Transition Prep

(3/4/23)

O Lover,

In recent months my wife and I, now co-residents of octogenaria, have been responding to our parish’s invitation to submit written guidance for our respective funeral Masses. Amid this rich dialogical process we recently bid farewell to yet another of our peers, one exactly my age, who preceded us to You. In this prayer offered from within the orb of Your encompassingness I want to explore several aspects of my preparation thus far toward and to physical death.

First, I have found myself ready, occasionally even eager, to give myself to this matter. While most versions of the Christian scriptures translate the Greek word kaíros as “fullness of time,” I prefer “ripe chrónos.” The winter of ’23 was the ripe time for me to do this! In contrast to earlier decades when amid growing awareness of my family’s genetic cardiac vulnerabilities I might have vacillated between denial and distraction, fatalism and despair, now I was seemingly ready. That that earlier season was both protracted and painful only makes me more grateful to You for this openness now.

Second, and relatedly, this present project has proceeded largely without fear, one of my fellow-travelers earlier on. I feared death lest my time with my wife be but brief; lest my fondest dreams be truncated as were some of those of both my father and brother who hearts failed at ages 53 and 44, respectively; lest the implications of my mortality bear me down into the darkness. Most of all, across the first half of my life I feared Your judgment upon my obvious brokenness. 

Granted, glimpses of these fears, not least the latter one, occasionally reappear now, the deep grooves of my formative decades being smoothed only gradually and rarely completely. Indeed, the tension inherent in faith sometimes has me chaffing at the confines of finitude, restless with my own non-necessity, scratching at the hairshirt of what Heidegger dubbed our “thrownness into being” (dásein). But these lingering tensions are now experienced more as inherent strictures of the finitude package than as occasions for despair as in earlier nightmares.

Third, the linchpin of all of the above continues to be an incremental transformation of my experience of You, O Lover. There is an irony in coming increasingly into a peace with my own finitude, mortality, contingency, and non-essentiality during the very season when my certitude regarding “after” is being distilled down to nada.  Or perhaps it is but an apparent irony. In any event, the seemingly oxymoronic corollary of becoming increasingly agnostic regarding “after,” of being drawn into gelássenheit (“releasement”) regarding all penultimate securities, has been a growing trust in You, in the lavish agápe of Your Sacred Heart’s embrace. 

I wear my otherwise ponderous yoke of finitude much differently to the extent to which I am aware that You are the Grunt (“Ground”), Abyss, and Télos, the incarnating resident (Jn 1:14; Apoc 21:1-7) of precisely that creaturehood realm. The self about whose identity, preservation, and survivability I had long worried and fretted was largely a fabricated, an autonomous, and thus a false self; its true counterpart, the self nonnegotiably in relation with (vis-à-vis) You, the self which, finally, will be You, is unfolding still. As I continue to live toward my own physical death, I am increasingly coming to be at peace with putting all of my eggs in the basket of You, O Lover. 

And there I rest. Most of the time.