Dear old and new friends,

     Good Friday honors the death day of Jesus, and on that day we are forced to ponder what we typically try to deny, our own death. We live but a short span of days, and it is our common belief that the day of our death ends all of them, so no wonder we try to deny its ugly reality. Christians revere the image of the cross, a paradoxical sign of the power of repulsive evil and also the triumph of life over death. Among the countless meanings of the symbol of the cross is the End; so it is used to mark grave sites. Traditionally tomb stones have two dates, the deceased’s birth date and the death date…but something is missing! Following the death date there needs to be those legendary words of the Saturday afternoon matinee movies that ended with the hero or heroine in a hopeless situation: “To be continued!”

     This Good Friday consider that Teilhard de Chardin taught the need of new religious symbols, rituals and prayers that embrace our new understanding of the influence of evolution, quantum physics and our place in an ever-expanding cosmos. I propose one new radical change…abandon the cross of Calvary and replace it with Jesus nailed to an old large door! Pause and take a few moments to create in your mind this new image of Cavalry; envision on top of that barren hilltop is a 15-foot-tall, 8-foot-wide, old weathered door to which is nailed the dying Jesus of Nazareth.

     A door symbolizes passing from one state to another. Doors open to the mysterious and are an invitation to dare to voyage into the beyond. Death is integral to ongoing evolution and its doorway to new life. Easter celebrates that death releases us from our human limitations to experience the freedom of the unlimited, unrestrained boundless new existence with an entirely innovative relationship to Life and the entire star staggering cosmos. This new Easter existence is beyond the feeble comprehension of our small human minds. Only our imaginations can create a teeny glimmer of the utter magnificence of this new life of living in communion with everyone and everything. Each of us this moment is an unfinished creation awaiting the process of being fully created into our personal Good Friday and Easter.

     On our fateful day, like the dying Jesus we will plunge into oneness in the Mystery of Life, God, with all the earth and the cosmos of billions of galaxies. Mark and Matthew in their passions stories relate the last human words of Jesus as he died, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” John has Jesus declare the end of his mission, “It is finished.” Luke has the last words of the dying Jesus, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”

     I propose new final words of the dying Jesus! His last words were the very same as those of Elizabeth Kubler Ross. She was a Swiss-American psychiatrist and famous pioneer in her work on death and dying. When asked where she was going when she died she said, “I’m going out dancing among the galaxies.”

Dear old and new friends,

     Today’s marriage vows have remained unchanged for centuries except from the relatively recent historic deletion of the bride’s vow to “obey.” However, those vows need to evolve. Some readers may stop here saying, “I’m not married, so this reflection doesn’t apply to me.” But please read on because marriage is only the introduction to this reflection which is about your tomorrow. The conventional marriage vows today conclude with “…in sickness and health until death do us part” or “…all the days of my life.”

     Love before marriage wasn’t even considered a reality until the 18th century. Today’s acceptance of marriage as a sexually exclusive, romantic union between one man and one woman is a rather recent historic development. Today half of all American marriages end not by death but by divorce…and there are those who fall in love and live as life partners without ever being married. Realistically that pledge of “until death do us part” is the desired ideal and could be compared to the rings on a tree that grow yearly. A happy loveship (more intimate than friendship) lived with loving fidelity, affection and care grows daily into much more than “until death do us part.”

     That “much more” is expressed in a possible new four-word ending to our marriage vows promising love “…in sickness, health and death for all eternity.” The theologian Diarmuid O’ Murchu recalls author Michael Talbot’s words, “We are, as the aborigines say, just learning how to survive in infinity.” In addition, he says, “At this stage of our human evolution the human mind can scarcely grasp the notion of the infinite.” He then challenges us by saying the most controversial principle of quantum theology is, “The concepts of beginning and end, along with the theological notions of resurrection and reincarnation are invoked as dominate myths to help us humans make sense of our infinite destiny in an infinite universe.”

