Death and Life
In a remarkable reflection (that almost sums up his encyclical, Spe Salvi), Pope Benedict commemorated All Souls Day. The whole reflection is quite worth pondering, but here is his concluding paragraph:
This yearly commemoration, often marked by visits to the cemetery, is an occasion to ponder the mystery of death and to renew our faith in the promise of eternal life held out to us by Christ’s resurrection. As human beings, we have a natural fear of death and we rebel against its apparent finality. Faith teaches us that the fear of death is lightened by a great hope, the hope of eternity, which gives our lives their fullest meaning. The God who is love offers us the promise of eternal life through the death and resurrection of his Son. In Christ, death no longer appears as an abyss of emptiness, but rather a path to life which will never end. Christ is the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in him will never die. Each Sunday, in reciting the Creed, we reaffirm our faith in this mystery. As we remember our dear departed ones, united with them in the communion of the saints, may our faith inspire us to follow Christ more closely and to work in this world to build a future of hope.
In a recent seminar discussion we spoke of the mysterious interpenetration of death and life, and that the attempts to deny or flee death often eventuated in shrinking one’s capacity for a full life, indeed at times turning death-dealing. I had occasion to recall the words of Etty Hillesum in her diary, published as An Interrupted Life:
By “coming to terms with life” I mean: the reality of death has become a definite part of my life; my life has, so to speak, been extended by death, by my looking death in the eye and accepting it, by accepting destruction as part of life and no longer wasting my energies on fear of death or the refusal to acknowledge its inevitability. It sounds paradoxical: by excluding death from our life we cannot live a full life, and by admitting death into our life we enlarge and enrich it.
I would add one more reason for fear in the face of death: the fear of being separated from our loved ones who are living, even as we are about to be reunited with our loved ones who have died.
Most of that meditation makes sense in a very natural way, but there are a couple of exceptions.
I am a bit put off by this sentence: “If we reduce man exclusively to his horizontal dimension, to what can be perceived empirically, life itself loses its profound meaning. “ The choice of terms is surprising. I thought that horizontal dimension usually meant our connection to our brothers and sisters through love, and referred to God’s presence in our fellow human beings.
I am also taken aback by the following: “… it is precisely faith in eternal life that gives the Christian the courage to love our world even more intensely,…” – it wouldn’t occur to me to say that loving the world takes courage.
Just want to say RIP,Andy Rooney
I can’t help wonder if the Pope is well. Yes, there are rumors he’ll just retire next year, but I wonder if that’s the whole story. This reflection seems to come from intense personal experience.
Yes, Ann, to want to look death in the face does suggest that one can’t avoid it. There’s so much to life that preoccupation with death seems a bit odd otherwise, like constantly worrying about running out of gas as you drive through the fall countryside.
Ann,
I don’t know about the state of the Pope’s health, though I’ve heard no alarming reports. I think he has always taken to heart St. Benedict’s injunction to his monks: “Keep death ever before your eyes.”
If I am not mistaken the late Anthony de Mello, S.J., recommended as a spiritual exercise that one lie in one’s bed and imagine it were one’s coffin. As Dr. Johnson said to Boswell: “‘Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully’
Does “eternal life” refer to the resurrection of the dead rather than the immortality of the soul? My understanding is that the Jewish belief of what happened after death amounted to an “abyss of emptiness” (Sheol). Did our current belief in the immortality of the soul exist at the time of Jesus? And if so, did “eternal life” mean “eternal life in heaven” rather than “eternal existence in heaven or hell”?
In short, what does “eternal life” for some mean, when we all have immortal souls?
Fr. Imbelli ==
That sounds like Fr. deMello’s Indian background speaking. Some of the Hindu monks actually tied themselves to corpses for meditation purposes! (Glad I’m a Christian :-)
Didn’t Plato say that the best philosophers practice dying? P. Hadot points out that Montaigne has a chapter: “That to philosophize is to learn to die,” and the same theme can be found in Heidegger’s “definition of the authenticity of existence as a lucid anticipation of death.” Hadot has eight pages of citations from the ancients on the theme. It passed over into Christian spirituality, too, only now death could be anticipated also as undergone in and with Christ. One of the spiritual nosegays we received went: “Live every day as if it were your last.”
