Anam Cara

9

T

HE

W

HITE

S

HADOW

:

B

EAUTY AND

D

EATH

But: for me, death is past. It has already taken place. My own. It

was at the beginning . . . Of course death also has a future for me.

But I am not expecting death. I am expecting to cross it, to spend it.

HÉLÈNE CIXOUS

T

HE

P

ATHOS OF

B

EAUTY

BEAUTY SHINES WITH A LIGHT FROM BEYOND ITSELF. LOVE IS the name of that light. At the heart of beauty must be a huge care and affection for creation, for nowhere is beauty an accidental presence. Nor is beauty simply its own end. It is not self-absorbed but points beyond itself to an embrace of belonging that holds everything together. Yet not everything is beautiful and in a broken world occasions of beauty point to possibilities of providence that lie beneath the surface fragmentation. When we endeavour to view something through the lens of beauty, it is often surprising how much more we can see.

Beauty is such an attractive and gracious force precisely because it is so close to the fractured side of experience. Beauty is the sister of all that is broken, damaged, stunted and soiled. She will not be confined in some untouchable realm where she can enjoy a one-sided perfection with no exposure to risk, doubt and pain. Beauty dwells in the palace of broken tenderness. This is where the pathos of beauty shines forth. Pathos is the poignancy that comes alive in our hearts in the presence of loss.

No life is without its broken, empty spaces. In the West of Ireland almost each village has some story of a haunted room in a house. This is a room where the strain of an otherworldly, ghostly presence is felt and there is always a narrative to sustain such an appearance, some story of woundedness or loss. That haunted room somehow stands outside time; it holds a memory that never lessens with the passage of years. The memory remains a wounded presence. Somewhere in every life there is such a haunted room. Like cursed treasure, all the losses of one’s life seem to gather there. Pathos arises when something in the sequence of present experience brings us into direct contact with the burn of past loss. Socially the surface of our culture is fascinated with the break-up of relationships and the glamour of new partnerships. But the camera eye has loyalty only to the moment and always moves on. Little true attention is given to the secret, private death which the end of a relationship can bring. The deeper radiation of intimate tissue is concealed. Externally, an impression is given that one has already ‘moved on’, as the signal phrase has it. The truth is slower, more painful; when you have truly loved, it can take a long time to ‘move on’. Pathos can awaken when, for instance, you unintentionally find yourself back in the same place or landscape where you shared a special time with your beloved. You may hear a piece of music which immediately turns your thoughts to one previous moment of love. Old loss rekindles as you know this time, this place; this joy can never be recaptured.

T

O

L

EARN

H

OW TO

I

NHABIT

L

OSS

If our two loves be one, or thou and I

Love so alike that none do slacken, none can die.

JOHN DONNE, ‘The Good-morrow’

PATHOS IS ESPECIALLY PRESENT IN GRIEF. WHEN SOMEONE YOU love has died, it takes a long time to learn the art of inhabiting the loss. One of the loneliest times in this journey is when you have to clear the person’s wardrobe and decide what to do with their personal effects. When you see again the objects of their affection, the clothes they never again will wear, these things become receptacles of your sense of loss for they are link-objects still connecting you to the departed. In this sense they become ‘sacred objects’. There is some corner of the heart that remains faithful to all that we have loved. Even years after a loss, the sight or scent of something associated with the departed can still quicken the heart. The tragedy is, the longer you live, the more friends you lose. As the world grows older, the ruins of loss multiply and the textures of pathos deepen. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the theologian, has a powerful passage in his Letters and Papers from Prison about being faithful to the vacancy of loss:

T

HE

U

NFILLED

G

AP

Nothing can fill the gap

When we are away from those we love and it would be

Wrong to try to find anything

Since leaving the gap unfilled preserves the bond between

Us. It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap.

He does not fill it but keeps it empty, so that our communion

With another may be kept alive even at the cost of pain.