     We have been taught God is eternal, without a beginning or end, and it seems heretical to conceive of ourselves in the same way, but the new quantum physics dares us to do so. We proclaim that the Christian God is love, and so that love surely shares in the Divine’s infinity. To daily attempt to live with the conviction that you will live forever radically transforms how you view today’s daily little hangnail irritations. Marvelously, you don’t have to create some great masterpiece to become immortal.

     As we struggle with this new conception of personal infinity may we find support in Woody Allen, the American film actor, director and writer. He has been acclaimed a genius by the French and praised by Americans as one of the greatest film directors of modern times. Allen himself is more lighthearted: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve it through not dying!”

…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….

Dear old and new friends,

     Agnostics and atheists, non-religious or religious, no one yet has escaped dying! This Haystack reflection is for all to ponder as we anticipate the events of Friday, April 3rd, that remembers the death of Jesus. Believers or doubters, we all need to think about that unavoidable event in life and the reality known to every backyard gardener that the beautiful pictures on the seed packets don’t come alive unless they die. Do garden seeds fear their death as we fear ours?

     More than a primal survival instinct our fear of dying is evident from our daily speech when we politely say, “Mary passed away today”—instead of “she died”! So common is this darkest fear of the inescapable that in the stone business a salesperson never speaks of tombstones, instead refers to them as “memorial stones or monuments.” Regardless what you want to call it, to each of us someday the “unspeakable” will come so we best wisely prepare for it by thinking about it seriously.

     Surprisingly the best preparation for a happy death is to become an expert lover who never tires of more unselfishly loving—more totally and sacrificially loving—regardless if married or not! Single, divorced, widowed or vowed religious, the wandering teacher of Galilee who died crucified on a cross calls everyone to wisely observe his one and only commandment: “Love God and each other.” Every act of love requires death of self; dying to the self’s powerful demands to be always right, first and in control. The need for the self to die is essential according to theologian Ilia Delio, “A self that is full of itself can never receive the love of another nor make a genuine movement towards the other.” Infallible is this ironclad rule of how to love.

     The legend that Adam, by sinning against God, ushered death into this world was the way the ancients tried to explain the existence of this dark horrifying fate of all life. Science has shown us that death and life appear together after evolution’s Big Bang as dying stars exploded outward in space all the raw ingredients of life. These star deaths were repeated over and over in the billions of years of evolution as galaxies appeared, and then our daystar, the sun, was born out of the clouds of various gasses and atomic hydrogen. The other planets in our solar system along with our planet Earth were gradually created from cosmic clouds in like fashion until, most amazingly, we humans became living Easters of long dead stars.

           Good Friday is the Great Valentine’s Day! Believers and unbelievers need to see the cross with all its suffering, pain and death not as a sacrifice-payment to redeem humanity from the punishment of its sins but rather as a cosmically gigantic act of love. The cross symbolizes the deeply profound cost of authentic loving and the sign of a willingness to go to extreme limits of genuine true affection and faithfulness. Even if it appeared God had abandoned him in his agonizing death, Jesus never once curses, asks why, or abandons God. The cross then is the ultimate sign of a love that knows no end. There is an old Russian expression that says you can tell the depth of belief of a woman or man by the way they make the sign of the cross.

Dear old and new friends, 

Creation these late November days presents a living meditation on death, even if we don’t want to think about that dreaded subject. The once green leaves have turned scarlet golden, then brownish-gray and finally drop to join a wind-shifting yellow crowd of other fallen ones at the bottom of trees. October’s autumn is an image of the golden years of old age, while November’s autumn with its bare skeleton tree branches with their few clinging, crinkled brown leaves is a picture of the nearing end of life. Since medieval times November is the month to remember our departed ones and to reflect upon our own death.

