Yesterday Kathi and I met with our parish clergy to plan my funeral. I’m not announcing my imminent death; I’m getting by. Nothing is certain, but my doctors tell me it could happen this year. My parents had everything – and I mean everything – arranged when they died, and it was a great help to the family. I’ve also seen what happens when someone dies with their affairs in chaos.
Wait, I just planned my funeral.
Acknowledging death comes in stages. It’s one thing to know you will die and another to take it to heart. When you know something, you can state, describe, and even affirm that fact or idea. When you take something to heart, you internalize it and let the knowledge transform your feelings, attitudes, and actions.
I want, in my heart, to fully accept my death. But what does it mean to take death to heart?
I’ll tell you what I do not mean. Have you noticed the death’s heads around us? The Punisher decals on the back windows of F-150s?1 The Día de Muertos images on tee shirts?2 Much of this is just immature cosplay. But 16 million Americans own an AR-15, death’s talisman. And that as of today, May 18th, there have been 45 mass shootings, many by alienated young men who murder strangers for barely legible motives. What is this about?
Guns and the badges of death have a seductive glamour to which young American men seem peculiarly vulnerable. Guns are among our most highly engineered artifacts; they radiate power. D. H. Lawrence said that.
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.
He might have added, “and a vigilante.” A long cultural history presents America — and since 9/11, the world — as a lawless frontier where justice requires a rough man ready to act. Scan an airport book rack. Taking death to heart is how a disconnected youth transforms himself into a mythic protagonist.
So if not that, what could it mean to take death to heart?
It means I want to bring the limit on my days into the depth of my heart. The number of my days is random but finite and not large. Accepting that limit magnifies the value of each day – each moment – of remaining life. I want to be on fire with hope for what I can do with each one.
Hope for what? I want to discern in each moment the opportunity to serve God and my neighbour, to give love to and receive love from God and my neighbour, and to act on those opportunities.
It isn’t easy to find and sustain this love in your heart. You must resist pain, fatigue, and fear of the experience of dying. There are skills for overcoming these enemies; more about that later. For now, my mantra is,
Take heart.
No one remembers that the Death’s Head was the divisional badge of Waffen SS 3rd Panzer Division, formed from a unit of concentration camp guards and execrated for multiple massacres of civilians and prisoners of war.
One can argue that these images are misappropriated in that most Americans are unaware that the Day of Death celebrates the memory of the departed, not the reign of death.
Just free association, but since I first read about and then listened to Paul Simon's Seven Psalms last night, I thought it might resonate for you. His reckoning with death and possibly beyond.
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=ANtntuDslnk&feature=share
Thank you Bill. The American gun culture is such a profound spiritual illness. I’m currently in Japan, almost every day I worship at a Buddhist Temple, I love the cultural emphasis on harmony and peace. I marvel at how the Japanese seem to have learned from their dark militarism to reduce suffering. Ironically, America helped liberate the world from fascism yet has become such a tragic killing ground, all too often with AK-47 Jesus freaks. I have become deeply disillusioned with gun toting 2nd amendment Christianity, the murderous Crusaders break my heart.
Your path breaks my heart too because I will miss you if you depart this world before I do. But I love and am inspired by your spiritual path Bill. You are a Christian healer for a gun-God culture in search of its soul.
Peace, Chris