Of Life And The Integrity Of Death that David Crawford has in the current issue of Communio. In this case we are talking less about death as much as Luisa’s attempt to take our love into her own power, her lack of a loving trust.

It just makes me sad. I don’t understand why she doesn’t understand. Until she wipes away my tears, she will never get it.

Posted in Death, Loving Luisa, Music | Tagged Bee Gees, Noboy Gets Too Much Heaven, The "death-like" character of love, the glory of God is man fully alive | Leave a Comment »

The Art of Dying Well – St. Robert Bellarmine

October 30, 2012

Bishop, Confessor and Doctor of the Church.

Bellarmine is a name that pushed its way into my consciousness as I listened to a series of lectures on Church history. Cardinal Francis George named him as the man who set up the juridical framework of the Church-as-State back in the 16th century that Vatican II sought to reassess when it looked to encounter the world in the 1960s. And there he was again in the Galileo controversy. And finally, as scholar and thinker of the faith, I liked the thin volume he left behind, “The Art of Dying Well.” Some reading selections here. It also makes a nice segue from Michelangelo’s The Deluge now that Hurricane Sandy might be bearing down upon us all.

*******************************************************

The Most Important Of All Sciences
Being now free from Public business and enabled to attend to myself, when in my usual retreat I consider, what is the reason why so very few endeavor to learn the “Art of dying well,” (which all men ought to know,) I can find no other cause than that mentioned by the Wise man: “The perverse are hard to be corrected, and the number of fools is infinite.” (Ecclesiastes 1:15) For what folly can be imagined greater than to neglect that Art, on which depend our highest and eternal interests; whilst on the other hand we learn with great labor, and practice with no less ardor, other almost innumerable arts, in order either to preserve or to increase perishable things?

Now every one will admit, that the “Art of dying Well” is the most important of all sciences; at least every one who seriously reflects, how after death we shall have to give an account to God of everything we did, spoke, or thought of, during our whole life, even of every idle word; and that the devil being our accuser, our conscience a witness, and God the Judge, a sentence of happiness or misery everlasting awaits us. We daily see, how when judgment is expected to be given, even on affairs of the slightest consequence, the interested party enjoy no rest, but consult at one time the lawyers, at another the solicitors, now the judges, and then their friends or relations.

But in death when a “Cause” is pending before the Supreme Judge, connected with life or death eternal, often is the sinner compelled, when unprepared, oppressed by disease, and scarcely possessed of reason, to give an account of those things on which when in health, he had perhaps never once reflected. This is the reason why miserable mortals rush in crowds to hell; and as St. Peter saith, “If the just man shall scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear?” (1Peter 4:1)

I have therefore considered it would be useful to exhort myself, in the first place, and then my Brethren, highly to esteem the “Art of dying Well.” And if there be any who, as yet, have not acquired this Art from other learned teachers, I trust they will not despise, at least those Precepts which I have endeavored to collect, from Holy Writ and the Ancient Fathers.

But before I treat of these Precepts, I think it useful to inquire into the nature of death; whether it is to be ranked among good or among evil things. Now if death be considered absolutely in itself, without doubt it must be called an evil, because that which is opposed to life we must admit cannot be good.

By The Envy Of The Devil
Moreover, as the Wise man saith: “God made not death, but by the envy of the devil, death came into the world.” (Wisdom 11:13-24) With these words St. Paul also agrees, when he saith: “Wherefore as by one man sin entered into this world, and by sin death: and so death passed upon all men in whom all have sinned.” Romans 5:12. If then God did not make death, certainly it cannot be good, because everything which God hath made is good, according to the words of Moses: “And God saw all things that he had made, and they were very good.”

But although death cannot be considered good in itself, yet the wisdom of God hath so seasoned it as it were, that from death many blessings arise. Hence David exclaims; “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints:” and the Church speaking of Christ saith: Who by His death hath destroyed our death, and by His resurrection hath regained life.” Now death that hath destroyed death and regained life, cannot but be very good: wherefore if every death cannot be called good, yet at least some may. Hence St. Ambrose did not hesitate to write a book entitled, “On the Advantages of Death;” in which treatise he clearly proves that death, although produced by sin, possesses its peculiar advantages.

An End To The Miseries Of This Life
There is also another reason which proves that death, although an evil in itself, can, by the grace of God, produce many blessings. For, first, there is this great blessing, that death puts an end to the numerous miseries of this life. Job thus eloquently complains of the evils of this our present state: “Man born of a woman, living for a short time, is filled with many miseries. Who cometh forth like a flower and is destroyed, and fleeth as a shadow, and never continueth in the same state.” Job: 14:1

And Ecclesiastes saith: “I praised the dead rather than the living: and I judged him happier than them both, that is not yet born, nor hath seen the evils that are under the sun” (Ecclesiasticus 4: 2-3) likewise adds: “Great labor is created for all men, and a heavy yoke is upon the children of Adam, from the day of their coming out of their mother’s womb, until the day of their burial into the mother of all.” (Ecclesiasticus 40) The Apostle too complains of the miseries of this life: “Unhappy man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” (Epistle to Romans 7: 24.)

The Grace Of Christ
From these testimonies, therefore, of Holy Writ it is quite evident, that death possesses an advantage, in freeing us from the miseries of this life. But it also hath a still more excellent advantage, because it may become the gate from a prison to a Kingdom. This was revealed by our Lord to St. John the Evangelist, when for his faith he had been exiled into, the isle of Patmos: “And I heard a voice from heaven saying to me: Write, blessed are the dead who die in the Lord. From henceforth now, saith the spirit, that they may rest from their labors: for their works follow them.” (Apocalypse 14:13)

Truly “blessed” is the death of the saints, which by the command of the Heavenly King frees the soul from the prison of the flesh, and conducts her to a celestial Kingdom; where just souls sweetly rest after all their labors, and for the reward of their good works, receive a crown of glory. To the souls in purgatory also, death brings no slight benefit, for it delivers them from the fear of death, and makes them certain of possessing one day, eternal Happiness. Even to wicked men themselves, death seems to be of some advantage; for in freeing them from the body, it prevents the measure of their punishment from increasing.

