Tag: Death
0 Wearing Ashes in the Soviet Safeway
Last night after the Ash Wednesday Service I ran to Safeway to procure a few (non-meat) products for my dinner. That’s right, not only am I giving up farting for Lent (see earlier, evidently inflammatory, post) my wife informed me yesterday we’re also giving up meat for Lent.
I tried to point out to Ali that my commitment to give up the latter was in direct contradiction to and would most certainly frustrate my attempts to give up the former. My wife though doesn’t just give things up for Lent each year. She’s hard core. She gives up something for Lent each year but also the things she’s given up in previous years. Thus I’m now on the hook for forty days of not farting in my wife’s vicinity while being sustained on a diet of beans, vegetables and fruit.
Anyways, I was standing in line in the small, Soviet-esque Safeway near my house, about 4 people back. I could hear the bagger and the teller whispering words like ‘what’s’ and ‘going on’ and ‘holiday’ and ‘apocalypse’ and ‘probably’ and ‘something’ and ‘in’ and ‘Revelation.’
They were staring at the black, greasy cross on my forehead.
When I got to the checkout, one of them asked me furtively: ‘So, uh, is it like a holiday or something? Or did you go to a funeral?’
Thinking that would certainly be a memorable- and probably psyche destroying funeral- I replied: ‘It’s Ash Wednesday.’
‘Oh, right!’
Long pause.
‘What’s Ash Wednesday?’
And I replied with exactly what I’d told the congregation 30 minutes earlier: ‘Ash Wednesday is the day we remember that life is a gift from God by remembering our mortality.’
Longer pause.
‘I don’t get it.’
I kind of just smiled and swiped my debit card not wanting to venture too much more into this conversation and not because there were a dozen people waiting behind me impatiently with their lunch meat, TP and Crystal Light.
I didn’t want to say much more because, in all honesty, I still hadn’t processed or recovered the night’s service.
Less than hour before, I had traced an ugly black cross on a child in my son’s class and said: ‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return.’
Words that become jarring when spoken on to a 10 year old’s forehead.
And after her, several people back in line, I traced the same bruise-like cross on the forehead of someone whom I’ve grown to love over the past 8 years. Knowing that if I stay in this congregation for a while longer I’ll likely perform this person’s funeral, I said to this friend: ‘‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return.’ I fought back the sudden urge to cry.
And after that friend came another soon after, someone with whom I’ve shared many a laugh on mission teams in Guatemala. On him, I traced a brooding black cross and said: ‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return.’
There were others like that.
Like the parishioner whose battle with cancer I’m privy to. When I marked him with the cross and said ‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return’ the words rung with a painful truth.
Or the parent worried that their child will one day make good on threats to return themselves to the dust prematurely.
And then there was a handful of complete and total strangers. People who came in off the street because they saw the service announced on the sign out front. To these strangers, I drew an executioner’s tool on their forehead and basically said: ‘Remember, eventually you’re going to die.’
More so than any other holy day in the church year, Ash Wednesday affects me.
On Ash Wednesday it’s as though every one gathered in the pews becomes a walking, talking, breathing (for now) illustration of the day’s meaning: that life is fragile, tightrope experience, sometimes precious and sometimes terrifyingly awful and that, good or bad, it will one day end.
In so many ways, we’re finite. Just a part of the world God made. Like dirt.
But were it not so, our lives would cease to be gifts.
We don’t preach a sermon on Ash Wednesday largely because we don’t need to. The people in the pews are the embodiment of the message.
Here’s what I mean.
0 Wearing Ashes in the Soviet Safeway
Last night after the Ash Wednesday Service I ran to Safeway to procure a few (non-meat) products for my dinner. That’s right, not only am I giving up farting for Lent (see earlier, evidently inflammatory, post) my wife informed me yesterday we’re also giving up meat for Lent.
I tried to point out to Ali that my commitment to give up the latter was in direct contradiction to and would most certainly frustrate my attempts to give up the former. My wife though doesn’t just give things up for Lent each year. She’s hard core. She gives up something for Lent each year but also the things she’s given up in previous years. Thus I’m now on the hook for forty days of not farting in my wife’s vicinity while being sustained on a diet of beans, vegetables and fruit.
