Dear old and new friends,

     Your prized and richest possession isn’t in a bank vault or insured by Lloyds of London! The American philosopher psychologist William James said, “The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.” That can mean many things, but central is that your most cherished possession is your good name.

     The Zen master Hakuin was a hermit renowned by his local village as a saintly man of poverty and prayer. Villagers came up the mountain to a large rock some distance from his remote hermitage to leave gifts of food for him that often included notes asking for his prayers. One day a respected young woman in the village, being pregnant, announced loudly to everyone that Hakuin was the man responsible for her pregnancy! Shocked, she and her family, along with the village elders, angrily marched up beyond the large rock directly to his hermitage. With loud insults and shouts of hypocrisy they denounced Hakuin for being the father of her child. Standing at the door of his hut, the monk said only, “Is that so?”

     When the time came for the delivery of the child the villagers were amazed that the hermit Hakuin came down their village. Now the girl’s family wanted nothing at all to do with this shameful baby, but the old monk took the infant into his arms and lovingly carried it up to his hut. There he fed and cared for the infant and lovingly fondled it as his very own. A year and a half after the child’s birth had passed, the child’s mother became overcome with guilt. She publically announced that the child’s father wasn’t the Zen monk, but rather a local young farmer. Now overwhelmed with disgrace and humiliation, the entire village, led by the young girl and her family, climbed the mountain up to the small hut of Hakuin. They stood outside loudly proclaiming their sorrow and regrets for how they had stained with shame the holy man’s reputation. The young woman asked him to have her baby back, and told Hakuin who was the real father of the child. When she finished, the crowd surrounding his hut and waited in silence. Then handing her child back to her, Hakuin said, “Is that so?”

     Let us perform on this Zen story an autopsy so to find in it some personal applications for ourselves. We begin with the Zen monk’s poverty or simplicity that included his invisible property, his good name and reputation. When this was taken away, he didn’t loudly proclaim his innocence, nor challenge his accusers to prove his guilt. He only quietly asked, “Is that so?” Ask yourself if you were accused by your neighbors of such sexual misconduct, how would you respond? Ponder your reputation, your name or position in your community. Today, sexual accusations, true or not, become gossip and front page news. Sadly, once someone is charged with sexual misbehavior and later is found not guilty, that untrue allegation casts long indelible dark shadows over them.

     So when next you learn someone in your community or local church is accused of some shocking behavior, rather than replying with stunned condemnation, instead answer wisely as did the Zen monk Hakuin, “Hmm…is that so?”

…where we left off last week about romancing our own death will require a striptease that begins with discarding your Christian religious teaching, “At the death of the body the immoral soul leaves the body”! This Greek Aristotle-Platonic philosophical belief that the soul had a separate spiritual existence from the body was adopted by early Christianity. However, science today states that spirit and body are “Two dialectically related dimensions of one and the same physical reality”…“Neither spirit or matter can exist without the other!” So with this new knowledge what happens now at death?

     Our conventional thinking and believing was turned upside down a hundred and ten years ago in 1905 when Albert Einstein presented his theory of relativity (E = mc2) which revolutionized physics, but unfortunately not our thinking. It revealed that matter cannot be destroyed or eliminated, only transformed into energy! So our bodies, which are physical matter, can’t be destroyed; yet our common sense based on limited ordinary experiences and religious beliefs says death ends our existence. This idea of death must be abandoned unless we want to live in yesteryear when Orville and Wilbur Wright first flew a powered airplane, only two years before Einstein’s theory!

     Later, in the 1920’s, the German physicist Max Planck postulated all light and heat isn’t emitted continuously, but in energy packets that are the fundamental aspects of nature which Einstein named “quanta.” This quantum theory shockingly revealed there are no such things as inanimate objects! At the microscopic subatomic level any object typically referred to as dead, inanimate like your table or computer, isn’t dead but a living universe of invisible whirling quantum energies.

          “Stop; my head is spinning,” you want to cry out. That’s understandable
          as these new theories and discoveries are mind-boggling. We prefer the good
          old pre-Einstein days since they were simpler.

     More than ever before, today we suffer from a pandemic of necrophobia—a morbid fear of death. The once-proper English word “died” now is pornographically out of place, so we say “passed.” Family and friends don’t go in solemn procession to a cemetery to bury their beloved dead, more correctly they go to leave the beloved abandoned above ground surrounded by fake green rugs hiding the ugly dirt of the grave. When the mourners have departed, the burial of the beloved is left to strangers.

     Great spiritual masters like St. Benedict in his Rule instructed his monks to “Remember you will die.” That rule was to be a compass for how to live each day. The same compass is available to those who pray the rosary or even say a single Hail Mary that concludes, “Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.” Few consider seriously if “that” fateful hour will be one of their twenty-four hours of today, but they should.

     A basic principle of a good spirituality is be daily mindful you will die. Before we discuss how to romance your death, strive to follow another spiritual rule which is to love life and others deeply and passionately, yet never clinging to another or any possession. Non-clinging to attachments is liberation; a freedom essential for happiness in life and a happy death.

     To be continued….

Dear old and new friends, 

     The British scholar William Kerr was an energetic walker who loved the mountains. In 1923 he revisited his much beloved Italian Alps. As he walked up the slopes of the Pizzo Bianco at Macugnaga he paused and remarked to his companion, “I always thought this was the most beautiful spot in the world, and now I know it!” Then he dropped dead of a heart attack. 

     If William Kerr fortunately died in what he considered the most beautiful place in the world, how would you like to die? Certainly not in some ghastly interstate crash of your car and a tractor trailer, not in your home in a gas line fire-engulfing explosion, or even in a bland, sterilized , disinfected hospital bed. As for where you are when death and you eventually meet, pause a few minutes to consider all the various beautiful places that you have seen in your life. I realize this is a horrible assignment since we, like the old Irish, would rather die than think about death. But let’s think about it nonetheless. 

     The New York Times ran a survey offering a variety of times and places to die. I list it below, and ask that you slowly and reflectivity read through them, and then selection one. This can be a more interesting exercise by doing it with your spouse or a life companion. 

     1. While I am asleep

     2. Quickly by a heart attack, stroke or aneurysm

     3. Peacefully in my own bed surrounded by loved ones

     4. Happily while doing what I enjoy

     5. In old age

     6. By my own hand or being assisted by others

     7. I don’t know, and don’t want to die at all

     Check your selection with Time’s research department report of 3,244 participants as            follows: 

     44% chose #1

     15% chose #2

     29% chose #3

     2% selected #4

     6% chose #5

     Only 1% chose #6…and 3% selected #7 

     While dying surely ranks as among one of life’s most significant if not important events, it is worth noting that over half of the above, 59% (numbers 1 and 2), didn’t want to experience it!

     Daniel Francois Auber (1782-1871) agreed with that 59%, and though his musical genius developed slowly he eventually became a creator of French opera music. Like most of us, he refused to think about his death, and when this gifted musician was asked his views on death he replied, “I pay no attention to it.” However, after passing mid-life, perhaps along with composing music for dying scenes in his operatic works, he began to ponder more seriously his mortality. Forced by circumstances to attend a funeral service, he quietly remarked to one of his fellow mourners, “I believe this is the last time I’ll take part as an amateur.”

     At a funeral burial or a visitation prior to the funeral, do you meet death as an amateur? Viewing the body in an open casket do you experience death’s presence like a tourist or encounter it like a reunion with a familiar acquaintance? Daily each of us must wisely devise ways or small rituals to encounter death in healthy and wholesome ways so as to befriend it, even to consider romancing our death.

To be continued next week….