Thursday, September 19, 2024
Memorial of Saints Andrew Kim Tae-gĹŹn, Priest, Paul ChĹŹng Ha-sang, Companions, Martyrs
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
 Exit Verbs
By the grace of God I am what I am. And it’s the grace of God that is with me.
How about “befriending” death? That’s Jungian psychologist James Hillman’s idea. Marie Kondo befriends clothing, keeping only what brings her joy. But this other side of things, Hillman says, makes our lives richer. Befriend your dreams, befriend your shadow, befriend your unconscious. Befriend your death before it arrives. Claim all of your experience, integrate the light and dark sides of your story.
A wonderful but macabre picture book brings children, cared for by their grandmother who is very ill, into contact with the Grim Reaper, whose name is Death. The black robed reaper tries to sneak upstairs, but the children, knowing what’s about to happen, interrupt him. “Death’s only friend is night.” If they can keep him occupied till dawn, he’ll have to leave without their grandmother.
They offer him a snack, then coffee, and more coffee, and more. He loves his coffee, black without sugar, and he spends several hours at the kitchen table with the four children. But at last he puts his hand over his cup. He will drink no more.
When the children ask him why he must take their grandmother, Death tells them a story about a family of four, like theirs will be of Joy, Delight, Sorrow and Grief. They grow up together, live together on the same mountainside in two houses, and eventually they die together.
“What would life be worth if there was no death?”
He gets up from the table, and the children do not stop him. They listen as Death climbs the stairs, and they hear a window open. Then in a moment they hear Death’s voice, “Fly, soul. Fly, fly away.” They tiptoed up the stairs.
Grandmother had died, and the curtains were blowing in the gentle morning breeze. Death looked quietly at the children and told them, “Cry, heart, but never break.”
And then he was gone.
Henri Nouwen says, “I have a deep sense that if we could really befriend death we would be free people. We could relate to death as a familiar guest instead of as a threatening stranger.”
Of course. Night is NOT death’s only friend.
Nouwen continues:
To befriend death, we must claim that we are children of God, sisters and brothers of all people, and parents of generations yet to come. In so doing, we liberate our death from its absurdity and make it the gateway to a new life.
Andrew Kim Taegon and Paul Chong Hasang, Korean martyrs in the 19th century, looked into their hearts, around at their friends, then looked up to heaven, and befriended death in the midst of their oppressors. Nouwen says:
Nouwen continues:
The great challenge is living your wounds through instead of thinking them through. It is better to cry than to worry, better to feel your wounds than to understand them, better to let them enter into your silence than to talk about them. Will you take your wounds into your head or your heart?
Befriend. Relate. Live. Cry, feel, enter, take them into your heart. Die. Fly, soul, fly. The verbs lead us down a God-sent path toward heaven, day by day.
The Lord’s mercy endures forever. I will not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord. You are my God, and I give thanks to you.
(1 Corinthians 15, Psalm 118, Matthew 11, Luke 7)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
#