On account of these excellent advantages, death to good men seems not horrible, but sweet; not terrible, but lovely. Hence St. Paul securely exclaims: “For to me, to live is Christ; and to die is gain having a desire to be dissolved and to be with Christ:” and his first Epistle to the Thessalonians, he saith: “We will not have you ignorant, brethren, concerning them that are asleep, that you be not sorrowful, even as others who have not hope” (4:12.)

There lived some time ago a certain holy lady, named Catherine Adorna, of Genoa; she was so inflamed with the love of Christ, that with the most ardent desires she wished to be “dissolved,” and to depart to her Beloved: hence, seized as it were with a love for death, she often praised it as most beautiful and most lovely, blaming it only for this that it fled from those who desired it, and was found by those who fled from it.

From these considerations then we may conclude, that death, as produced by sin, is an evil; but that, by the grace of Christ who condescended to suffer death for us, it hath become in many ways salutary, lovely, and to be desired.

Posted in Death, St. Robert Bellarmine | Tagged death, St. Robert Bellarmine, The Art of Dying Well | Leave a Comment »

The World Is a Narrow Bridge: THE FEAR OF DEATH Part II – Rabbi Kushner

May 11, 2012

A free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation of life, not of death.
SPINOZA, Ethics

***********************************

Some people believe in life in heaven after death because it is the only thing that makes the troubles and tragedies of this life bearable. In the absence of any proof that there is no heaven, they cling to the faith that there must be. If God is all-powerful and loving, He should be both willing and able to provide a happy ending to our all-too-brief and frustrating lives on earth. If God could create life out of nothing, why can’t He restore a life that was already there?

Benjamin Franklin, shortly before his death, penned his own obituary: “The body of B. Franklin, printer, like the cover of an old book, its contents torn out…. But the work shall not be wholly lost, for it will, as he believed, appear once more in a new and more perfect edition, corrected and amended by the Author.”

I would like to believe it. It would be a source of immeasurable bliss to think that when I die, I would be reunited with my son and make up for all those years of being together that I was denied when he died at age fourteen. But that joyful possibility is one of the things that makes me skeptical about the notion of an afterlife. I learned early that the world is not designed to make me happy. Books and movies can be manipulated by their creators to have happy endings; real life doesn’t always work out that way.

More than that, I am uncomfortable with a faith system that posits a definition of God and then decides “what God has to do” in order to live up to their definition. It sounds a bit like saying, If the facts conflict with my theology, I would rather ignore the facts than question my theology.

My colleague Professor Neil Gillman, in his excellent study The Death of Death, points out something I had never noticed before. The last line of the Passover Seder, when Jews celebrate God’s redeeming of our ancestors from bondage in Egypt, describes God destroying the Angel of Death, as if anticipating a parallel between the Egyptian Exodus and a deliverance from the enslavement to mortality that limits us. We may no longer be slaves to Pharaoh, but our bodies are slaves to the Angel of Death, who will one day come to claim us. On Passover, we yearn to be freed from that limitation.

My family and I will continue to end our Seder meal with that image, but as we do so, I am chastened by Gillman’s cautionary words: “The surest way to trivialize any eschatological doctrine is to understand it as literal truth, as a prediction of events that will take place as they are described in some eventual future.” To me, the vision of God destroying Death offers not the promise of physically living again or of living forever but a poetic expression of confidence that there are some things about a person who links his or her life with God — deeds of kindness, medical breakthroughs, great works of art — that permit that person to outlive even his or her own death.

A reality check would remind us that our bodies decay and return to the earth, but so many of our after-death fantasies assume that we will still have bodies, probably because we can’t imagine what it would feel like to exist without them. I have always been drawn to the vision of the afterlife offered by Maimonides, the great Jewish philosopher of the twelfth century. He posited that, after we die, the righteous are rewarded by having their disembodied souls spend eternity in the presence of God, and the wicked are punished by missing out on that reward. My only problem with that view is that it assumes a duality, an essential divide between body and soul, which is more of a Greek notion than a biblical one.

Let me then offer my own belief on the subject: We don’t have to be afraid of dying because it is not really death that scares us. We are afraid of not having lived. In my nearly fifty years as a clergyman, I have been at the bedside of many, many dying people, young and old, religious and freethinkers, successful in life and less successful. They taught me the profound truth that terminally ill people are not afraid of death. When you are very sick, when little by little your body stops being able to do the things it has always been able to do, death may be the only cure for what ails you. There are three things that terrify the very ill person more than the prospect of dying.

They are afraid of pain, they are afraid that people will abandon them while they are still alive, and they are afraid that they will die having wasted their lives, having never accomplished anything that will cause people to remember them when they are gone. For most people, the prospect of nullification, of having left no mark on the world, is more frightening than the prospect of not living forever. The real fear of dying, I am convinced, is the fear that we will leave this world with our tasks unfinished, and the best way, indeed the only way, to defeat death is to live fearlessly and purposefully.

When it comes to the fear, of pain and of abandonment, the best thing that has happened in my lifetime has been the emergence of the hospice movement. I was recently invited to address a conference of hospice workers and volunteers, and I began by congratulating them on having changed the average American’s definition of a good death. Had you asked the average person a few years ago for his notion of a good death, he probably would have said “to go to sleep and not wake up,” echoing Woody Allen’s words, “I don’t mind dying; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” Today, hospice has taught us to define a good death as one that sees us surrounded by family and loved ones, giving us the opportunity to say good-bye, to thank them for having cared for us and shared their lives with us, leaving no words unspoken that need to be spoken.