The beauty of pathos is tenderness, a testimony to affection and care and recognition that love is always vulnerable. Pathos is the enduring witness to where our hearts have dwelt. This is evident in our relationship to our home. A home is not simply a building; it is the shelter around the intimacy of a life. Coming in from the outside world and its rasp of force and usage, you relax and allow yourself to be who you are. The inner walls of a home are threaded with the textures of one’s soul, a subtle weave of presences. If you could see your home through the lens of the soul, you would be surprised at the beauty concealed in the memory your home holds. When you enter some homes, you sense how the memories have seeped to the surface, infusing the aura of the place and deepening the tone of its presence. Where love has lived, a house still holds its warmth. Even the poorest home feels like a nest if love and tenderness dwell there. Conversely, the most ornate, the grandest homes can have an empty centre. The beauty of a home is ultimately determined by the nature of its atmosphere, by the texture and spirit of those who dwell there. A house is like a psyche in the patterns of spirit it absorbs and holds. The art of memory is its secret weaving, how it weaves together forgotten joy and endured sorrow.

D

EATH

: T

HE

F

IRST

T

IME

Y

OU

L

OSE

T

HE

W

ORLD

I find my bearings where I become lost.

HÉLÈNE CIXOUS

IN OUR TRADITION, THE LONELINESS OF DEATH IS USUALLY described with reference to those around the deathbed and the heartbreak that death brings. Yet for the one dying, how lonely it must be to lose the world. This is the first time that it is about to happen. All difficulty and sorrow up to now still happened in the world, in the home or some other familiar places. No matter how intense the devastation of the pain was, one still continued here, picked up the rhythm of one’s life and continued on. There are things of primal familiarity so deep that we never notice them. Being here in the world is a wondrous gift. Because we have always been here, we never render the surprise and shock of ‘being here’ explicit. From day to day we assume fully the role of being here; there is no elsewhere to consider as a destination. And because we are always in our bodies, we never gain distance. Every feeling, thought, delight, danger and confusion we have experienced, we experienced them all in this one body. The body is the inestimable gift that grounds our memory, perception and imagination. The horror of death is that we are in the same moment forced out of both worlds. We lose the world and we lose ourselves. There can be no greater distance on earth than that between the moment when life ends and the new moment when our post-life begins. The distance is infinite because of the utter break in physical continuity. We know nothing of what it is like to step onto that other shore. And it is incredible that no-one has ever been able to cleanly return to explain the journey. This raw factuality renders the loss of the world poignant and helpless. We may ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light’, but we cannot hold our grip here. Like the fall of sleep, it comes over us. However, this sleep will allow us no dreams and will never let us through to morning.

This is forced eviction from the world and from the body, the only home we know. To ordinary human eyes it seems to be a total and definitive eviction. Once evicted, we can never return. Within the whole sequence of life’s narrative, there is no cut like death. Every other ending in life is gathered forward into some other new beginning. The end of childhood is the beginning of growth into adulthood. The loss of a friendship can become the space for a new love or for a sorrow that can blight your life. One way or the other, the narrative continues. Not so with death. The continuity ends. The line of a life is left suspended from a cliff-edge. Everything is gone.

T

HE

C

HOREOGRAPHY OF

D

EATH

:

T

HE

S

ILENCE AND

S

TILLNESS

Nothing for us there is to dread in death.

LUCRETIUS

WHEN SOMEONE WE LOVE DIES, IT IS STRANGE COMING TO TERMS with their disappearance. At death it becomes clear how invisible a person’s life really is. The body still remains somewhat visible. But it has already become empty and is crossing the threshold into its own transformation. The crucial event is that the life of the person has now departed. Like a candle blown out, the flame has vanished. This was the old philosophical question: where does the flame go, when the candle is blown out? In one, unseen swiftness the life goes out. We see nothing. It seems that the essence of a person, the spirit which pervades every pore and cell and is expressed in every thought, feeling and act, can withdraw in one sweep like a wave from the shoreline. It is strange that something which was invisible in the first place can actually vanish and cause the ultimate collapse of everything: the memory, the breath, the body, the thoughts, the knowing, the Eros, the dreams and the eyes and the touch. Nowhere else in creation does an ending take so much with one stroke. Quantitatively in terms of objects there are larger endings. Yet because the object called the human body holds a world that death stops, it is an incredible event. Death is the end of a world; it unravels a unique geography of feeling, tenderness, creativity, sorrow, doubt and shadow; it all comes apart like a piece of knitting unravelling, stitch by stitch.