Anyways, I was standing in line in the small, Soviet-esque Safeway near my house, about 4 people back. I could hear the bagger and the teller whispering words like ‘what’s’ and ‘going on’ and ‘holiday’ and ‘apocalypse’ and ‘probably’ and ‘something’ and ‘in’ and ‘Revelation.’
They were staring at the black, greasy cross on my forehead.
When I got to the checkout, one of them asked me furtively: ‘So, uh, is it like a holiday or something? Or did you go to a funeral?’
Thinking that would certainly be a memorable- and probably psyche destroying funeral- I replied: ‘It’s Ash Wednesday.’
‘Oh, right!’
Long pause.
‘What’s Ash Wednesday?’
And I replied with exactly what I’d told the congregation 30 minutes earlier: ‘Ash Wednesday is the day we remember that life is a gift from God by remembering our mortality.’
Longer pause.
‘I don’t get it.’
I kind of just smiled and swiped my debit card not wanting to venture too much more into this conversation and not because there were a dozen people waiting behind me impatiently with their lunch meat, TP and Crystal Light.
I didn’t want to say much more because, in all honesty, I still hadn’t processed or recovered the night’s service.
Less than hour before, I had traced an ugly black cross on a child in my son’s class and said: ‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return.’
Words that become jarring when spoken on to a 10 year old’s forehead.
And after her, several people back in line, I traced the same bruise-like cross on the forehead of someone whom I’ve grown to love over the past 8 years. Knowing that if I stay in this congregation for a while longer I’ll likely perform this person’s funeral, I said to this friend: ‘‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return.’ I fought back the sudden urge to cry.
And after that friend came another soon after, someone with whom I’ve shared many a laugh on mission teams in Guatemala. On him, I traced a brooding black cross and said: ‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return.’
There were others like that.
Like the parishioner whose battle with cancer I’m privy to. When I marked him with the cross and said ‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return’ the words rung with a painful truth.
Or the parent worried that their child will one day make good on threats to return themselves to the dust prematurely.
And then there was a handful of complete and total strangers. People who came in off the street because they saw the service announced on the sign out front. To these strangers, I drew an executioner’s tool on their forehead and basically said: ‘Remember, eventually you’re going to die.’
More so than any other holy day in the church year, Ash Wednesday affects me.
On Ash Wednesday it’s as though every one gathered in the pews becomes a walking, talking, breathing (for now) illustration of the day’s meaning: that life is fragile, tightrope experience, sometimes precious and sometimes terrifyingly awful and that, good or bad, it will one day end.
In so many ways, we’re finite. Just a part of the world God made. Like dirt.
But were it not so, our lives would cease to be gifts.
We don’t preach a sermon on Ash Wednesday largely because we don’t need to. The people in the pews are the embodiment of the message.
Here’s what I mean.
0 Can We Sense When Someone Close to Us Dies?
Maybe because I’ve been writing a sermon on Eutychus, the first victim of bad preaching in the Church. Paul literally bores him to death. It’s in Acts 20 and may be the reason why I have death on the brain and recalled this wonderful essay from David Hart, who writes beautifully about losing a friend and sensing the event from miles away.
I was fairly close to both Angela and Jacob throughout our teens; at least, we were all part of the same circle. I briefly entertained the hope of something closer between Angela and myself, and for a few weeks she was more or less my girlfriend; but Jacob “swept her off her feet,” and they were at one school and I at another, so I had no chance. It made no difference to our friendship, though.
Unfortunately, I largely lost touch with Angela when I started attending university. Over the course of the next six months, we crossed one another’s paths only three times or so. On the last occasion, she had just returned from a visit to Paris, from which she had brought home, among other things, the Pléiade edition of Montaigne she proudly showed me.
And that was that. Two and a half years later she was killed when a drunk driver struck her car in an intersection; she was alive for several hours after the collision, but never regained consciousness. That was twenty-five years ago tomorrow.
