Learning to Die by Bro. David Steindl-Rast O.S.B.

Death is the event which has no after. To blur this fact means losing sight of the seriousness of dying.

[Cont. from page 2] ...     Here again is one of the points where I think birth and death come very close to one another: neither of the two events can be precisely pinned down to a moment in time. We don’t really know when a person is born. We can point to the physical fact of the umbilical cord being cut, but some people come to life maybe after forty years, or even later. When does a person come to life? I can imagine that the very moment in which someone comes to life is also the moment in which he really dies. And everything that led up to that, for forty-five years perhaps, is time spent in practicing for the important moment; and everything that follows is time spent letting nature run its course. Maybe in some people’s lives this happens all of a sudden, at one moment, while with others it is a gradual thing that goes laboriously through many stages.

  Most of what I have said simply means: Let’s learn to die so that, when our last hour comes and if we are still alert to it, we will be able to die well. But at any rate let’s learn it, and that means let’s learn to give ourselves over and over again to that which takes us; let go to things, or rather give up as a mother gives up. Let go is a little too passive, it comes too close to letting down; giving up is the truly sacrificial gesture. So in many traditions you have this notion that throughout our lives we train for a right dying; and that means to train for flowing with life, for giving ourselves. And this suggests some more symptomatic idioms of taking and giving that show ways we can make the inner gesture of dying: giving thanks instead of taking for granted; giving up rather than taking possession; for-giving as opposed to taking offense. What we take for granted does not make us happy; what we hold on to deteriorates in our grasp; what we take offense at we make into a hurdle we can’t get past. But in giving thanks, giving up, forgiving, we die here and now and become more fully alive.

  We speak, for instance, of a good death versus a bad death: I suppose the death we call bad is the one in which we struggle and cannot die peacefully. There are many cases when the doctor says: “I don’t know how this patient keeps on living,” but perhaps he never learned to let go, so he hangs on for dear life, as we say. He will eventually be killed, but he has not learned to give himself freely. After all, it is not a dogma or a theory but something that anyone can check out and experience in his own life, that when we really give up and actively die, we die not into death but into a richer life; and when we drag on and hang on to something that we should have already let go of, we are dead and decaying. Thus we know – not from any revelation but from our own personal daily experience – that the fruit of a good death, a death to which we give ourselves, is greater fullness of life, and the fruit of a death against the grain, in which we are just killed and do not give ourselves, is destruction, or what the Bible calls the second death.

  Now the difficulty that comes in here is that when it is a matter of our final physical death, what is given up by us is all of life. I feel rather strongly that we sometimes fail – especially, I think, people who speak from a religious perspective – to stress the seriousness of dying. It may be a beautiful image, but it just won’t do to say that “we fall asleep.” Death is no falling asleep; there is a rather drastic difference. Nor is it the same as going into a tunnel and coming out on the other side. I do not like to speak of “afterlife.” I have seen this book, Life After Life; it is interesting, and I think that there may be whole dimensions, a whole world of things going on after what we observe as dying; but I am not concerned with all that. As I have said, I am convinced that we cannot pinpoint our real death. It is that real death, however, which concerns us here: the event through which all we know of life comes to an end, in every respect. To speak of life after death makes no sense if death is the end of time for the one who dies. And that is just what I mean. Death is the event which has no after. To blur this fact means losing sight of the seriousness of dying.

The flow of life cannot ever be reversed. By faith we die forward into fullness of life.

It is an all too harmless picture of death if we think that the body dies but the soul lives. Is there really an independent soul over against a body with its own independent existence? Concretely we experience ourselves as body-soul beings. The total person, experienced from the outside, is body. Experienced from the inside, that same total person is soul. In that event we call death, the total person comes to an end. But the total person that sits here now and talks, knows that whenever in his life anything truly died, it did not mean destruction, but always a step into greater life; and therefore, that total person can take the leap of faith and can say yes, I believe that in this ultimate death also, what I am going toward is ultimate life. And that is faith in the resurrection, in the Christian context, because resurrection is not survival; it is not revivification, or coming back to life, or any sort of reversal at all. The flow of life cannot ever be reversed. By faith we die forward into fullness of life.

  This is why eminent Christian theologians today can dispense with the notion of an immortal soul without jeopardizing the Good News of resurrection and eternal life. In fact, as soon as we no longer feel obliged to hold on to such intellectual abstractions as the notion of an immortal soul, we are able to enter more freely and more fully into the existential approach on which Biblical statements about the resurrection are based. We might be surprised to discover that even the Christian belief in the resurrection of the body is simply based on the experience that soul and body are existentially one in the human person. It is not possible to speak of a disembodied human being, because that is no longer a human being. The body absolutely belongs to it. Therefore, when St. Paul speaks of resurrection life – life beyond death as I would call it, rather than after death (if death is the end of time, then what’s after it?) – he speaks about life that must be embodied.

What happens in the course of our lives is that we become somebody. Who we become will depend on the decisions we make and somehow bodily enact. It will depend on the responses we give to God’s calling which reaches us in many different forms, and these responses, too, will be bodily enacted. That in this way we become somebody is obviously as much a statement about our bodies as it is a statement about our souls. But the body we call our own in this sense is not limited by our skins. It comprises all those elements of the cosmos by which we have expressed our own personal uniqueness; it is the total person, seen from the outside. But if the total person has died, resurrection of life, as St. Paul sees it, must be a new creation of the total person – soul and body – by God who alone provides the continuity between the old and the new life. All St. Paul can say about our immortal life, the Christ-life within us, is that it is “hidden with Christ in God” (Cor. 3:3). This holds true whether we have died or not. In either case, “your real life is Christ,” as St. Paul puts it in the same passage.

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