‘T

HE

M

OST

R

EMARKABLE

T

HING

I E

VER

H

EARD

’

IF SOMEONE WERE TO ASK ME: WHAT IS THE MOST REMARKABLE thing you have ever heard? I would say: the most remarkable thing I ever heard is, there is death. When we were children there was an old woman who minded us now and again. She lived across the river and it was a real treat when we were brought to visit her. She was like a grandmother to us. Though everyone was poor, she could always manage to have some surprise put aside for us. Then one day, she died. It was the first time I heard of death. To a child’s mind, it was the most incredible news. She was gone and would never come back. We would never see her again and no-one could say where she had gone. They talked of heaven, but it seemed like a feeble fairytale when pitted against her vanishing. I could not believe it. Death had come out of nowhere and taken her. I had never once even suspected that there was such a thing as death. It came as a pure shock. To think that everyone had known about death all along and that they could continue working and talking while knowing this awful end, this bleak disappearance awaited each of us. To a child’s mind it was a massive breakage of innocence. What struck me too was how silently death came to take her.

One would surely have expected that such an intensely dramatic event would have been accompanied by a great whirl of sound and colour, and yet the opposite happened. Death was not an action; it was an anti-act. It came silently and left an awful silence in its wake. There is deep silence in death. It can carry out its task without invitation or warning. Death needs no word to frighten or force anyone. In silence it takes you into a silence from which no echo returns. From the moment of your beginning, through all days and climates of mood and dream, the music of your heart has never stopped. Sending its rhythm along vein and bone, it has held you alive and present. Even when you visited deep into the realm of silence, your heart’s music never ceased. Only death’s silence will stop it.

Death is also the master of stillness. Everything that has life moves. Raised on a farm, we learned early to notice the slightest movement against the spread of the landscape. The hill-man’s eye could spot something stirring far off on the other side of a hill; it may have been a hare, a rabbit, another animal or a bird. The eye was trained to the rhythm of the place. Against the backdrop of this familiar landscape, if an animal seemed too still, that alerted the eye too. The animal could be sick or dead. In the world of nature, life moves, but death makes still. When you first see the remains of someone who has died what strikes you is how a presence that was always astir with voice, gesture and gaze is suddenly enveloped in cold stillness. Your eye wants to believe the person is merely asleep. You imagine you glimpse the chest stirring with breath. You stare deeper and your eyes recoil from the unnatural stillness. A neighbour who lived near two elderly ladies told me how he was called to the house as one of them had been taken ill. As soon as he came into the kitchen, he realized the woman was dead. Poignantly her sister was holding her hand, shaking her and calling her name over and over as if trying to awaken her from sleep. The neighbour gently calmed her and explained that her sister had gone. Her inability to register had been due to shock and also to the inability to see her loss. In a way, it was a natural response. She had never seen her sister dead before. It is a tremendous shock to come upon a loved one freeze-framed in that stillness.

T

O

H

ELP A

P

ERSON TO

D

IE

: T

HE

M

OST

B

EAUTIFUL

G

IFT

THE ACT OF DYING IS A HUGE PERSONAL EVENT. NOTHING ELSE that you do in your life will bring such change. In no other experience is the transformation as ultimate and irreversible. In no other experience in your life do you have the opportunity to become invisible. Your death will make you permanently invisible. You will become free of the human gaze and free of place. While you are alive you are always somewhere. Through death you will be no longer bound to any location. Death is the absolute and irreversible event of change. Friends and family who surround the departing one are confined to the outer perimeters of the event. There is a journey beginning here but it is not a physical journey. It is a real journey: someone is leaving and will not be returning. Yet the journey is into an interior and it is an invisible journey. At birth the journey here creates the traveller, the invisible becomes visible. At death the return journey re-creates the traveller, the visible becomes invisible again.

We prefer to avoid talk of death. It is amazing that aside from minimal and superficial reference, the theme of death is absent from most of our conversation. Our culture avoids it too. Where time is money no-one really wants to focus on that edge where time runs out on you. Our education system never really considers it; we have no pedagogy of death. Consequently, death is something we are left to deal with in the isolation of our own life and family. When death visits, there is no cultural webbing to lighten the blow. Death can have a clean strike because the space is clear. Against this background, it is not surprising that we are never told that one of the greatest days’ work we could ever do in the world is to help someone to die.

T

HE

D

EATHBED AS

A

LTAR

Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,

Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams

And our desires.

WALLACE STEVENS, ‘The Deathbed as Altar’

THE IMAGE OF THE DEATHBED FRIGHTENS US. WE END UP THERE because someone we love is departing. But we don’t really know what we should do. As well as being distraught with sadness, we are unsure and awkward. We usually resort to cliché or rush for religious ritual. Yet some people instinctively reach into the heart of the event and extract the treasure.