And hospice has persuaded doctors to let go, to forgo uncomfortable, invasive treatments that would only bring the patient a few more days or weeks of discomfort. Doctors no longer see assigning a patient to hospice as giving up or admitting defeat. As one doctor put it, when it comes to the terminally ill, medical care should usually involve more care and less medicine. American society has been slower, however, to recognize the need of the terminally ill for human companionship. Perhaps because we feel so inadequate to do anything helpful (“I never know what to say”), perhaps because it involves looking in the mirror and seeing a preview of our own mortality, we visit the terminally ill less often, we phone them less often, and we spend less time with them.

I remember a colleague of mine, an outstanding rabbi and pastor, who once confided to me, “I have a congregant whom I like a lot. He’s about my age, a good friend, an occasional tennis partner. He’s in the hospital with cancer and doesn’t have much time left. I know I ought to visit him, but for some reason I never get around to it.” I suggested, “Might it be because when you visit him, you see yourself one day in that situation and that’s scary?” David Kessler, author of The Needs of the Dying, has written, “We may never feel more alone than when we ourselves are dying.” Elsewhere, Kessler pictures the hospitalized terminally ill person saying, “You can talk to me, you can talk about me.: Just don’t talk without me, as if I weren’t here. I’m not dead yet.”

Recently, a close friend had to bury his ninety-seven-year-old aunt. He told me that when he visited her at the assisted-living facility where she spent her last years, the staff would comment on his frequent visits, telling him, “You have no idea how many people here go for weeks and months without a single visitor.”

I know from my own experience in hospitals and nursing homes that it is not pleasant visiting the seriously ill. We feel there is so little we can do for them. When we do bring ourselves to do it, we should realize that our presence, our caring enough to come, does a lot for the dying person. It may not extend her life, but it reassures her that people know that she is still very much alive. Kessler offers a beautiful image of what we can do when a loved one is dying. He suggests that we escort them to the door of death the way we would accompany a friend leaving on a journey to his or her gate at the airport. (Given today’s airport rules, we might think of accompanying them to the security transit point.)

But in case after case the dying have taught me that what frightened them more than pain or loneliness was the fear that they had wasted their lives, that they had used up their allotted time on earth keeping busy but never really having lived. Earlier, I cited the theory that the knowledge Adam and Eve acquired when they ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the knowledge that elevated them above the level of animals, was the knowledge that they would one day die, and I asked how that awareness of mortality could be called good and bad, as the Bible describes the fruit.

The answer may be that death is not good (except where it brings release from unbearable suffering), but the knowledge that we are destined to die can be good if it moves us to take our choices and preferences more seriously. If our time is limited, we realize that what we put off today, we may never get around to doing. It has been said that death, like birth, provides life with a temporal frame, a beginning and an end. Without them, there can be no middle. In the words of Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, who wrote so meaningfully on the subject, “It is the denial of death that is partially responsible for people living empty, purposeless lives; for when you live as if you’ll live forever, it becomes too easy to postpone the things you know you must do.”

Death does not negate the meaning of our lives. Death helps to define our lives. Remember, the word “define” means “to set boundaries.” Death marks the end of life in the same way that a period marks the end of a sentence. It doesn’t rob the sentence of meaning; it clarifies what the meaning of the sentence is. Your life is not meaningless just because it doesn’t go on forever. It is precisely because our lives do not go on forever that our choices and values have significance.

But what if we understand that we are mortal yet get the frightening feeling that we may be running out of time with a large part of our agenda unfinished? What if, as we grow older and notice changes in our health and vigor, as we read more obituary notices for people our age and younger, we find ourselves thinking less about life and more about the prospect of dying? To speak of death in the abstract, to speak of the inevitability of death for all mankind, is a philosophical-theological conversation. To confront the prospect of one’s own imminent death is an act of immense courage. My friend Forrest Church, a Unitarian minister in New York and author of a dozen books, recently sent me the manuscript of his next book. In an accompanying note, he told me that this book would be his last; he was dying of esophageal cancer. The book would be called Love and Death.

How does a man who has dealt with death professionally for years deal with the prospect of his own death? First, he overcomes the temptation to blame himself for contracting a fatal illness, not asking himself, “What did I do to deserve this?” whether in terms of unhealthy living or moral misbehavior. Too often, asking why either becomes an effort to find someone to blame or suggests that if we had never made any wrong choices in our lives, we might have lived forever. Church writes, “The hard truth is … we all die of something. Vegetarians die. Joggers die. Even people with low cholesterol die….However we may have lived, the ultimate culprit is not sin or squalor but life. Life draws death in its glorious train.”

Next, he realizes that his death will be a source of anguish for his family and friends, and it is his obligation to be aware of that even if he won’t be around to see it. He reaches out to them, articulating his fears so that they will feel free to express theirs, forgiving and seeking forgiveness. In that way, the loneliest thing any of us will ever do becomes just a bit less lonely.

And finally he draws comfort from his faith, not faith in a God of happy endings for good people and not faith in the certainty of a life in the hereafter but the faith that life is not meaningless just because it is not endless. “Everyone suffers but not everyone despairs. Despair is a consequence of suffering only when affliction cuts us off from others. The same suffering that leads one person to lose all hope can as easily promote empathy, a felt appreciation for other people’s pain.” It can also lead us to take pleasure in savoring one’s time with loved ones, knowing it will be brief and therefore all the more precious.

