The last solitude
Garvey, John
Of several minds: John Garvey THE LAST SOLITUDE ARE WE HONEST ABOUT DEATH & DYING? DURING HOLY WEEK this year I thought — not surprisingly, I guess — about death. Traditional religions have been...
...WHERE THE religious response to death differs from the secular response is in the religious assumption that what we regard as life is only a part of our reality...
...But when we don't, we face a scary mystery...
...As something which reveals us as we truly are it works only insofar as it shows the bravery of, for example, the terminal cancer victim or the person who has the time to display courage before the assembled family...
...Death not only tells us what we are moving towards, or what the backdrop is...
...What we are told is that "we are God's children now...
...I discount the stories told by people who have seen the tunnel of light and all that...
...and the reason is that it is really the only life which exists at all...
...Secularists — which is to say, most people in their ordinary ways of viewing these things, whether they are consciously secularist or not — exhibit a different attitude...
...Once we know that this is an illusion, our grasping will not anchor us to an inevitably tragic destiny...
...and this is why stories of courage and displays of good character in the face of extinction are so moving from the secular point of view (and from any other point of vjew, for that matter...
...God's answer to Job includes a rebuke to Job's comforters, who are accused of not being quite honest...
...That death itself might have a significance beyond the one which offers the dying person a setting in which to die dramatically, interestingly, heroically — this is not part of the way we ordinarily regard the one thing which all of us can count on...
...We have hope through being baptized into that life, and have no right to any information beyond the staggering news we have been shown in Jesus' Resurrection...
...it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is" (1 John 3:2...
...there has been enough oxygen left in their brain cells to allow them to experience such sensations...
...In fact no one with a straight line on the EEG has come back to say anything at all...
...That is probably the better place for us to be...
...If the presence of death underscores that knowledge, it stretches our present awareness, and for that reason is profoundly important...
...death, from a religious point of view, is part of the definition...
...I have met people who have left behind all ideas of eternal life because of their fear that it will be in some way "more of the same" — more of this life, even if it is this life clothed in white robes and walking on streets of gold, which, after all, would get boring after about five minutes...
...When Jesus approached Lazarus's tomb, he wept...
...Preachers who rely on this tactic should be warned...
...It doesn't do a thing for mine...
...The secular anCommonweal: 298 swer reveals the secular belief that life is what we know it to be, even granted the fact that we may be surprised by our capacities...
...I find this much more helpful than all of the stuff which would reconcile me to the fact that someday I may die before the people I love do, or they may die before I do, and some of us will be left feeling torn open, 'there is no Christian doctrine which says we have to feel good about what life deals us...
...What does that death preserve...
...What it tells us is less precise than we would like, and this has led fundamentalists to search Scripture in their usual unimaginative way for descriptions of the length of heaven and the kinds of clothes we will get to wear, leading to pictures which make what happens to us after death look like a visit to a particularly boring sort of theme park...
...But the attitude in the air, the sensibility that reflects the assumptions which drive the age (this sensibility can't, almost by definition, be as clearly articulated as belief), is that death is an interruption, an accident, something which must be postponed and avoided and challenged wherever it can be...
...None of us has been there...
...It wasn't...
...For years now various Christian theologians have been trying to point out the fact that the New Testament does not tell us to believe in something as abstract and finally indefinable as "the immortality of the soul...
...may properly be answered "nowhere...
...What they have in common is something we take so much for granted that we may not see how odd it is for human beings from all of the major religious traditions to share this one perception: the way we live has something to do with how we die, with what death will mean for us...
...That is certainly important both to the Jewish opposition to idolatry and to the connection Christians need to make between the Judaism we come from and the doctrines we speak about too easily...
...none of us can say what it is like...
...but this knowledge must be a transforming thing, not merely an intellectual acknowledgment...
...If I assume that whatever survives my death will be a sort of me-without-a-body (an entity which doesn't sweat or need haircuts or have problems with flatulence but which does remember how nice the sun felt one day in July or how noble the causes I cared about were), if I think that whatever I will be after I am dead has much to do with what I think of now as "me," I am, among other things, ignoring some very impressive evidence...
...Religious traditions can't settle for this...
...The comparisons which are made between growing plants, children in the mother's womb, things growing in the dark waiting still to be revealed — all of this has to do with the nature of our present consciousness...
