On
Saturday, I went to the memorial service for a spiritual mentor of mine who died
in a rafting accident on the Yangtze River.
She was a lot younger than I and was used to more physicality than my
life in recent years. Her passing was so unexpected. She will be missed by many
people, and the good that she did while on earth will live on for many
years. Before, during, and after the
service, I found myself pondering my mortality - again.
When
Baby Boomers were young, we didn’t spend much time thinking about when we got
older or about taking care of our future selves – body, mind, or spirit. We lived in the present, for the moment, but
not in the spiritual sense or the Zen sense of the word. It basically boiled down to “Make love, not
war” and “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” With whatever good intentions there may
have been, these were debatable ideals with which to live one’s whole life.
I
don’t expect those younger than me to die before me – and it’s even harder to find a reason, when
they lived to serve humanity, with the glory of God in mind. It is one of the most difficult questions for which to find an answer.
So I did what I always do, when faced with something I want to
understand better – I went looking for a book and found one
by favorite author Henri Nouwen, Our Greatest Gift: A
Meditation on Dying and Caring.
Nouwen
was a devout priest and professor, a man who radiated the love of God, sharing it with everyone. He spent much of his life wondering about how
loveable he was to God, and yet, at the same time, expended much of his energy
on making sure that everyone else knew that they were all God’s Beloved sons and
daughters. In writing this book, he
wanted to “befriend death,” himself, as he watched so many of his family and
friends dying. The very premise of the
book – making friends with death - was perfect for my mood. It got me thinking that if we make friends with death, it shouldn't, in theory, frighten us any
longer. (Right?) And the most important lesson,
I think, to learn is that by befriending death, we are also befriending God.
In his book, Nouwen tells the brief story of meeting a troupe of German circus acrobats. He loved their high-flying tricks, so he went backstage to tell them, and eventually he became friends with them. He talked with one of the flyers and asked how it all worked. His new friend told him that to be successful at his craft, he had to have “’complete trust in my catcher… the real star is … my catcher…. The secret is that the flyer does nothing and the catcher does everything. When I fly to [the catcher], I have simply to stretch out my arms and hands and wait for him to catch me …’” It turns out that if the flyer grabbed on to the catcher, he would break the catcher’s wrists, so the flyer must trust that he will be caught safely.
Nouwen
wrote that when he heard this, “the words of Jesus flashed through my mind:
’Father, into your hands, I commend my Spirit.’
Dying is trusting in the catcher.
To care for the dying is to say, ‘Don’t be afraid. Remember that you are
the beloved child of God. He will be
there when you make your long jump.
Don’t try to grab him; he will grab you. Just stretch out your arms and
hands and trust, trust, trust.” (pp
66-67)
I
sat with that story for a while and kept returning to the image during the rest
of the weekend. Death is a surrendering
– the ultimate trusting submission to God. As we grow in our love for God, ourselves,
and our neighbor, we learn to trust God even more. And isn’t that part of the worry that some
people have about death? They don’t trust
that there’s going to be Someone or anyone out there. But as believers, knowing Whose beloved we
are, we can grow in our trust until comes the day when we simply “stretch out”
our arms and fall into the loving Hands of the One who will catch us.
Thanks be to God! 💙
