Here on the Way to There

I've been reflecting a lot this last week on a conversation I shared with some family members last weekend about death and what comes after. I ended up going to the shelf and plucking off a book that I bought awhile back and never read, Here on the Way to There: A Catholic Perspective on Death and What Follows. It's by William Shannon, who is a Thomas Merton scholar and writer on the mystical/contemplative tradition within Christianity, and it has several interesting insights.

In the end, I don't think there's any need to try to "figure out" any of this. Sometimes we're tempted to think that when we die we're just dead and even if that's true, it doesn't really change much. I think that's one distinct possibility. But I think there are many other possibilities as well. The consensus of all the world's great religious and philosophical traditions is that reality is really just a flow of events (and that fact has enormous implications). Nothing is fixed and unchanging, and there is no reason to assume that the flow stops when we're dead. In fact, to assume that it does is perhaps the pinnacle of arrogance and conceit: we think we've figured out the universe, including what happens (or does not happen) when we die.

All of these possibilities are just conceptual overlays we try to impose on an experience that is too big to be contained in any belief or description. Where does that leave us? Open to any possibility. This is not just a philosophical position, but a way of being: open to whatever arises in the next moment, without clinging to what just was, without aversion to what is emerging, without any idea of what should be. Just completely open. This, to me, is faith.

Faith is not certainty of belief. It is quite the opposite. Faith is that complete and total letting go into whatever comes next, without needing to manipulate our experience in any way. This is the way I want to live, and the way I want to die. And if I do, then any idea I have about what happens afterward is just an amusing fantasy, perhaps an artistic imagining of possibility, sometimes helpful but not of any eternal consequence.

My prayer (affirmation) for myself and for everyone is that we might meet each moment, including the moment of death, with such absolute freedom and openness of heart.