Over the years, my appreciation of the books of Philip Roth has been enhanced by the realization that he and I are about the same age. I could identify with his characters, from the randy adolescents of Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy ‘s Complaint to the rueful middle-aged figure of Nathan Zuckerman.

When, in his most recent novels, I find heroes who are his (and my) age obsessed with the prospect of growing old and dying, I can’t help feeling that this reflects issues with which Roth himself is grappling, and it saddens me that a writer of Roth’s immense talent should be focusing on how little he has left rather than on how much. It bothers me because I recognize that same tendency in myself as I grow into my seventies and have to make allowances for physical and mental things I can no longer do as easily as I once did. It is the plaint of Ecclesiastes, who finds himself in old age thinking, I have striven to do so much and now I am running out of time and wondering what the point of it all was.

In contrast with this obsession with the gathering darkness, I am drawn to the attitude of the artist Marc Chagall, who just before his death at age ninety-seven completed his last painting entitled Towards Another Light, showing a young painter with wings (as if ready for flight) working at his easel and an angel descending from heaven to carry him off. I would like to see a person’s last years (including my own) guided by the words of Spinoza that appear in the epigraph to this post, “A free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation of life, not of death.”

The sin of Ecclesiastes — to focus too much on the fear of death, to see it as canceling out everything you have done in your lifetime — gives death more power than it deserves. Death is not the final word. Your life is the story; death is only punctuation. We sin against life and against everything that is holy and valuable in life if we let the fear of death rob us of our freedom to enjoy as much life as we are granted.

I read Roth’s novel Everyman shortly after it was published, not realizing at the time that Roth had taken the title from a well-known medieval morality play and modeled his leading character after the hero of the play, a man who is terrified at the prospect of dying and dismayed to learn that neither friends nor family nor worldly success can postpone his passage. Happily, there is evidence that many people do deal with growing old and approaching the end of life more like Chagall than like Roth’s protagonists. After Roth’s novel appeared, two social scientists wrote to The New York Times Book Review citing the results of their research on middle-class Americans in their seventies. They wrote, “Only a small minority `worry about oblivion.’ Most accept their lives, including illness, loss and their many past misdeeds, and purposefully engage with the present…. Some despair, but they tend to be the same people who were also despairing in young and middle adulthood…. We share this note lest too many aging Americans take permission from Roth to dwell in the past and fear the future rather than seize the present.”

My own experience endorses theirs. People are living longer, and most of them are no longer spending their last years watching television in an empty apartment and waiting for the end. More and more of them are finding useful, creative things to do, mentoring young people, organizing book clubs, and keeping themselves vital as they do so.

I have two specific suggestions for those people (and I include myself in their number) who realize that the years behind significantly outnumber the years ahead, and for those who may find themselves looking forward to death because they find their current lives unsatisfying. We have to cleanse our souls of accumulated bitterness, envy, and resentment. We have to get over our anger at people who may have hurt, cheated, or betrayed us, most of whom may be long dead themselves or long gone from our lives. I would say to people, Why do you insist on carrying that heavy baggage into whatever is waiting for you? Why are you giving those people such power over you, to define you as a loser, a bitter, jealous person? Let go and travel light.

And second, we have to be able to focus on one or two meaningful things in our lives that we can feel we did well. A life doesn’t have to be remarkable to be meaningful. If you were not that successful in business, if you never earned a lot of money, you can focus on the fact that you lived and worked with integrity, that you were a good neighbor and earned the respect of your coworkers. If as a mother you are disappointed at the way your children turned out, you can still take pride in your ability to go on loving them and caring about them despite your disappointment. Love them because of who you want to be, not just because of who you want them to be.

If you worry that no one cares about you now that you are old and failing, find times to surround yourself with friends and family to give you the message of how much they care and to celebrate with them what your life has been about. Many years ago, when I was a young rabbi preparing to officiate at my first funeral (and only the third one at which I had been present), an older colleague gave me a valuable piece of advice. He told me, “Every life is a unique story, one that has never happened before. Your task as a eulogizer is to find that unique dimension and build your eulogy around it, so that friends and family will have that to remember.”

When Thornton Wilder wrote his novel in an effort to make sense of the death of innocent people, he had them die when a bridge collapsed. Why did he have them die that way? Why not in a fire, an automobile accident, a plague, or at the hands of a violent murderer? Wilder may have been using the image of the fragile rope bridge over a chasm as a symbol of the precariousness of all of our lives. Whether we understand the bridge as carrying us to a better world or just taking us to tomorrow’s problems and possibilities, each of us every day is making his or her way across a shaky bridge, aware that something might happen to us at any moment but at the same time realizing that if all we can think about is the fear of falling, we will never get anywhere in our lives. Feel the fear but cross the bridge anyway.

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, one of the dominant personalities in the world of Eastern European Hasidic Judaism was a man named Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlay. He enchanted his followers with his enigmatic stories and sayings, many of which are pored over to this day by theologians and psychiatrists alike. One of his many sayings became a popular song in Israel several years ago at a particularly tense time in Israeli society. This whole world, he said, is nothing but a narrow bridge, and for those who would cross it, the most important thing is not to be afraid.

We too, the only creatures who live with the daily awareness of our mortality, may feel that we are called on to cross that narrow bridge every day of our lives. If we let ourselves be paralyzed by the fear of falling into the chasm, we will never get anywhere or achieve anything. It will be the fear of death, not the fact of death, that will rob our lives of meaning. For us, as for Rabbi Nachman’s disciples, the most important thing to remember is not to be afraid.

