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 souclass="underline" 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.