Over a year ago, a group of students from a university in Ireland went to work in London for the summer. One member of the group, a young American, stayed here to study for autumn exams. One weekend he was visiting relatives in London and phoned his friends to arrange to meet up. But tragedy had just struck the group. The night before, they had been at a party and one of them had tried Ecstasy for the first time. Shortly afterwards, he went into convulsions and was brought to hospital, where he slipped into a coma. The young American went straight to the hospital. All of the group was there with the parents of the young man. A doctor came in and explained that everything possible had been done but the young man was brain dead and he had come to unplug the life-support machine. Everyone was numb and helpless. Just as the doctor was about to unplug the machine, the young American student said: ‘Wait.’ Showing sensitive leadership, he said: ‘This is our friend. Let us take some time before we do this. Let each of us spend a special private moment with him and whisper something special in his ear to bless him on his journey.’ They took the time. Each one blessed him. Then they waited and let the silence settle for the event to become sacred, and for their presence to deepen and become a real circle of shelter around their friend, and only then was he released into his journey.

A deathbed is such a special and sacred place: a deathbed is more like an altar than a bed. It is an altar where the flesh and blood of a life is transformed into eternal spirit. Rather than being unsure, anxious and bungling, we should endeavour to be present there with the most contemplative, priestly grace. Regardless of the shock and pain of our grief, our whole attention should be dedicated to the one who is setting off on their solitary journey. We will have plenty of time later to engage our own grief. Now we need to provide the best shelter, the sweetest love, the most sensitive listening and the most wholesome words for the one who is dying. This is the most significant time, the last moments of time on earth. Therefore, it is vital to attend and listen. Perhaps there are last things a person wishes to say, things from long-forgotten past times he always wished to say but never could. Before the great silence falls, he might desperately need to tell something. And there may be things that need to be heard. Perhaps someone around that deathbed has waited all their life to hear something vitally healing and encouraging and perhaps these are the hours in which it might be heard.

W

HEN

D

EPARTURE

B

ECOMES

T

RANSFORMING

P

RESENCE

Death . . . the undiscover’d country.

SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet

I AM NOT SUGGESTING THAT THE DEATHBED BE CONVERTED INTO a clinical monastic cell. Indeed the situation around a deathbed can often be raw and wholesome with surrealistic splashes of black humour. In and through all of this, however, it is vital to provide an atmosphere whereby the deeper levels of what is happening can emerge and be engaged. A deathbed is not a dead place; it can be a place of intense energy. A woman told me recently that holding her father-in-law in her arms as he slipped into eternity was an incredibly transformative experience for her, more transforming in fact than the birth of her two children. She felt privileged and honoured to be with him at his end.

When the activity of departure becomes a liturgy of real presence, amazing things can happen around a deathbed. I have seen reconciliation happen here that no-one could have predicted that anyone would ever have been able to effect. I have seen frozen years of silent cohabitation, where nothing was shared or said, break like a shell and the essence and warmth of two hearts embrace before the final silence. It is amazing so near the bleak frontier to see how words can become jewelled. Words that come alive here often go on to accompany lives with shelter and grace. For the person who is dying, wholesome words can be an enormous encouragement and shelter. As we have seen, it is a privilege to be present when someone embarks upon the journey into the silence. If you attend reverently and listen tenderly, you will be given the words that are needed. It is as if these words make a raft to carry the person over to the further shore. We should not allow ourselves to settle for being awkward and unsure around a deathbed. There is vital and beautiful work to be done there. When you realize that the dying person needs and depends on your words and presence, it takes the focus off your limitation and frees you to become a creative companion on that new journey. One of the most beautiful gifts you could ever give is the gift of helping someone to die with dignity, graciousness and serenity.

D

EATH AS

T

RANSFIGURATION

:

Y

OUR

S

OUL

H

AS

N

O

F

EAR OF

D

EATH

Therefore, be cheer’d;

Make not your thoughts your prisons.