Posted in Death | Tagged Death helps to define our lives, Passover Seder | Leave a Comment »

The World Is a Narrow Bridge: THE FEAR OF DEATH Part I – Rabbi Kushner

May 10, 2012

In its entirety, all the world
is a too-narrow bridge
and the key
is to not be afraid
at all.
(Attributed to Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav)

Rather than live on in the hearts and minds of my fellow men, I’d prefer to live on in my apartment.
WOODY ALLEN

****************************************

When I was fifteen years old, I fell in love with the biblical book of Ecclesiastes. I loved Ecclesiastes then for much the same reasons that my fifteen-year-old grandson loves Jon Stewart and The Daily Show on television, for the same reasons that fifteen-year-olds have for decades responded to J. D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye – because it seemed to challenge the hypocritical pieties of the adult world that controlled my life. “All is vanity. What does a man gain from all the toil at which he toils under the sun?” (Ecclesiastes 1:2). “I amassed silver and gold, more than anyone before me … and it was all futile, there was no real value to it” (Ecclesiastes 2:8-11). “Be not excessively righteous nor excessively wise lest you bring yourself to destruction” (Ecclesiastes 7:16).

When I was thirty-five years old and working toward a doctoral degree in the Bible, I returned to the study of Ecclesiastes and discovered another dimension of the anonymous sage who wrote it. Now I came to see him as a middle-aged man who worried that all he had worked so hard for — wealth, fame, pleasure — would ultimately disappear, and nothing would remain. He was asking, “What is worth investing my time and energy in? What will endure?”

Then, the year I turned fifty, my father died, and I became the oldest living member of my family. I turned again to Ecclesiastes, making it the focus of my book When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough, and for the third time in my life, I thought I finally understood it. Now I saw the author of Ecclesiastes as an old man, terrified at the prospect of dying. Now what frightened him was not the thought that everything he had worked for would disappear. It was the fear that he would disappear. The prospect of dying cast a pall over everything he had done and everything he still yearned to do, shrouding it with an air of futility.

He had met every challenge life had put to him, but he would not be able to meet the challenge of defeating death. Ernest Becker, in his classic work The Denial of ‘Death, writes, “Of all things that move men, one of the principal ones is the terror of death…. It is the basic fear that influences all others, a fear from which no one is immune.”

All living things, when faced with danger, struggle to escape and survive. But only human beings are haunted by the knowledge of their ultimate mortality even when they are not in mortal danger. Some years ago, I heard a lecture on the biblical story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The speaker asked, “What was the knowledge that Adam and Eve acquired when they ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad? Was the story meant to teach us that they learned that some things are good and others are bad, that they acquired a conscience? Or was the story less about the meaning of the fruit and more about their act of disobedience, that having been given one rule, they broke it?”

The speaker said that by eating the fruit, they learned something that was both good and bad. They learned that one day they would die, and having learned how brief and fragile a human life could be, they would never again be able to think of their lives in the same way. God’s warning to the first humans, “for on the day you eat of it, you will die” (Genesis 2:17), would be understood to mean not that they would die instantly (they didn’t) but that they would realize, in a way, no other creature does, that they were fated one day to die.

The question of how the knowledge of our inevitable death can be called both “good and bad” is an important one that we will have to deal with. But the speaker went on to justify his interpretation by calling our attention to what happens immediately after Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit. The very next verse tells us they realized that they were naked and they were embarrassed (Genesis 3:7). Why were they embarrassed, given that there was literally no one else in the world to see them in their nakedness?

They were embarrassed to have bodies, not because there was anything wrong with their bodies, some parts too big and others too small, but because it was their bodies that made them mortal, vulnerable to illness, injury, and death. Their bodies would one day betray them, made up as they were of bones that could break, organs that could fail, blood that could become infected. If it weren’t for their physical bodies, they would be able to go on living eternally.

We human beings are caught up in a perpetual struggle between the yearnings of the spirit and the demands of the body. No matter how much we cultivate the spirit, no matter how much we strive to subordinate our bodies to it through prayer, dieting, and sexual restraint, we can never escape the realization that in the end, our physical bodies will have the ultimate victory. They will give out, and, no matter how pious we are, we will die.

The fact that only the human being is burdened every day of his life by the knowledge of death’s inevitability may explain why the author of the Twenty-third Psalm speaks of the “valley of the shadow of death.” Long before someone comes to the point of actually dying, the prospect of death, the inevitability of death, casts a shadow over his days.

The knowledge of our mortality spurs people to do great things in an effort to cheat death. Families have children so that their name, their values, and their DNA will live on into the next generation. People who never have children find other ways of achieving a form of immortality. Artists, writers, and composers labor to fashion works of art that future generations will continue to cherish.

Doctors strive to find cures for diseases, whether in the hope that future generations will invoke their names with gratitude, the way we speak of the Salk vaccine against polio, or as a symbolic victory for the human spirit in the fight against disease. Physician and author Dr. Sherwin Nuland has written, “Of all the professions, medicine is one most likely to attract people with high personal anxieties about dying. We become doctors because our ability to cure gives us power over the death of which we are so afraid.”

If we were pure spirit, if we were angels, we could happily exist forever without worrying about illness, physical decline, and death. If we were only animals, we could live, age, and perish without the distraction of dreading the end of our lives. If we were pure spirit, we would never be seduced by gluttony, envy, or sexual desire. If we were bodies without souls, without conscience, we could indulge in our fill of sensual pleasure without pangs of guilt. But because we are unique creatures that combine body and spirit, we crave religion to guide and elevate us, and at the same time, we resent it for making us feel guilty whenever we are tempted to do things that most normal people are tempted to do. (I have long suspected that many anti-Semites are really feeling hatred for the Jew from Nazareth for imposing Christian morality on them.)

