The reality of death, the loss of both our loved ones and our own personal life has long been at the heart of human concern, human pondering, at the heart of our religion, our art and our literature. The world’s oldest story, a four-thousand-year-old Mesopotamian poem, the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’, poignantly shows the struggle of mortals when faced with our inevitable death.
Thousands of years later the same concerns are still felt. Modern German-American poet Charles Bukowski once wrote:
“We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
Bukowski, perhaps because of his early childhood Catholicism, powerfully zeros in on some of the eternal verities, the universal truths at the heart of our faith, at the heart of our entering into the mystery of Ash Wednesday today.
We are all going to die. All of us, every last one of us.
And this death, “is a circus” – it is a tragedy, a brutal and cruel farce that should not be so.
The Christian tradition asserts death has no inherent meaning, is not “a balance” to life, has no goodness and is not part of any original plan of the Divine. Like illness, decay and that we may call evil, that which pulls us from the Good, death is actually just an absence of that Good, a result of turning away from God, a consequence of a creation-wide cataclysm whereby life and is estranged from the eternal. A ‘circus’ indeed.
Our natural, our human-made-in-the-Image of God response to this reality should be love. Because it is only love, only that which makes us act for others, regardless of self, only that which means we may give our life for others, it is only love that is as strong as death, it is only love that is stronger than death.
Bukowski though again astutely names and makes real why we do not love: “We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities”. By that which is not important, by that which is not of lasting consequence or meaning. We hold onto the trivial, the fleeting and the temporary, and we neglect the important and the eternal.
This terrorization by the trivial is, ironically, no more present than in popular misconceptions of death and the afterlife. As seen in so many modern movies and cute cartoons, we are fed on the idea that after death, we, our soul perhaps, live forever in heaven – pretty much as we are now. Our dearly departed are so often depicted as continuing their lives, same appearance, same name, same life, but now in heaven not earth. In fact, they are depicted as essentially not having died at all.
This is not the Christian understanding. We do die. We, the person we know and think we are now, has to die because we are both an image of the immortal One who made us, and mortal, formed from earth. Our mortal self, our life, our identity, our bodies all die and what we become, we cannot fully know.
We understand this more when we critically look at the popular idea of life after death described above, living in heaven like we live on earth. My mother died last year, 82 years old suffering from long-term Alzheimer’s. Is she in heaven now, as she was when she died, in pain and without full cognition? Or before she lost too more cognition. Or when she was 50? Or 30 and in her prime, but before she started looking after injured wildlife which made her so much of who she was? Who is in heaven?
Thomas Merton, the highly influential monk and mystic, the source of so many modern Christian contemplative traditions, once spoke of this confusion when he said:
“One thing for sure about heaven is that there is not going to be much of you there.”
There is not much of my mother in heaven. But who is there is the eternal image of the divine my mother was and is. It is this inner image, this inner person my dad loved when he met her at 18. It is this inner image, this eternal person he loved all through the years of family life, and it is this inner image he continued to love as my mother began to change physically, when she aged, and withered.
This inner image is the same person he loved as her illness progressed and her outward cognition and mental life failed. The person my dad loved, and loves, is beyond all outer, temporal physical reality, beyond the circus and tragedies of death and decay.
In our Gospel today, Christ lovingly shows us the same reality and how we may access the inner, eternal image of God who we are.
Do not get caught up in the visible trappings of spiritual and physical life, forget the outer trivialities of prayer and church that terrorize us away from eternal love. Instead, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret.
Our prayer is to be both a personal and communal pursuit; alone but in a house, the house of God, a symbol for the Church. And the word for room here in the Greek, is the room at the centre of the home, where both the secrets and the treasures were kept, but also the place where the most important visitors were received – God and our inner self, made in God’s image.
Our prayer is to become an inner journey, a traversing to enter the depths of ourselves and meet the eternal image of God who we are.
And just as we pray alone, though within a house – a house peopled by those we love, ultimately we will take our final journey of death alone, but hopefully surrounded by those we love.
To deeply enter prayer is to enter death, accept death and meet that of us which is beyond death, the eternal image of the One, Christ, who was never Created and thus could never and will never die.
This is why Christ tells us to store treasures in heaven or of heavenly nature, that which is beyond the material circumstances of change and chance, beyond the circus of natural decay and human damage. By focusing on the eternal, our heart, the very, very centre of our being is changed: where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
By inner focus, by prayer, by meditation and inner journey our heart, our centres become aligned with that within us which is heavenly, which is the image of the uncreated, that which will never die – all the while knowing that we will also die.
And so, we today, and all days, we may walk in the Great Mystery - that the moment of death is every moment and at every moment, we may die and rise in Christ, knowing ourselves for the first time. Amen.