David Tracy and I once visited the home of Emily Dickinson in Amherst. We were guided on the tour by a young woman, college student probably, something of an airhead and, to judge from her patter, not much of a fan of the poet. “She used to think and write a lot about death, and things like that,” she said at one point, as if that was the height of Emily’s eccentricities.
Mark Twain made made a number of notable comments about death in his writings, some supporting the view that fear of death shrinks the capacity to live, and others evincing the belief that death will be a relief from the pain of life. (Twain was predeceased by his wife and two of his three daughters in the last years of his life, so his yearning for death may be the result of those sad circumstances.)
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
“Many say ‘How hard it is that we have to die’– a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who had to live.”
And my personal favorite:
“All people have ill luck, but Jairus’s daughter and Lazarus the worst.”
Elbert Hubbard, a leader in the Arts & Crafts Movement, also had had some notable one-liners about life and death that remind me of the witty style of Will Rogers, America’s “Cowboy Philosopher”:
“Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.”
“God will not look you over for medals, degrees, or diplomas when you die, but for scars.”
And my Hubbard favorite:
“Die, v.: To stop sinning suddenly.”
Hope this isn’t too off-topic, but after seeing the HD broadcast of the Met’s new Don Giovanni last week, I read again the chapter devoted to the opera in Nicholas Till’s splendid book, “Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue, and Beauty in Mozart’s Operas” (Oxford).. Till places much emphasis on Mozart’s position in the Austrian Catholic Enlightenment, a rather different animal from the French Enlightenment some miles west of Vienna, with which we may be more familiar. Critical of the failure of most critics to deal seriously with Don Giovanni’s damnation in the last act, Till reminds us among other things that when the Commendatore (whom the Don has killed in Act I) shows up in response to Giovanni’s sardonic invitation to dinner given to his statue, his purpose (overlooked by many) is NOT to drag Don G. down into hell, but in a very Catholic way, to invite the reprobate to repent and join him at dinner in heaven. It is the Don’s own refusal to accept God’s mercy that ultimately condemns him, not an unChristian desire for vengeance by his victim (or, for that matter, a desire by the audience to see the Don get his just reward).
This damnation, which so many look on as an embarrassing atavistic return to pre-Enlightenment values, thus makes perfect sense in the character of the Don, and in the larger sense of the opera. Till quotes from a letter by Mozart, written as he was working on Don G., pointing to death as “the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relations with this best and truest friend of man that his image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling.”
Nicholas,
Mozart is never “off-topic!” Thank you for sharing the reflection on Don Giovanni. It is new to me, but immensely appealing.
As for the letter to which you refer, it was quoted by Pope Benedict after a concert of Mozart’s “Requiem” given in his honor. Here is how Mozart’s letter continues:
“I never go to bed without thinking that I might perhaps be dead on the morrow. Yet not one of those who know me would be able to say that in company I am sad or in a bad mood. And for this good fortune I thank my Creator every day, and I wish for it with all my heart for all my peers”.
And the Pope goes on to say: “It is a letter that shows a deep and simple faith which likewise emerges in the prayer of the great Requiem and leads us, at the same time, to love intensely the events of earthly life as gifts of God and to rise above them, looking serenely at death as the “key” that opens the door to eternal happiness.”
So Mozart’s music rests on religious joy. Does that suggest that much of the cacophony of modern music rests on anger and despair in the face of death – of a near certainty that this poor life is all there is?
Here’s an interesting contrarian take on Don Giovanni; according to David Goldman (aka Spengler) this is Mozart’s “Jewish Opera.”
——————–
The story is not about eros, but evil. Christian society is founded on the premise that it requires “only one precept,” as St. Augustine put it: “Love, and do as you will.” Once humankind accepts the utterly unselfish love of Jesus Christ, Christianity asserts, the elaborate body of Jewish law becomes redundant, for Christian love will elicit the right behavior spontaneously…
Christianity…can produce a monster who does nothing but evil precisely because he believes in heaven, hell, and the sacraments of the Church… Christian reliance on the Attribute of Mercy at the expense of the Attribute of Justice, as the theologian Michael Wyschogrod put it, frees Juan to formulate a sociopath’s theory of salvation.