SHAKESPEARE

WE AVOID THINKING ABOUT DEATH BECAUSE IT MAKES US AFRAID. There is no-one to intercede with, no-one that could call off your death. When we view death in a purely physical way, it is that frightening ending where a life is stopped and cut off. However, it is possible to see death in a different and more creative way. To view death as an abrupt, dumb stop is unfair to the beauty, struggle and growth of a life. It seems unlikely that life would choose us so carefully, bring us through so much and then simply offload the whole harvest of journey over a cliff. That in one sudden, dead moment all growth, memory and presence cease seems to fall out of rhythm. So much could not have been so carefully built to be simply destroyed in a second. Something more profound and ultimate is happening behind the veil. This idea is expressed well by the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral: ‘No, I don’t believe that I will be lost after death. Why should You have made me fruitful, if I must be emptied and left like the crushed sugarcanes? Why should You spill the light across my forehead and my heart every morning, if You will not come to pick me, as one picks the dark grapes that sweeten in the sun, in the middle of autumn?’

The imagination has an eye for the invisible. And the real event in death takes place in the realm of the invisible. At a deathbed the merely physical eye sees an old man, worn and weary, breathing his last. At a deeper level, however, this death is an event where the inner life of this person is gathering and refining itself to slip through the door of air. No-one dies poor or empty. The subtle harvest of memory collects here: all the days and places of a life, all the faces, the words and thoughts, the images, all the small transfigurations that no-one else noticed, all the losses, the delights, the suffering and the surprises. All the experiences of a life collect together in their final weave. No-one knows how they will die. When the time comes, it would be so consoling to be in the embrace of loved ones. Yet for many people this is not the case; they die alone or are hurled unexpectedly into eternity by accidents, murder or war. One can only hope, despite the awful outer circumstances, that somewhere in the interior, invisible level where the dying happens, serenity and grace prevail.

The soul is the real container of an individual’s life. The eye always assumes that it is the physical body that holds a life. However, rather than the soul being simply a component or presence within the body, the soul surrounds and pervades the body. The body is in the soul. This means that the soul has a different kind of knowing than the mind and its thoughts and feelings. While the knowing of the mind is limited by frontiers, the soul has no frontiers. At death, the mind is up against the last and ultimate frontier. It will attempt to understand and, with dignity and hope, accept what is ending and what is coming. However, the soul knows in a different way. The soul is not afraid. It has no reason to be afraid, for death cannot touch the soul.

W

HEN THE

R

IVER

R

EACHES THE

C

LIFF-EDGE

ALL THROUGH YOUR LIFE YOUR SOUL TAKES CARE OF YOU. DESPITE its best brightness, your mind can never illuminate what your life is doing. You are always in a state of knowing, but that knowing, while often lucid and deep, is more often faltering and shadowed. At times you feel immensely present in your life, rooted in what is happening to you, utterly there. At other times you are only vaguely in your life; things are blurred, confusion or distraction owns your days. In such times you remain attached to the earth by only the slightest thread. Yet through all these times, your soul is alive and awakened, gathering, sheltering and guiding your ways and days in the world. In effect, your soul is your secret shelter. Without ever surfacing or becoming explicit, your soul takes care of you. Never once while you are here does your soul lose touch with the eternal. Your soul makes sure that God’s dream for you is always edging towards fulfilment even when at times the opposite seems to be the case. At times of immense suffering or the most ecstatic joy, your life breaks through the shadowing and you come to sense that something else is minding and guiding you. This is the nature of the consolation and infinitely tender embrace your soul always provides for you. If this is true of the flow of your days, how much more tender must that caring be at the time of your death when the river reaches the edge of the cliff?

At the deepest heart of your life, in your soul, there is no fear of death. Your soul is well prepared for the arrival of death for it knows that death cannot destroy you. It will change you, and change you beyond recognition to those you leave behind, but death cannot disassemble you.

All through your life, the most precious experiences seemed to vanish. Transience turns everything to air. You look behind and see no sign even of a yesterday that was so intense. Yet in truth, nothing ever disappears, nothing is lost. Everything that happens to us in the world passes into us. It all becomes part of the inner temple of the soul and it can never be lost. This is the art of the soul: to harvest your deeper life from all the seasons of your experience. This is probably why the soul never surfaces fully. The intimacy and tenderness of its light would blind us. We continue in our days to wander between the shadowing and the brightening, while all the time a more subtle brightness sustains us. If we could but realize the sureness around us, we would be much more courageous in our lives. The frames of anxiety that keep us caged would dissolve. We would live the life we love and in that way, day by day, free our future from the weight of regret.

N

OT

O

NE

M

OMENT OF

Y

OU

W

ILL

B

E

L

OST

IN THE

C

ROSSING

When night asks

who I am I answer, Your own, and am not lonely.