When we are young, we act on the assumption that our time is unlimited. Young people are not uncomfortable wasting time because they believe they have an endless supply of it. To them, middle age is unimaginably far off and death is too far over the horizon even to be glimpsed. It has been said that eighteen-year-old young men make the best soldiers and the worst drivers because they can’t imagine they won’t live forever. When I have had to officiate at the funeral of a young person, a victim of disease or accident, I have found adults to be saddened by the tragedy. But the dead young person’s friends feel more angry than sad. They feel betrayed. “This is so unfair; this is not supposed to happen, ” they say.

But soon enough, the time comes when those who survive have to come to terms with their mortality, when they realize that no matter how wisely they eat or how strenuously they exercise, they will not live forever. How then do they avoid the fate of Ecclesiastes, deciding that nothing matters because, despite their best efforts, they will die one day and the world will keep going without them?

It is when people confront these kinds of questions that they turn to religion. How does religion guide us in not letting the prospect of death cast a cloud of futility over our lives? Religious guidance typically goes in one of three directions. Sometimes religion tries to justify an individual’s death as appropriate, part of God’s plan. I have seen life and death in this world compared to a tapestry seen from the wrong side, a jumble of long and short threads fitting no discernible pattern.

But seen from above, from God’s perspective, the long threads, the knotted threads, and the threads cut short all fit together to make up a work of beauty. Or premature death may be a reward for having successfully completed one’s life mission. Buddhism speaks of a death as “the drop of water returning to its source in the ocean.” Or it may be seen as part of God’s long-range plan, impossible for us on earth to comprehend.

Sometimes religion tries to banish the terror of death by assuring us that death is not real. It offers us a promise of the hereafter, a life beyond this life, a realm where our spirits will have shed their earthly bodies and will live on eternally. In heaven, we will still have a sense of who we are. We will recognize our loved ones. But everything that was wrong in this world, everything that was broken or imperfect, will be healed. In heaven, there will be no illness, no hunger, and no jealousy.

And sometimes religion promises us that, despite the limitations of our corporeal nature, we are capable of lives of such heroism and spiritual excellence that we will represent the triumph of the spirit over the flesh here on earth. In his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder offers his solution to the question of why death often seems to interrupt an unfinished life. The book begins with an accident that claims the lives of five apparently unrelated people. A rope bridge over a chasm in a small. Peruvian village gives way, sending the five people who were crossing it to their deaths.

A young Catholic priest witnesses the accident, and it challenges his faith in the goodness of a world under God’s direction. He sets out to investigate the lives of the five victims to see if in any way it was morally appropriate for them to die at that moment and in that manner. He discovers that in each case, the person’s ability to enjoy life had been blocked by an excessive focus on the self and an inability to love. But each of them had recently resolved that problem and opened himself or herself to love. The priest’s conclusion is that how long a person lives may be the least important measure of that person’s life. Our lives are measured in breadth and depth, not only in length. The purpose of life is to learn to love, to learn to reach out beyond the self. When we have learned to do that, we will have reached our goal and will be ready to “graduate” from this life to a higher level.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey is a beautiful book that has comforted many people over the years, but in the end, I find Wilder’s solution unsatisfying. Why should people whom we love be taken. away from us just when they have learned to love us in return? Are we wrong to grieve for them if their death represents their “graduating” to a higher form of life? Wouldn’t this world be a better place if people who were capable of sharing love remained on earth to bless us with their love? Are we all destined to suffer the fate of Romeo and Juliet and all the other star-crossed lovers of medieval and modern literature, to die just when love seems within reach?

And why would Wilder write a book to warn us against learning to love because it might prove fatal? We are left having to believe either that death (not death in general but the death of a specific person at a specific time, someone we knew and cared about) is tragic because it reduces the amount of goodness in the world, in which case we are baffled as to why God permits it, or that death in our world is one necessary stage of a larger plan on God’s part.

It can be tempting to fasten on to the idea that death need not be tragic because a better life awaits us on the other side. I remember seeing a cartoon that showed a husband and wife who had died arriving in heaven, which is a world of sunlight and soft music and comfortable places to sit and relax. The husband turns to his wife and says, “Just think. If we hadn’t quit smoking and eaten all that oat bran, this could have been ours ten years sooner.”

The notion of a life beyond this one came relatively late to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Most of the Hebrew Bible never speaks of it. In fact, the book of Job, the story of a good man who suffers terribly, where one would expect the defenders of orthodox theology to comfort Job with visions of heavenly bliss and reward, never mentions it at all. To the contrary, all the speakers in the book seem to agree that “there is hope for a tree; if it is cut down, it will renew itself…. But mortals languish and die. Man expires and then where is he?” (Job 14:7, 10).

It is only in the book of Daniel, the last book in the Hebrew canon to be written, that we first find explicit references to the idea that those who die tragically and heroically will be restored to a better, longer life through God’s intervention (Daniel 12:2-3).

Most scholars believe that the impetus for the emergence of this idea was the Maccabean revolt against the Greeks, the story behind the festival of Hanukkah some 160 years B.C.E. Many pious Jews died defending their faith against the efforts of the Greek emperor to wipe it out. Even as in our time, people might have been willing to accept the tragic death of individuals, telling themselves that we don’t know all the details behind God’s designs, until the Holocaust forced them to reconsider their beliefs, so the experience of seeing the most faithful and heroic people killed in battles defending God drove many Judeans, unwilling to conclude that life was unfair, to insist that that could not be the final event of those people’s lives: Sometimes that insistence led to anticipating the resurrection of the dead to live out the stolen years of their lives on earth, a doctrine that, after bitter disputes, found its way into the Jewish prayer book. Sometimes it led to a belief in a person’s soul spending eternity in heaven with God and other pious souls.