...To the extent that religion is part of filling that need it deserves all the cynicism atheists bring to it...
...It is impossible for us to know what the cancellations involved in death and suffering mean in any but the most tentative and awkward ways...
...Brain damage does to those memories what electrical surges do to information in a computer, and to ask "where did that information go...
...All we know is that they cause us pain...
...In shoving "mind" and "spirit" into the same category we have created some real problems...
...Secularism stresses what we can know: this is our triumph...
...If our response is designed simply to comfort us, to serve as a security blanket against the inevitable cancellation we'd rather not think about, it isn't any more worthy of adults than belief in Santa Claus...
...One bunch of evidence comes from science That may be enough to discredit it with fundamentalists, but not with me...
...Judaism offers us the example of Job, and the paradox of a God who answers Job's anguished questions with still more questions — questions which really are better than Job's, and are probably the most majestic and wonderful example in history of putting someone in his place...
...It may be possible to think of a kind of heavenly account where all those earthly cancellations wind up, bit by bit, until the heart's stopping tosses the balance over the wall into whatever stores all that stuff on the other side...
...What death means is what it seems to mean: an ultimate cancellation of everything we thought we were about, the end of everything we want to hold on to, whether white robes or profound experiences...
...The responses we make to this absolute blank reveal a lot...
...We have, after that, Jesus appearing as a stranger to the disciples walking towards Emmaus, known to them in the breaking of the bread...
...It is hard to speak simply about it because there is no secular church, no common voice or authority which can say what matters from a secular point of view...
...I would hate for Christians to have to depend on this sort of thinking to shore up their belief, though...
...There is something unavoidably blank about death...
...if we think that death dissolves something we are also on the wrong track, since there is really not a single thing, a subsistent entity, which goes through the process of dying...
...Death can tell us nothing about life, except by way of reaction...
...Buddhism answers with a questioning of our desire to hold on to particular images of the self, making of the self a solid and subsistent thing, and therefore dooming us to tragedy...
...JOHN GARVEY 17 May 1985: 299...
...In the case of two very different traditions, Buddhism and Judaism, death tells something about the nature of our relationship with a universe which is ordered in ways we are not capable of comprehending...
...Instead, it says that Christ is risen, and this tells us something about what we will be...
...At the garden of Gethsemane, needing human companionship, he found himself alone before God (a radical solitude which would have been there even if his friends had found it possible to stay awake) and, according to Scripture, "his soul was filled with dismay and dread.'' He asked that the horror would be lifted from him...
...Is it possible to believe that Jesus is risen, that Christ is Lord, and also take to heart the unknowing which must form any true and non-idolatrous response to death...
...Death itself is a blank, a backdrop against which the important drama is acted...
...If we hope that it preserves something we are on the wrong track...
...We need more of that...
...The ancient division of the human being into a three-part rather than a two-part reality (aside from having a nice trinitarian feel to it, making it appealing to Christians) was probably closer to whatever may turn out to be the case...
...But people who think they have gone beyond this and talk instead about "heightened experiences" or something of that sort should realize that they are doing more of the same sort of thing, with California accents...
...There is an irreverence involved in trying to imagine much more than this...
...And it is true that no religion ignores this dreadful subject...
...Imagining isn't the point, rather it is the mare sober and infinitely more hope-filled work of trying to receive everything that we have been given...
...Most Christians and most more or less secular people who cherish some idea of an afterlife make an identification of the mind — that is, the part of us that has memories and tastes, affections and aversions — with the soul, the part that is supposed to hang around somewhere after the body is gone...
...Strokes can cancel out a lot of what we think of as the self...
...Judaism preserves the mystery of the source of our being here without answering any of our questions about it...
...His prayers, from the only point of view we can possibly understand, were answered with silence...
...all great traditions deal with death in a way which is closer to a stammer than to clarity...
...Buddhism suggests that the fear of death is part of a complex web of understandings which are themselves part of the problem — including our attraction to the idea that a noble death is impressive...
...Traditional religions have been accused of making us all conscious of our guilts, of playing on our fears of death and what may follow death...
...Secularism has decided that what we have come to call "this life" is the only one which matters...
Vol. 112 • May 1985 • No. 10
