Abhinivesha (Death)

 

 

I believe your death was there at your birth with you. It was the unknown presence. Every step of the road of your life that you take, your death is beside you. Death often works through the vehicle of fear, so as you begin to transfigure your own fear, you are actually transfiguring the presence of your own death. At the end of your life when death comes..it can actually be a friend who hides the most truthful image of your own soul. Each day, hoever, you have to work at transfiguring the fear.

John O'Donohue

A spiritual practice that does not integrate death cannot be complete.  If we keep God on one side and death on the other, there is no way to come closer to God because we walk beside death throughout our whole life. That death accompanies us from our birth and through our life makes sense to me on many levels. We do not die just once at the end of our lives, but each loss along the way can feel like a death, a death to the self that had hoped things worked out differently, the self that thought it was in control of life’s unfolding, the self tethered to accomplishments, achievement, accolades, self-will, and adoration. In loss and suffering, the part of us that didn’t think this could happen dies.  In these losses, our innocence is sacrificed for a less self-centered perspective and more compassion for everyone including ourselves.  This is how we might understand resurrection, new life emerging from death. 

We act as if death will never come or can be thwarted by being more successful, desired, and strong for that is what our culture bombards us with. But without, death our lives would hold no meaning.  Nothing would matter.  We would lack the capacity to learn and grow. To understand that God is also in and with us in death is the profound invitation of spiritual practices and one of the greatest gifts of our lives.  In death, we are giving up everything we own and love, the smell of the earth, the touch of the wind on our skin, our bodies. As Thomas Keating has said it is perhaps only at our death that we can come to see the face we had before we were born, that God gave to us to before we entered the world. We can come to know the part of us deep inside that is pure and unadulterated, the part closest to God who has always known us in this way. Giving up all there is that holds us from God, in dying and death, there may be a chance to touch the infinitude of love and tenderness, grace, and mercy that has surrounded us through our entire lives.

If you were to look outside your window as you were dying and saw the spring buds perhaps for the last time it would be the most amazing thing. To live knowing how death accompanies us is to see things this way more often.