—————-
http://www.tabletmag.com/arts-and-culture/music/81821/divine-justice/?all=1
More discussion here:
http://www.artsjournal.com/slippeddisc/2011/11/was-don-giovanni-a-jew-discuss.html
Of course it’s highly questionable whether Christianity has only one precept but I believe Goldman is correct to point out that some may too easily take refuge in that belief as a way of justifying their otherwise wicked behavior. In that vein I’ve always enjoyed Don Giovanni’s justification of what we now call “monogamish” behavior — to be faithful to one is to be cruel to many.
I look forward to Pope Benedict’s comment.
Well, of course, if it is wicked or evil, it is not love or truth by definition.
Patrick,
I can’t speak for Pope Benedict, but your comment reminded me of the following assertion:
“Ah, le bon Dieu, il doit nous pardonner; c’est son métier [Ah, God is good, He's bound to forgive us; that's His job].”
I’ve seen it attributed to Catherine the Great — but it sounds a bit effete for the formidable Empress. She’d have taught the poor Don a thing or two.
I have always wondered whether it is a sin to yearn for death, even to pray for it.
I recently took time to read my grandmother’s diaries, and it was clear that the last 10 years of her life (she lived to be 95) were filled with discomfort, pain, and loss of all her best friends. She often felt bewildered by the way life had changed, though she was quite a progressive woman. While she seems not to have believed in any kind of afterlife, she clearly welcomed the prospect of release.
While the length of our life is in the hands of God, is there anything that says we have to like it?
And here’s Florence and the Machine singing about God’s love seeing her through when she just wants to chuck life. While doing a kind of quasi pole dance in a skimpy outfit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQZhN65vq9E&ob=av2n
Not for all tastes, but interesting how Our Young People do hear the Good News and tell it in ways we had not anticipated …
People justify wicked behavior with whatever tools they have at hand.
Jean –
My father died at 92, and I’m sure that at the end he was just too tired to go on. He also had great faith, and he anticipated being with my mother and all the rest of his friends, not to mention God. So I don’t think he feared death, he welcomed it.
Yes, the atheists tell us that such beliefs are just wishful thinking, and of course, they are wishful thinking. But they also make sense. The philosophers and theologians have yet to give any good reason why “making sense” is so persuasive. But to some of us, anyway, it is.
As I get older I understand my father better. When your body starts falling apart even though you’re still alive holding it together just doesn’t have the same urgency it has when you’re young. I fear a painful proces of dying, but I don’t think I fear death, not the way some people do, at any rate. If you think that there is life after this one, then there really isn’t any death, except the temporary severing of worn-out body and soul.
Where I come from All Saints Day is one of the biggest days of the year, celebrating as it does the Communion of Saints. It even used to be an official holiday for everyone. Flowers in hand, we still go to the cemeteries to pay our respects, and for those who believe the occasion is not an unhappy one. On the contrary.
My father was quite a good amateur photographer, and he did a series of photographs of New Orleans cemeteries. Just for fun, he would present his pictures as a slide show for different groups. His theme was this: a cemetery is a city of the living, and his pictures showed analogies between things in the cemeteries and things in the rest of the city. One of his favorite shots was the one he would show last. It’s of a traffic sign on a little road way in the back of a cemetery. The sign reads, “DEAD END”. That somehow self-referential sign was to him really funny, no doubt because of his firm belief that such a dead end, a road in a cemetery going nowhere, makes no sense at all.
Ann, I would have loved to have seen your father’s slide show.
My mother’s family used to make the cemetery treck each year on Memorial Day, visiting three different cemeteries and tending the graves of everybody from the first generation over from Ireland. We did this until a few years ago, but it was a good time, even though most of my family weren’t then and aren’t now believers.
The point was that the life had been lived, hard times had been got through, something had been handed down, and suffering was at an end. As various relatives grew older, they would talk very openly about where they wanted to be buried, what they wanted planted on their graves, and what they wouldn’t miss about life.
Raber found the whole thing bizarre and morbid, and I suppose many believers would be contemptuous of such an observance: What is there to celebrate if there is nothing beyond death? But there was a good deal of reverence in these visits, and it was possibly the one holiday where nobody got drunk or started a big fight.