Posted in Death | Tagged Rabbi Kushner, religion and death, The fear of death, the shadow of death | Leave a Comment »

Two Conversations on Death – Alexander Schmemann

February 10, 2012

From 1946-51, Fr Schmemann taught church history at St. Sergius in Paris. He was invited to join the faculty of Saint Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, then in New York City, where he taught from 1951 onwards. When the seminary moved to its present campus in Crestwood, New York in 1962, Fr Schmemann assumed the post of dean, which he would hold until his death. He also served as adjunct professor at Columbia University, New York University, Union Theological Seminary and General Theological Seminary in New York. Much of his focus at St Vladimir’s was on liturgical theology, which emphasizes the liturgical tradition of the Church as a major sign and expression of the Christian faith. Fr Schmemann was accorded the title of protopresbyter, the highest honor that can be bestowed on a married Orthodox priest. He held honorary degrees from Butler University, General Theological Seminary, Lafayette College, Iona College, and Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology. He was an Orthodox observer for the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church from 1962 to 1965. He was active in the establishment of the Orthodox Church in America and in its being granted autocephaly by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1970. His sermons were broadcast in Russian on Radio Liberty for 30 years. He gained a broad following of listeners across the Soviet Union, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who became his friend after emigrating to the West.

The Last Enemy
The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26) — these are the words of the apostle Paul, writing at the dawn of Christianity following the relentless persecution and death of Christ, in a time of a general, passionate hatred of Christians.

Previously I said that the question about death and, more precisely, the confusion about death, lies at the very heart of human understanding, and in the final analysis, the relation of man to life, that which we call his worldview, is ultimately determined by his relationship to death. I also said that there are essentially two positions, both clearly unsatisfying, neither of which gives us a real answer.

On the one hand we have a form of a rejection of life in the name of death: I quoted the words of the Greek philosopher Plato. “The life of a righteous man,” said he, “is an eternal dying.” Here, as in many religions, one finds the irrevocable victory of death, which violates the purpose of life. For if it is inevitable that we must die, then it is best to transfer all our hopes and aspirations to that other, mystical world.

But I call this answer unsatisfactory because it is precisely about this other world that man has no knowledge. And how can we have as the object of our love that about which we know nothing? This is the source of man’s reaction against various “funereal,” “death-centered” religions, the rejection of pathetic and sorrow-filled world-views.

But while rejecting them in the name of this life, in the name of this world, man still is not liberated from the oppressive sense of the awareness of death. On the contrary, having lost the perspective of eternity, he becomes even more fragile, even more ephemeral on this earth. As Pasternak wrote:

We shall stroll through the dwellings
With flashlights in hand,
We also shall search,
And we also shall die.

All of civilization seems to be permeated with a passionate obsession to stifle this fear of death and the sense of the meaninglessness of life that oozes out of it like a slow-dripping poison. What is this intense conflict with religion, if nothing other than a mindless attempt to root out of human consciousness the memory and concern with death and consequently the question: why do I live in this brief and fragile life?

And so we have two answers, neither of which in the final analysis gives us anything. And it is this dilemma that leads us to ask: but what does Christianity say to us about death? Even if we know nothing about Christianity, we cannot help but recall that its attitude toward death is radically different — it can’t be reduced to one of the two approaches cited above.

“The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” So, it is as if we suddenly find ourselves in a different dimension: death is an enemy that must be destroyed. We find ourselves so removed from Plato and his efforts to force us not only to become used to the idea of death but actually to love this thought and to transform our whole life into an “exercise about death”

Christ weeps at the grave of his dead friend Lazarus — what a powerful witness! He does not say, “Well, now he is in heaven, everything is well; he is separated from this difficult and tormented life.” Christ does not say all those things we do in our pathetic and uncomforting attempts to console. In fact he says nothing — he weeps. And then, according to the Gospels, he raises his friend, that is, he restores him into that life from which we are supposedly to find liberation toward a higher good.

Furthermore, is it not a fact that Easter stands at the center of Christianity, with its joyful proclamation that death has been overthrown? “Trampling down death by death!” Did not Christianity enter into and rule the world during many centuries with this unheard-of proclamation: “death is conquered in victory”? Is not Christianity first of all faith in the resurrection of Christ from the dead, in the assertion that the dead shall arise and those in the graves shall rejoice”?

Yes, indeed this is all true, yet within Christianity itself and among individual Christians we now find the weakening of this victorious, new, and, from the viewpoint of this world, foolish faith. And Christians have themselves begun to slowly return to Plato, not with his opposition of life and death as two enemies, but in the opposition of two worlds: “this world” and the other world, in which supposedly rejoice all the immortal souls of people who have died.

But Christ never spoke about the immortality of souls — he spoke about the resurrection of the dead! And how can we fail to see that between these two approaches there is an immense abyss? For, surely, if the question is strictly about the immortality of souls, then we need not concern ourselves with death as such, and what need have we of all these words about victory over death, about its destruction, and about resurrection?

“The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” And so, let us ask ourselves: in what sense is death the last enemy? Whose enemy is death? And how did this enemy become the ruler of the world and the master of life? We may recall the lines from Vladimir Soloviev’s poem: “Death and Time have dominion on earth / you must refrain from calling them lords …” But how can we not recognize the lordship of all that has become nor mal, the rule of life, with which man has long ago come to terms, against which he has ceased to protest and about which he has ceased even to be concerned in his philosophy, the enemy with which he seeks to find a compromise both in his religion and his culture?

Indeed, the Christian teaching about death is no longer heard, and Christians themselves can no longer deal with it, for in essence Christianity is not concerned about coming to terms with death, but rather with the victory over it. And when this subject is discussed with the attitude of the foolish Russian philosopher Fedorov, then immediately it is blindly accepted as the voice of wisdom, the voice of compromise, the voice of inevitability. But if such is the case, then I repeat, the whole Christian faith is meaningless, for the apostle Paul said: “If Christ has not been raised then … your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). So it is to this theme — the Christian understanding of death — that we will return in our next conversation.

