Musings on Mortality
[“There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven—A time to give birth and a time to die. . . .” (Ecclesiastes 3:1,2)]
O Lover,
I was a child when in 1948 I first experienced the interception of life by death: the funeral of my Ukrainian-born great grandfather Jacob Balzer. In the years following the aura of this unbid visitor assumed paradoxical form: on the one hand, the rapture anxiety of my religious origins blighted me with an abiding fear of my own death; on the other, my dizzying rush into adolescence and then early adulthood had me viewing death as an abstraction insofar as the young surely live forever. In retrospect, I was scarred in both ditches of that road.
The plot would only thicken. While early on I had repeatedly encountered bio-mortality on our farmstead, I entered my majority viewing death almost solely as an individual and merely human experience. It was in graduate school that first the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr (e.g., Moral Man and Immoral Society) and then John Howard Yoder’s work on the “principalities and powers” (The Politics of Jesus) compelled me to confront the negative in its trans-personal forms, both the collective and institutional.
A cardiac diagnosis at age thirty-eight together with the early deaths of my father (53) and younger brother (44) both served to render less abstract the subject and increased awareness of my own mortality even as its parameters remained highly individualistic. Only in the second half of life did the emerging cosmology/spirituality interface and the ubiquity of process undermine my compartmentalizing of my own mortality from the pervasive role of change in the entire cosmic saga. More than an interruption, death was becoming a part of the fabric of existence, its role indisputably part of a universal flux of recycling.
One of the major foibles in my anecdotage continues to be the clutching of a traditional notion of identity, both before and beyond death, which is individual, distinctive, and preserving of the fabricated self. I only cautiously am opening myself to the primacy of participation in Your cosmic renewal rather than grasping an egoic personal identity. While I find myself surrendering that construct incrementally, the earlier grooves run deep and the absence of a safety net over Kierkegaard’s 70,000 fathoms foreboding. Having said that, before You, O Lover, I bear witness that this relinquishment, very much in progress, has only heightened my longing for the whatever! of You, all asterisks deleted. My principal longing is to participate in Your encompassing “all in All” (I Cor 15:28), all else having been ceded to You.
And what would remain were I to complete the surrender of all attachment, even letting go of my own distinct and prized personhood, my separate self? Am I able to emulate the “empty hands” (sans solace) of which Thérèse wrote and lived up to her final hour? After all of the struggle, journeying, and abandoning of projected outcomes from the personal to the cosmic, what would I then retain in the hour of my death? Nothing! No thing! Only You: Eckhart’s mind-boggling “No-thing”! Given the severity of this Your lavishness, can You not empathize with my difficulty in accepting it, my perplexity at this conundrum none other than You have placed before me? I intuit that You probably can, but, alas, sometimes I waver.
In his 1224 Canticle of the Sun Francis of Assisi peerlessly encapsulated the direction groped for in this post with these two words: “Sister Death.” Let it be, O Lover, let Your whatever be.