LI-YOUNG LEE

AT THE TIME OF DEATH, THE SOUL KNOWS HOW TO PROTECT ITS precious cargo. While death will stop and empty the body, the soul will ferry your essence into eternal life. Not one moment of you will be lost in the crossing. Eternal life is the province of the soul; this is where the soul is at home. For your soul, then, death is indeed a homecoming. Naturally the soul will feel the sadness of withdrawal from the visible world. Ultimately, however, physical death must also be an adventure for the soul. There must be excitement for the soul at the edge of such transformation, and joy in bringing the bright essence of a life’s harvest into eternity. Perhaps this is the reason why at a deathbed you often notice that another presence takes over. The taut lonesomeness of the death struggle eases; below the personality and physical body some other level of the person’s spirit has awakened. You look at the dying and sense that they are now beginning to belong more fully to the unseen world. Indeed, they will often tell you that they have just glimpsed the countenance of some long-departed friend or family member. Already their vision is altering. Now they are beginning to see the eternal tracings of the invisible world. It can be an incredible thing to really look into the eyes of the dying. Often you see such beauty dawning there. It is as if the whole tenderness and dispersed beauty of the person’s life focuses in their eyes.

If we befriend the mystery of the soul, then we sense the secret depths to our life. And if we come to trust these depths and realize that here is where the significance of our life dwells, then we come to awaken more and more to our true life. Fear, falsity and the struggle for image cease to absorb us. We learn to live in the world but grow sure that we are not simply of the world. To awaken to the soul is to enter a new rhythm of dignity. Despite awkwardness, confusion and negativity, this rhythm of soul-elegance will continue to prevail. And when the invitation of death arrives, we will be given the strength and light to transfigure our fear. Strange as it may sound, we will come to trust death as the deeper dignity within us carries us through the travail of departure. At death the infinite within us will come good: there is no need to be afraid.

I

N THE

H

OUSE OF

E

TERNAL

B

ELONGING

B

IRTH AND

D

EATH

A

RE

O

NE

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar;

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

WORDSWORTH, ‘Ode. Intimations of Immortality’

NO THOUGHT CAN TAKE AWAY THE STRANGENESS OF DEATH. However you approach it, the fact that death awaits us but that its time and form remain unknown is strange. Nothing else that waits for us will make such a claim on us. Death weights the future. Imagine if you could say ‘I am glad that my death is behind me’ – what a different world you would be speaking from. Unfortunately, death dissolves subsequence and allows no afterwards and it assumes such power because it lies out of reach further down the line. In fact, it marks the end of the line. Perhaps if we could get beyond thinking of time as a line of life and life as a lifeline, we might be able to salvage a more hospitable understanding of death.

No sooner have we arrived on earth than we become excited hostages of the future. Our thoughts, words and actions are never neutral. Meanwhile behind us the future we have just traversed piles up. Claimed by the continuous generosity and promise of the future, we forget where we have come from. We forget our birth and we hardly ever think further back to the time before our birth. When we do think of birth in this way, an unexpected kinship emerges between death and birth. Each is the intimate and ultimate gateway. Birth is appearance; death is disappearance; or the reverse, for all we know. This kinship is unforgettably portrayed in the opening paragraph of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory:

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).

If we could see time as a circle, we might be better able to see how birth and death belong within the one embrace. Could it be that where we come from at birth is where we return to at death? When we think of birth and death together, death begins to lose its terror as an unknown abyss where the intimacy of a life is erased. If the light and beauty of who we are was dreamed and created in that realm before birth, then death is surely bringing us home to the house of our eternal belonging. And if everything we are is a gift from that home of dream, then our return will be a celebration of all we have awakened, realized and lived. Perhaps, deep within us there will be no great surprise at our return, for there may be a silent dimension of the heart which through all the years has never forgotten where it came from. Perhaps this is why beauty touches us so deeply. When beauty touches us, we remember who we are. We realize that we have come from the homeland of beauty.