Of course, self-blinded by our obsessive anxieties about our daily troubles, we can fail to see or hear what creation is saying. Or mindful of creation’s cycles we know that after a dreary winter wait it will return again to the greenness of abounding life, and so we need not fret about dying. While in these last weeks of November nature wears the bleak bare face of death we can ask, “But is that the really the face of Death?”

Regardless of your age or health, open your eyes to death that is all around you in creation and pause to meditate on that ultimate reality in your life. While personally doing just that I recalled Teilhard de Chardin’s The Divine Milieu, in which he wrote of death. So I re-read his visionary thoughts of it, and so powerful did I find them that I now present them to you to read slowly as this week’s Haystack reflection.

     Grant when my hour comes, that I may recognize you
     under the species of each alien or hostile force
     that seems bent upon destroying or uprooting me.
     When the signs of age begin to mark my body
     (and still more when they touch my mind);
     when the ill that is to diminish me or carry me off
     strikes from without or is born within me;
     when the painful moment comes in which I
     suddenly awaken to the fact that I am ill or growing old;
     and above all at that last moment
     when I feel I am loosing hold of myself
     and am absolutely passive within the hands
     of the great unknown forces that have formed me;
     in all those dark moments, O God, grant that I
     may understand that it is you!

     Teach me to treat my death as an act of communion.

Dear old and new friends,   

     To introduce our reflection for this week that celebrates Halloween on Friday, the 31st of October, I turned to E.E. Cummings ungrammatical poem about Buffalo Bill.

 
“Buffalo Bill’s
defunct
            who used to
            ride a watersmooth-silver
                                                   stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive  pigeonsjustlike that
                                                                           Jesus
he was a handsome man
                                      and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death”


     You and I, like Buffalo Bill, have an appointment with Mister Death. He seems to be everywhere and could tap anyone of us on the shoulder and say smiling, “Excuse me.”  Funerals have nothing in common with this Friday’s Halloween except for the presence of Mister Death. Halloweens are playfully cheery and fun, while funerals are sad and mournful occasions. Both Halloween and roller coasters were originally designed to scare and frighten us “to death,” but only roller coasters can still produce that first purpose of fright while Halloween Friday’s frolicking fun festival only entertains us.

     Mister Death is your invisible passenger seated next to you when that roller coaster takes its sudden, lethal, breath-taking 200 foot plunge. He is invisibility seated next to you at every dangerous racecar event. We find Mister Death’s presence both thrilling and spine chillingly fearful. Our society has accomplished an amazing feat of cultural denial of death while day and night the news media plunges us into murders, school shootings, death by starvation, disease and war massacres. Perhaps we might be more conscious of Mister Death if we found him offering various ways to die in our Yellow Pages. Check your local directory for Death under several listing:

     Mr. Sudden Unexpected Death              Ms. Lingering Slow Death

     Mr. Lonely All-Alone Death                    Ms. Guilt Nagging Death

     Mr. Fear-Filled Death                            Ms. Dementia Alzheimer Death

     Mr. Stroke Brain Death                         Ms. Physically Paralyzed Death

     Mr. Angry Bitter Death                          Ms. Teenage Early Death         

     Mr. Violent Brutal Death                        Ms. Serene Peaceful Death

 
     Regardless who comes calling, Death has an appointment with each of us that we hope will be cancelled…or at least postponed until a later date.

 Dear old and new friends, 

    Scientific studies of human population estimate that since 50,000 B.C.E. over 100 billion people have died! This Friday, April 18th, out of those 100 billion deaths one will be remembered worldwide—the death of Jesus of Galilee. It is also estimated each day between 150,000 to 250,000 people die, and one day we know for certain our own death shall be included in that number! That being an unavoidable reality, we should prepare for our final exam.

    The Galilean Teacher taught his most important lesson as he died on the cross. Are we, his disciple-students, asleep or playing hooky whenever we see a cross? Each year we have the opportunity to learn that final lesson on the Friday of his death. Among Latin nations it is called “Holy Friday,” and by Slavic peoples, “Great Friday” and by the English or Dutch, “Good Friday.” If we have become good students of his Last Lesson then whatever day we die will truly be a good day. But excuse me for forgetting again that in our culture it is bad taste to speak of “death or dying.” So, should we rename this Friday, “The day Jesus passed”?

