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November 6, 2016
Reading I: 2 Maccabees 7: 1-2, 9-14
Responsorial Psalm: 17:1, 5-6, 8, 15
Reading II: 2 Thessalonians 2:6-3:5
Gospel: Luke 20:27-38
The journey's end
I've just been scanning comments about last week's instruction from the Vatican with its embargo on the scattering of ashes and even a Catholic funeral to anyone who would make a issue of it.
The news item gave scope for many witty comments, not a few admonitions as to what really matters, and in particular, occasion to focus on our own ending. It's an elusive topic, our own dying. We'd rather think of anything but the start of nothing. It's one thing to believe that life is 'changed, not ended', but the lack of anything to think on engenders a healthy revulsion, immortalised in the words of Dylan Thomas: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-night
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
I find I need to approach the question of death carefully, or I take fright. I try to make familiar the thought of passing over from this world to another and my last goodbyes. I picture who might be standing by, I observe my shallow breathing, my drifting consciousness in and out of dreams and memories, wondering what will come next but holding on to hope as my final stand. Right to the end we simply do not know anything about the new dawn breaking. You can't really talk about dying in the abstract as though we had testimonies to be analysed and catalogued. Each one's dying is unique, and no-one ever has reported back.
In that journey we are alone. In fact, in spite of close friends and community and communion in the spirit we are, throughout our life, alone, but never so much as in our final passing over from this life to...
Alone and responsible. Looking back down the track I see it littered with stumbling blocks on which I've barked my shins and skinned my knees and sometimes broke a leg or arm or cracked a rib or two. Too many falls. Too many broken promises, failed expectations, self-indulgent meanderings. Beside the road are those I've hurt, making their solitary way as best they can, and I wonder are they wounded still by me, or mercifully healed by grace.
To be responsible: I acknowledge all that's been and all that is, the good and the bad, with the reasons and the excusing factors, without embellishment or obfuscation. The joys and sorrows mingle, unmanageable. Life's tangle resists being sorted out. The judgment is not mine to make.
...
Another way to focus on the unavoidable is in checking over those necessary preparations, the last will and testament, the power of attorney (medical), and my preferred arrangements for a memorial gathering of friends sometime later, having left the cremation to those who do these things while family take comfort together in the familiar home and garden where the birds will still be singing.
Actually I spent an interesting hour reading mostly in Wikipedia on funerals and cemeteries and cremation. Many odd customs and practices bring up a sudden laugh. Two things stand out though, first, that all peoples have respect for the dead, and second, that most cultures (perhaps all) down the ages have expected life to go on, even if there have always been some who doubted or denied it. Total denial with aggressive refutation seems to be a particularly modern conceit. Jeshua gave the Sadducees short shrift with his "God of the living, not of the dead!' Anyone who accepts us as somehow in the likeness of God must see that this likeness is not to be snuffed out.
...
Resurrection is an abstract term that says little that is useful to me. The best I can make of it is as a pointer towards a moment or time in which everything will be wrapped up and brought to some kind of glorious finale. The bodily resurrection of Jesus is some sort of pledge of this. We are not destined for either an ethereal half-real existence as disembodied spirits nor for annihilation when the cosmos reaches its end. Jeshua says, "They are like the angels", and I can see a witty twinkle in his eye as he says it. It's not an informative statement since we have no idea what the angels are or what they're like.
There are many other expressions, especially from John: 'Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.' (Jn 17:3) It's not a general knowledge about god, but knowing the Father personally, and being known. It's all that is best about human friendship multiplied to the nth degree. John gets carried away by the idea in his letter:
See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.
Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. (1Jn 3:1-2)
'To see God as he is'. It's breathtaking. Enough to have me looking forward to my passing over.
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Thoreau issued his jeremiad against those pressures more than a century ago: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear.” http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/09/andrew-sullivan-technology-almost-killed-me.html
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