Each life is enfolded within a circle of time and if we imagine this circle as porous, occasionally, as we journey through our days, time suddenly deepens and all fragmentation coheres as we slip into eternal presence. Eternal time dwells deep in ordinary time. As we say, such moments become timeless and what is timeless does not pass away; it lives for ever. Eternity is then not to be considered as an infinite quantity of days. There is the image of eternity as an endless desert. Once every hundred years a raven comes and takes away one grain of sand and eternity will last until all the sand is removed. Caught between the shadowing and brightening of our days, we can have no clear view, yet our glimpses of the eternal world would suggest that it is not a matter of infinite quantity so much as a pure refinement of presence. And maybe this is the unseen gift that death will bring, namely, a refinement that transfigures us in order that we may dwell completely in eternal presence. Again this would not be foreign to us. Indeed the times of deepest delight in life are those moments when everything comes together and we feel divinely alive. Time opens and the eternal enfolds us. Though we slip back again into the breakage of days and moments, we never lose that feel of the eternal.

‘B

EHOLD

, I A

M

M

AKING

A

LL

T

HINGS

N

EW

’

MEMORY IS THE PLACE WHERE OUR VANISHED DAYS SECRETLY gather. Already within the passage of time there is a harvesting of our experience. Without memory, you would not be who you are. All that has happened to you in your life awakens and unfolds your individuality. All that has hurt you, gladdened you, deepened you and challenged you tells you who you are. Your experience is your most intimate creation. No-one else knows your experience in the way you do. No-one else sees what has happened to you in the same way as you see it. Something that seems trivial to another could be heart-rending to you. When you love someone and come to know them, you learn to tune your heart to the rhythm of their sensitivity. Through all your time together, this attunement becomes the ground of your ability to understand, forgive and care for each other. When someone you love is dying, your sorrow is for the loss of them and the loss of the world they carry. Eternal life must mean that neither the person nor their world is lost. Eternal life must mean the continuity beyond death of that individual life and that individual world.

Eternal life must also mean that one day we will be together again with the ones we love. This is the beauty of the notion of resurrection. In much contemporary thinking there is the tendency to view death as a simple dissolution whereby the body returns to mother earth and the spirit slips into the air to become one with the universe. While this claims a certain elemental continuity, it cannot be described as the eternal life of the individual. This view would accept death as a reversal and unravelling of the mysterious and intricate weaving of an individual life and it seems to offer very little. Indeed, all it delivers is a bland description of death as an elemental physical process. The intimacy and mystery of the individual life is merely loosed into anonymous, vague energy. In contrast, the resurrection promise is the continuity of the individual life in transfigured form. We will be ourselves. We will recognize each other and we will be together, reunited for eternity.

‘I W

ONDER

I

F

T

HERE

I

S

G

RASS IN

H

EAVEN

’

MUCH OF OUR CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY HAS PRESENTED HEAVEN AS an idealized realm somewhere at the outposts of infinite space. Heaven has to be as distant as possible from the shadow-lands of human imperfection. The distance also seemed to account for the absence and silence of the dead. Such a distant, pure region was always too abstract for the folk-mind. I remember one delightful conversation where the abstraction was punctured. When I was a child I heard an old neighbouring woman ask my father: ‘Paddy, I wonder if there is grass in heaven?’ With my child’s eye I could imagine a sweep of green after-grass breathing in the silver realm of heaven! If we were to imagine heaven as a state rather than a place, we could say that heaven is as near as God and there is nothing as close as God. Heaven is not elsewhere. It is here, in the unseen, beside us.

Similarly, the dead are not distant or absent. They are alongside us. When we lose someone to death, we lose their physical image and presence, they slip out of visible form into invisible presence. This alteration of form is the reason we cannot see the dead. But because we cannot see them does not mean that they are not there. One of the oldest and most beautiful metaphors to convey this change of level is the journey of the larva to become a butterfly. Once it is a butterfly it cannot go back and re-enter the world of the larva. As larva it was bound to earth and water; now as butterfly it inhabits the air. It can fly overhead, look down and remember where and who it has been but not even for one second can it partake again in the image or form from that realm. Transfigured into eternal form, the dead cannot reverse the journey and even for one second re-enter their old form to linger with us a while. Though they cannot reappear, they continue to be near us and part of the healing of grief is the refinement of our hearts whereby we come to sense their loving nearness. When we ourselves enter the eternal world and come to see our lives on earth in full view, we may be surprised at the immense assistance and support with which our departed loved ones have accompanied every moment of our lives. In their new, transfigured presence their compassion, understanding and love take on a divine depth, enabling them to become secret angels guiding and sheltering the unfolding of our destiny. Those who die come closer to the source of everything creative.

L

IKE THE

M

USIC OF A

R

IVER THE

I

NDIVIDUAL

L

IFE

F

LOWS

T

HROUGH

D

EATH

I have immortal longings in me.