I suppose as a kid, the notion that death had the power to quell even my mother’s fractious family might have had affected my religious views, but this isn’t a subject I’ve thought much about.
Jean –
Ever since the sociologist Max Weber, secularists have been moaning that the abandonment of religion produces a loss of “enchantment”, but not to despair, some of the secularists have decided to find some new enchantments and new meanings of life. We saw such a search recently at dotCWL when we talked about the search by some seculars for “whoosh” (was that the word?) experiences. They included, for example, a really good cup of coffee with a fried, a sunset, cheering on your favorite team.
Over at Verdicts Paul Lakeland just put up a review of a book about making/finding meaning in secular lives. It’s “The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now”. The review is sympathetic and suggests that Catholics and at least some of the secularists can indeed search together for that which makes this life meaningful. The impetus for that sort of collaboration is obviously coming from Pope Benedict, who launched the Courts of the Gentiles, and invited some agnostics to Assissi II, plus making some other overtures to them.. YOu might want to start a discussion over there of “the meaning of life”;.
By the way, does everyone know that the posts on the Verdict blog can be commented on by anybody? To those interested in the arts: Verdicts is more arty/literary than this blog.
Me, I’d just like to know the core meaning of “meaning” in the phrase “the meaning of life” (if indeed it has a core meaning). Very mushy word.
Ann tells of going to the cemeteries in New Orleans, “flowers in hand.” Here in El Salvador, that’s just for openers. My wife’s family is from the countryside. To this day they maintain, with great enthusiasm, their tradition of spending the entire day visiting the cemeteries where their loved ones are buried, telling their favorite stories about them, singing the songs they liked, eating the food they preferred – and often doing this in accord with the wishes of the deceased, expressed at the end of their lives: “After I die, when you come to visit me en el dia de los difuntos, I want you to . . . “
For those who were simply buried in a plot, with nothing above their coffin, fresh earth is piled in a small mound, to compensate for the erosion that’s taken place during the year. When that task has been completed, flowers are placed in the mound, and candles are lit and left alongside it. For those whose had some kind of monument, however modest, it is cleaned and freshly painted; again, at the end come the flowers and candles.
The day begins with a mass at the cemetery. In the previous weeks, people put the names of their loved ones on lists posted at the parish. Those lists are read, as a kind of litany, at the beginning of the mass; afterward, the priest visits the tombs and prays at them.
I noticed Emily Dickinson mentioned above. I have had a crush on for a number of years. Couldn’t help but pass on this one:
Even just from a naturalistic point of view, there is something in the human condition that does not trust a strictly materialist anthropology.
Death is the final horizon but Christianity offers the hope and certainty of life and I think this does give us the courage to engage with the world outside of our own ego gratification but in order to make things “on earth as they are in heaven”
Ann (11/06/2011 – 3:22 pm), I imagine the meaning of “the meaning of life” is a simple, clear, unique and final statement that stills all the longings and doubts and indecisions in us.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Answer_to_the_Ultimate_Question_of_Life.2C_the_Universe.2C_and_Everything_.2842.29
An imaginary creature, sort of like the perfect latte or a sound, restful sleep.
David –
I think that there are many meanings of “the meaning of life”, and they’re probably all important, at least to the people who choose their own. Maybe my basic question is really: is there some core meaning of “the meaning of life” that most of those many meanings share?
Maybe you’re right about the meanings stilling longings, doubts and indecisions. But this just tells us the effects of the meaning of life. What is it that can do such a thing? What can it be thqt satisfies longings, removes doubts and resolves indecisions/ Do theSE meanings differ from person to person? REmember the whoosh theory — your meaning might not be my meaning under this description.
I think it would have to involve a realization that language can’t be involved. Or are you limiting acceptable candidates to verbal constructs?
Thank you Fr Imbelli for prompting this conversation. Pope Benedict is said to have had two primary theological interests: ecclesiology and eschatology…and eschatology requires a theology of death (Chapter Four of his book Eschatology; 1977, trans 1988). On the subject of human being toward death, Ratzinger and Rahner strike many similar notes, perhaps influenced by Romano Guardini. Theologically, death can’t simply be reduced to the clinical exitus, and Ratzinger is very aware of the steps toward death in their pain while hoping that we can yet ‘come to ourselves’ in the midst of all this.