” I had not thought death had undone so many.” Those words Dante says to Virgil upon entering the Infierno…I’ve been acquainted with death too much lately…the deaths of friends, of family…rudely forced… I just got news that my uncle in Dothan has cancer…He’s eighty six….the older we get the more acquainted with death we become. I think one of our tasks of maturing as we age is to make friends with death; not in a morose way, but to make meaning of it. … apprehending its beauty…All Hallows Eve an ancient tradition of making meaning of death…in mocking and embracing and celebrating its mystery.
One important aspect of death to me is that because we die, then we must make the most of our brief time in earth; that the Christian vision of mercy and compassion and hospitality and justice and inclusion becomes all the more poignant, all the more urgent…”death the mother of beauty”…the transience of our lives a foil for the beauty in which we live and move…in which our responsibility is vital all the more.
As we age we should rightly take on the responsibility of making meaning of death; that death has meaning and a beauty all its own…It has its own natural order…an ancient, and in its own way, a gracious process of ending…and perhaps of beginning…In the burial rite of the Episcopal Church we hold up together the realities of grief for a life ended and of hope for a life in some form to come…That feels right…life a beautiful and ambiguous odyssey that has a fitting end, a culmination, a finale with a knowledge that indeed there is something else…a mysterious transformation…what that something else is I can’t say…but we know in our collective psyche that it is there.
Let us lovingly attend to our dying as we lovingly attend to our living…both harmonies of the same song…the song that richly informs and orders the universe entire…death is not our undoing, but an ending in hope in the company of all…and therefore there is nothing to fear…nothing to fear.