I learned of her death three days after, from Jacob. (Their romance had not survived their remove to separate colleges, but they had remained friends.) I won’t bother to say how the news affected me, but I will remark that I had had what in retrospect seemed to have been a premonition of it. On the night of her death, Angela had suddenly, for no discernible reason, come into my mind, attended by an inexplicable sense of aching melancholy, which at the time I simply took for acute nostalgia.
Jacob, though, had had something that seemed like much more than a premonition. On the night of Angela’s accident, apparently during the hours when she was lying in the hospital unconscious but still breathing, he had had a particularly vivid dream in which she and he had spoken to one another in a strange house that, after the fashion of dreams, was also somehow a garden (if I have the details right).
Their conversation, which had been pervasively sad, concerned her imminent departure for somewhere far away; and it seemed to Jacob that it was understood between them—in that way in which, in dreams, many unspoken things seem simply to be presumed—that she was leaving on a journey from which she would never return. She told him, he recalled, that she had come only to say good-bye.
Now, these things—my vague intuitions, Jacob’s haunting dream—may have been merely coincidences; but, frankly, I can’t make myself believe that the universe is quite large enough to accommodate coincidences of that kind. What was most extraordinary about our experiences, however, is that they were not that extraordinary at all.
That is, it is rather astonishing how common these encounters with the uncanny really are. You may not recall any yourself, but it is quite likely that you need only ask around among your acquaintances to discover someone who does. I myself have had at least two others, one utterly trivial, one of the most crucial importance, and both together sufficient to convince me that consciousness is not moored to the present moment or local space in quite the same way that the body is.
The mind can, of course, deceive itself; it can retrospectively fabricate spectral connections or occult sympathies and convince itself they were there all along. But there are still a great many experiences that resist any too effortlessly reductive an explanation.
There was a period of two or three years, for instance, when a member of my extended family temporarily acquired the unsettling habit of dreaming abnormally clear dreams that later came true (as well as several that did not). I was even present on one occasion, under circumstances neither of us could have foreseen or planned, when a dream he had described to me months earlier came to pass.
What does it all mean, though?
Well, obviously, persons who have known such moments are unlikely to be convinced by any purely materialist account of consciousness, at least of the “mechanical philosophy” variety. The confirmed “physicalists” among them might toy with ideas drawn from, say, some of the more stochastically adventurous quantum theories of consciousness, but mostly out of desperation.
Whatever the case, though, such experiences should chiefly remind us how many and how deep the mysteries of consciousness really are. And the profoundest mystery of consciousness is consciousness itself, because we really have little or no clear idea what it is, or how it could either arise from or ally itself to the material mechanisms of the brain.
There are, of course, intellectually serious books with titles like How the Mind Works (Steven Pinker) or Consciousness Explained (Daniel Dennett), but the preponderant consensus in the philosophical world is that they do not deliver more than a fraction of what they promise. The logical high ground is still occupied by consciousness “mysterians” like Colin McGinn or, at least, by skeptics like John Searle.
Most attempts to describe the mind entirely as an emergent quality of the brain, or as another name for the brain’s machinery, not only fail convincingly to bridge the qualitative distance between sensory impression and coherent thought, but invariably bracket out of consideration a great deal of what any scrupulous phenomenology of consciousness reveals. Certainly they do not seem to explain the “transcendental” conditions by which consciousness is organized: that primordial act within and prior to all our other acts of mind and will; that constant mediation between thought and world that we both perform and suffer in advance of all experience or volition.
Consciousness has not been explained until one can provide a comprehensive picture of how the mind not only “fits” the world, but also “intends” and “constitutes” it as an intelligible phenomenon. And that is not the straightforward mechanical problem it is often mistaken for.
But these are matters that have been tormenting philosophers and cognitive scientists for decades, and they will not be resolved by any arguments or any science currently at our command. And, anyway, even if humanity should some day penetrate the ordinary mysteries of consciousness, the more extraordinary mysteries will probably remain, and continue to urge human beings to think in terms not only of the mind, but of the soul.
Whatever the case, I cannot help but believe that on the night when Angela lay dying, some portion of my consciousness was remotely, flickeringly aware of the fact; and that she, or something of her, was able to reach out into Jacob’s dream to make her farewells. But, even in admitting I believe such things, I would never claim to understand them.
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