The Origin of Death
In my last conversation I referred to the Gospel account in which Christ weeps at the grave of his friend Lazarus. We need to pause and consider the meaning of these tears, for in this very moment there occurs a unique transformation within religion in relation to the long-standing religious approach to death.

I already spoke about the meaning of this transformation. Up to this moment the purpose of religion, as well as the purpose of philosophy, consisted in enabling man to come to terms with death, and if possible even to make death desirable: death as the liberation from the oppressiveness of the body; death as the liberation from suffering; death as freedom from this changing, busy, evil world; death as the beginning of eternity. Here, in fact, is the sum total of religious and philosophical teaching before Christ and outside of Christianity — in primitive religions, in Greek philosophy, in Buddhism, and so forth.

But Christ weeps at the grave of his friend, and in so doing he reveals his own struggle with death, his refusal to acknowledge it and to come to terms with it. Suddenly, death ceases to be a normal and natural fact, it appears as something foreign, as unnatural, as fearsome and perverted, and it is acknowledged as an enemy: “The last enemy to be destroyed is death.”

In order to feel the whole depth and revolutionary force of this change we must begin at the beginning, at the source of this new and unprecedented approach to death. We find it as a brief statement in Holy Scripture: “God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living” (Wisdom 1:13). This means that in the world, in creation, there is a power that does not have its origin in God, which he did not desire, which he did not create, which opposes him and is independent of him.

God created life. Always and everywhere God is himself called the Life and the giver of life. In that eternally new and eternally childlike story in the Bible, God delights in his world, in its resplendent light and in its joy of life.

To be more precise, and to bring this story revealed in the Bible to its conclusion, one can put it this way: death is the denial of God, and if death is natural, if it is the ultimate truth about life and about the world, if it is the highest and immutable law about all of creation, then there is no God, then this whole story about creation, about joy, and about the light of life is a total lie.

Therefore, the most important and most profound question of the Christian faith must be, How and from where did death arise, and why has it become stronger than life? Why has it become so powerful that the world itself has become a kind of cosmic cemetery, a place where a collection of people condemned to death live either in fear or terror, or in their efforts to forget about death find themselves rushing around one great big burial plot?

To this question Christianity answers with equal force, brevity, and conviction. Here is the text: “and through sin death has come into the world” (Romans 5:12). In other words, for Christianity, death first of all is revealed as part of the moral order, as a spiritual catastrophe. In some final and indescribable sense man desired death, or perhaps one might say, he did not desire that life that was given to him by God freely, with love and joy.

Surely it is an indisputable fact that life consists in total interdependence. In the words of Holy Scripture man does not have life in himself. He always receives it from outside, from others, and always depends on the other — for air, for food, for light, for warmth, for water. It is precisely this dependency that materialism emphasizes with such force. And it is justified in doing so, for indeed man is inextricably, naturally, biologically, physiologically dependent on the world.

But whereas materialism sees in this fact the final truth about the world and about humanity (for it regards this determinism as a self-evident rule of nature), Christianity sees here the Fall and the perversion of the world and of humanity. This is what it calls the original sin.

The world is a perpetual revelation of God about himself to humanity; it is only a means of communion, of this constant, free, and joyful encounter with the only content of life — with the Life of life itself — with God.

“You have created us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts cannot rest, until they find their rest in You!”

But the tragedy — and herein lies the heart of the Christian teaching about sin — is that man did not desire this life with God and for God. He desired life for himself, and in himself he found the purpose, the goal, and the content of life. And in this free choice of himself, and not of God, in his preference for himself over God, without realizing it, man became inextricably a slave of the world, a slave of his own dependence on the world. He eats in order to live, but with his food he communes with what is mortal, for food does not have life in itself.

Feuerbach said, “Man is what he eats.” Yes indeed, but what he eats has just died; he eats in order to live, but instead he began living in order to eat, and in this senseless and vicious circle lies the horrible determinism of human life.

Thus, death is the fruit of a life that is poisoned and perpetually disintegrating, a disintegration to which man has freely subjected himself. Not having life in himself, he has subjected himself to the world of death.

“God did not create death.” It is man who introduced death into the world, freely desiring life only for himself and in himself, cutting himself off from the source, the goal, and content of life — from God. And this is why death — as disintegration, as separation, as temporality, transitoriness — has become the supreme law of life, revealing the illusory nature of everything on earth.

In order to console himself, man created a dream of another world where there is no death, and for that dream he forfeited this world, gave it up decidedly to death. Only if we fully return to the Christian understanding about death, as the root of man’s own perversion of the understanding of the very content of life, can we hear once more, as new, the Christian proclamation about the destruction of death in the resurrection.

Posted in Death, Fr. Alexander Schmemann | Tagged death, Lazarus, The Last Enemy, The Opposition of Two Worlds, The Origin of Death | Leave a Comment »

Paying Attention To The Sky

Archive for the ‘Death’ Category

The “Intermediate State” Between Death and Resurrection – Benedict XVI

The Immortality of the Soul and the Resurrection of the Dead – Benedict XVI

Birches — By Robert Frost

A Catholic Anthropology vs. “Death with Dignity” – Derek Jeter

Nobody Gets Too Much Heaven — Derek Jeter

The Art of Dying Well – St. Robert Bellarmine

The World Is a Narrow Bridge: THE FEAR OF DEATH Part II – Rabbi Kushner

The World Is a Narrow Bridge: THE FEAR OF DEATH Part I – Rabbi Kushner

Two Conversations on Death – Alexander Schmemann

Pages

Recent Comments

Recent Posts

Categories

Blog Stats

Top Posts

Subscribe

Archives

Recently Featured Books

Follow “Paying Attention To The Sky”