Regarding Thánatos
[“O Death, where is your sting? O Hades, where is your victory?” (I Cor 15:55)]
O Lover,
In my eighty-fourth year, I live with ample awareness of mortality. The relentless waning of somatic and mental powers correlates with the teaching of Holy Writ: “It is appointed unto humans once to die” (Heb 9:27). While longevity may seem to offer a brief reprieve, all is relative and duration, finally, is invariably finite. Awakened as from a youthful illusion of immortality by a diagnosis forty-five years ago, my subsequent life has had a disconcerting travel companion named thánatos (“death”).
It is regarding how I hold the above “passenger” that the flower continues to unfold. You, O Lover, have been persistently tutoring me in the art of trusting You across these decades, all of which has been, mostly unbeknownst to me, inadvertent preparation for my own end. At present that reliance upon You continues to include a measure of struggle. In my prayer, often including fíat volúntas Túa (“do with me as You will”), I ask to be drawn into a more expansive trust. But what would that look like? And at what points am I actually resisting such movement?
Central to those questions is the issue of the self: am I an egoic, “free,” fabricated, and auto-preserving self, or am I the self embedded in and, ultimately, indistinguishable from, You? Am I the former, a false self, or the latter, my true self? Well You know that I relinquish the first most reluctantly, for it has seemingly been my lifelong survival project. And yet, first from the hints of theósis, deification, divinization, and engoddedness in the tradition of the Christ, especially at its mystical edge; and of late via exposure to the broad advaíta (“non-dualism”) strand in Vedantic Hinduism; I have been given growing glimpses that there is, finally and actually, only You. The apostle Paul lays out the direction of this emerging inverted cornucopia of Oneing in writing of “all things” being “headed up” in the Mystérium of Your Christ (Eph 1:10), of creatures being drawn into Your “all in All” (I Cor 15:28).
So, again, what restrains me from embracing fully the implications of Your Oneing for my mortality? I confess that on this day, like many others, the principal obstacle involves the loss of my differentiated identity. As with so much else about You, I am both bedazzled and frightened by the implications of Your encompassing Singularity. Across so much of my life the “I” vector encompassing work-ethic, goal-orientedness, accomplishment, and sheer tenacity has been the lodestar, and surrendering that tack comes only incrementally and grudgingly, a cliff above the Abyss of You from which I repeatedly almost jump. Why am I tempted to fear that the only alternative to perpetual differentiation is total annihilation rather than continuing transformation into You, The One Self, You whom neither eye nor ear, imagination nor affections, can corral (I Cor 2:9)?
Here again, O Lover, I take shelter in the interrogative. Given whom I have experienced You to be, especially via Your Christ, why do I have moments opting for perpetual differentiation over the tsunamic plentitude of Your WHATEVER? Why do I repeatedly find myself hoping, as it were, to sneak my egoic distinctiónis contraband into an ineffable Greater Life? Is not my dilemma but a protracted, chronic case of failure to surrender to Your invitation to gelássenheit in regard to my very last? Having witnessed and experienced glimpses of hell already, both without and within, and thus joining Paul in taunting rather than fearing it, why am I still intermittently uneasy about the loss of the “I,” my egoic creation, this even as I hear again Your invitation to trust You with the whole kit and caboodle giving rise to this post? Of the vast list of things mortality requires me to surrender, is not the false and ever-differentiated self the chief one still standing? To paraphrase Pogo, is not the final and most formidable of my attachments, my clutchings, none other than . . . “I”?
In the light of the above, it seems safe to say that the sting of death has not yet been completely removed within me. “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me” (Ps 70:2).