SHAKESPEARE, Antony and Cleopatra

IN ONE OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL PASSAGES IN THE BIBLE THE LORD says:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth . . . Here God lives among men. He will make his home among them; they shall be his people and he will be their God; his name is God-with-them. He will wipe away all tears from their eyes; there will be no more death, and no more mourning and sadness. The world of the past has gone. Then the One sitting on the throne spoke: Now I am making the whole of creation new . . .

REV. 21: 1–5

When the individual life flows towards death, it also flows through death. It travels like the music of the river. Sustained by its passion and belonging and within the sureness of its flowing, the river is alive. It has a future and urgency for new possibility. It has no fear of death and yet at the end of its flow, a river always seems to be dying into the huge embrace of the ocean. Yet there is no break between the end of the river and its flowing life. The song of its end continues to sing back up the river towards the first moments of its visible infant-flow. At death the music of the heart becomes one with the unheard eternal melody.

T

O THE

P

LACE

W

HERE

G

OD AND

D

EATH

A

RE

O

NE

: T

OWARDS THE

C

ONTEMPLATIVE

J

OURNEY OF

B

EAUTY

DEATH IS THE GREAT SHADOW THAT DARKENS EVERY LIFE. IT IS A huge mystery. Though your future is unknown and its content uncertain, one thing will certainly come: death. It is the only certain and absolutely intimate event. Yet we know so little about it. Within a culture the contemplatives are the ones who probe this event. The subtext of the contemplative life is the continual attempt to build a creative companionship with your own death. All fear is rooted in the fear of death. All illusion is the attempt to disguise death. The contemplative mind is willing to school itself in the primal silence of death. It endeavours to turn that bleakness into a welcoming tenderness. It is as though the gaze of kindness causes the abyss to relent and yield some shelter. The courage of the contemplative mind pushes the fragile barque of thought and faith out into the anonymous stillness and vacant silence of the abyss. The contemplative strives for a depth-resonance, a depth-recognition at the outer/inner extreme where death, transience and eternity issue from God. Maybe life and death are one in God. The contemplative wishes instinctively to reach the absolute source: the spring of essence, the well of origin. In this circle all is one, nothing is broken. The crevice that brings duality, opposition and otherness has not yet opened. It is to this numinous region that the contemplative mind is drawn. Joan Chittister writes: ‘It is Beauty that magnetizes the contemplative, and it is the duty of the contemplative to give beauty away so that the rest of the world may, in the midst of squalor, ugliness, and pain, remember that beauty is possible.’

Death casts a white shadow. It is the shadow of light bleached by Nothingness. All our days, actions, words, and finally our very bodies, vanish into the light. If death had the final word, then beauty would be reduced to a transient, ghostly presence. The heroism of the contemplative endeavour is the attempt to reach through to that final threshold and enter that fierce conversation between Death and Beauty. The irony is that death brings out the fire and fibre at the heart of beauty. Within the white shadow, the gentle eyes of beauty can out-stare the unravelling eyes of death.

T

O

W

ATCH A

P

ERSON

B

ECOME

M

ORE

B

EAUTIFUL

AS

T

HEY

N

EAR

T

HAT

K

INGDOM

But is that beauty, is that beauty death?

No, it’s the mask by which we’re drawn to him,

It is with our consent death finds his breath;

Love is death’s beauty and annexes him.

DENIS DEVLIN, ‘The Colours of Love’

THE CONTEMPLATIVE IS THE ARTIST OF THE ETERNAL: THE ONE who chooses to listen patiently in the abyss of Nothingness for the whisper of beauty. Only at that severe frontier does it emerge in the knowing in the bone that yes, Love is stronger than Death. It is overwhelming sometimes to watch a person become more and more beautiful as they near the kingdom of death. Though the body is worn, the countenance becomes infused with radiance. The words and the silences are enveloped in a new dignity and freedom. You begin to realize that already the graciousness of the eternal is infusing the last remnants of a life. Below the vicissitudes and vagaries of loss and transience is the primal affection, the Divine Beauty which holds everything. In that embrace, memory is always new possibility and all possibility comes finally home to memory.

Ultimately, the contemplative journey discloses that there is no need to be afraid of death. When the heart finds its contemplative radiance, the darkness of death shall have no dominion. The beauty of God is that sure embrace where eternal life is eternal memory.