It is not a morbid thing to think of death. It makes for preparedness. It surfaces the destructive contradictions and creative tensions in our being, the profundities and trivialities of our existence. It is looking at oneself in a magnifying mirror under a fluorescent light. It is being prodded with a pointed stick.
It is naive for believers in a living God made incarnate to diminish the facticity of death and foolish to be incurious about how everything passes away.
Day slowly bleeds to death
Through the wound made
When the sharp horizon's edge
Ripped through the sky.
Into its now empty veins
Seeps the darkness.
The corpse stiffens,
Embraced by the chill of night.
Over the dead one are lit
Some silent stars.
Dag Hammarskjold, Oct. 12, 1958
Everything must pass away. To live is to let everything go. To die is to complete the giving away. And then God appears. For it is no longer us, but God in us.
Mark this well: nothing that is given away is lost. Jesus died in defiance of those who would have him be sacrificed. But everything we struggle with violence to hold, especially the things we hold most dear, is sunk and eternally abandoned.
Hell is not death. Hell is eternal oblivion.
Anything that prevents the ordinary (and holy) dying, the giving away, the living that leads to the fullness of God, this is the undying Death to be feared. This is the Death that is absolute Loss.
Let us live and die so that nothing we have been given is lost.
Gratitude and readiness. You got all for nothing. Do not hesitate, when it is asked for, to give your all, which, in fact, is nothing, for all.
Be grateful as your deeds become less and less associated with your name as your feet ever more lightly tread the earth.
Dag Hammarskjold, 1956
Re-reading my thanatological thoughts, I must confess that I have yet to live into the wisdom I brazenly profess.
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