Saturday, September 23, 2023
Memorial of Saint Pius of Pietrelcina, Priest
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Living (and dying) for the light
I charge you before God, who gives life to all things, to keep the commandment until the appearance of our Lord Jesus Christ.
It seems right for me to think about the border between life and death far more than even just a year or two ago. That may not be right timing for you, but thanks for joining me now and then in this exploration.
Enter his gates with thanksgiving, enter his courts with praise. Come with joy into the presence of the Lord.
God’s temple extends beyond the horizon of my death, right across the Line. I might join the angels here, I might join the angels there.
How I live the last years of my life, and how I die, matters more than I generally realize. Henri Nouwen, who had a year at least between his own near-death-experience and actual death, paid close attention to his words and actions during that time:
If I could truly say that I was grateful for what I had lived, eager to forgive and be forgiven, full of hope that those who loved me would continue their lives of joy and peace, and confident that Jesus who calls me would guide all who somehow belonged to my life—if I could do that—I would, in the hour of my death, reveal more true spiritual freedom than I had been able to reveal during all the years of my life. I realize on a very deep level that dying is the most important act of living. It involves a choice to bind others with guilt or to set them free with gratitude.
Generosity of the dead to the living? That might be a strange idea for Protestants, but not so strange for the rest of Christianity. “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.” I often pray this prayer interceding with my Aunt Mary along with Mary Theotokos, the mother of Jesus.
How many centuries have the Chinese (among others in the Far East) revered their dead? We Americans don’t do much of that, and we think/talk/write/pray far more about our lives alive than what we cannot touch or feel of life after death. This, in spite of Paul’s description of Jesus, not on earth but in heaven:
Our Lord Jesus Christ alone has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light. No human being has seen Him, or can see Him. To him be honor and eternal power.
This coming Sunday’s cover essay from the NY Times Opinion section bridges both east and west, as well as life, death, and after-life, as the author describes the work of “underground historians” in China:
At the start of one of her articles, Jiang Xue quoted the philosopher Hannah Arendt on the relevance of the people she profiles — and her own life:
“Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given them on earth — this conviction is the inarticulate background against which these profiles were drawn. Eyes so used to darkness as ours will hardly be able to tell whether their light was the light of a candle or that of the blazing sun.”
I was struck by how the lines applied to anyone working for change in China today: Is their work pointless, or trailblazing? The light of a candle, or a blazing sun?
Arendt’s quote is especially apt because it is open-ended. It doesn’t imply that people working for change in dark times are bound to win because good always trumps evil, or some other cliché. But the implication is clear: In dark times, light is precious; it always matters.
Paul tells Timothy to finish the race, not to give himself up to death while he lives. Wendell Berry’s character Nathan Coulter, diagnosed with cancer, tells his wife in an unforgettable passage of prose, “Dear Hannah, I’m going to live right on. Dying is none of my business. Dying will have to take care of itself.”
A few months later, as Nathan grew weaker, Mr. Berry said of him, “Death had become his friend, and when the time came to go, he went.”
As for the seed that fell on rich soil, they are the ones who embrace the word with a generous and good heart, and bear fruit through perseverance.
 (1 Timothy 6, Psalm 100, Luke 8)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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