    For so many, dying isn’t any gentle “passing” but a fierce, determined clutching onto life since the possibility of nonexistence after death is so terrifying. The Teacher’s final lesson is contained in an easily remembered two word expression, “Let go.” These two words sum up his life, teachings, spirituality and death. Giving away anything deeply valued or loved is a small death, so check the list below to see your progress as one of his students.

            Let go of hated and harboring anger.
            Let go of seeking revenge, even by speech.
            Let go of always having to be right.
            Let go of needing to be important.
            Let go of irritation and impatience with others.
            Let go of fear of strangers, aliens, and those different than you.
            Let go of prejudices and judging others.
            Let go of trying to control life, others and God.
            Let go of your greatest fear of dying.

    If daily we practice letting go, embracing each as a small death, then when it’s our time to die we will pass our final exam by dying gracefully. The spirituality of Galilean’s teacher is “Do not cling!” Do not clutch the moment regardless how beautiful, or anything or anyone, for in this life everything is short-lived! You have two choices: (1) you can let go of what you tightly cling to or (2) you can wait until old age, financial disaster or terminal illness rips it away from you.

    From his cross Jesus taught us to just “let go,” as he did of protests of his innocence, of accusations of those who had tortured and crucified him, of denouncing his disciples for cowardly running away…and even God for “seemingly” to have abandoned him. Then, with his final breath, he let go of his life.

Note:

This Friday, April 18th, a special Easter reflection will be posted here.

Dear old and new friends,            

    A favorite daily routine of seniors and others is the reading of each day’s obituaries. These are read with unspoken thoughts regarding the dead person’s age, life, membership in various organizations and the time and place of their funeral. This day by day obituary reading ritual usually concludes with a silent if not unconscious prayer of gratitude that the death of the reader was not included that day. This habitual reading of death notices, however, doesn’t make the reader any more mindful of their own death since dying always happens to others.

    If a world obituary was released by the United Nations it would be a long read as daily about 250,000 die, and while that’s a staggering number, it’s immaterial unless it included your death! Excuse me for my repeated use of that filthy word, death. Psychologist and author Rollo May says that today the word is pornography, a dirty word unmentionable in polite society. So people “pass on”…they don’t die!

    In the industrialized world people now live until their late eighties and early nineties, so death for most seems as remote as the planet Mars. Yet wise are you if you confront that final act and primal fear instilled in us as children. Our parents constantly admonished, “Be careful,” (implying “don’t get killed/die”) crossing the street, swimming or climbing trees. This admonition continued into adulthood when we usually add “Be careful” to our “Goodbyes.” In spite of these warnings our prehistoric sense of self-preservation makes us life-long dedicated death dodgers. A cure for this evasion can be found in the final days of P.T. Barnum’s “The Greatest Show on Earth.”

    In April 1891 this illustriously creative showman, knowing that his death was near, requested of the New York Evening Sun newspaper the favor that he be able to read his obituary before he died! The newspaper agreed and ran their world famous Phineas Taylor Barnum’s four-column obituary on the very day before he actually died. It is said that Barnum greatly enjoyed reading it.

    A guaranteed happy death and a cure for dodging death are hidden in Barnum’s desire to read his obituary. So write your own obituary. In creating it be abundantly lavish in praising your charity to all in need, especially your kindheartedness to the poor, your untiring patience under the heaviest pressure, your bold public stands against injustice, your prayerful serenity in the midst of the most horrendous situations and how untiringly loveable you were to all whom you encountered, both good or bad.

    Along with a happy death, frequently reading your own obituary would also be ‘life-changing’ if every day you earnestly tried to live out what it said about you.