Here’s today’s insert from: The heart of a kiwi Christian: a personal journey
25/3/17 Mortality
I’ve been reflecting on my own mortality, and suddenly realized: mortality is a gift! Wow: that’s radical! As Solomon wrote in Proverbs in the Old Testament, there is a time to live and a time to die: and I’m beginning to become grateful for it.
In our lives, we track down a path of different seasons: birth, childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, middle age – that’s me now – older age, and then comes death. We’re wired for it, these different stages: our lives flow out in a pattern of the seasons. The reality of the seasons changes us: we are different in middle age, more formed, more complete, than in early adulthood, and a grasping and accepting of our own mortality changes us too. It brings a freedom, the acceptance of death – a greater and deeper freedom to live.
What would it feel like, I wonder, if we were not wired for perhaps 70- 100 years: if we were, rather, wired for 500- 1000 years, like some of the figures of the Old Testament? What would that look like? Two hundred years of adolescence? Two hundred years of early adulthood? Or would it be full development for hundreds of years: a full offering of oneself over a long period of time for the sake of others?
I don’t know what it means to live a thousand years: but I do know what is has meant to live forty years. I’m grateful for life, but now, suddenly, I find myself also grateful for death. The reality of death can forge us: it can form us. The acceptance of death can free us: the awareness of our own mortality can inform us and release us into a deeper expression of our own humanity.
I’m glad to be merely mortal: I embrace my own mortality. Death, now, has become my friend, in setting my life free.
There is a time to live and a time to die.
Lots of points to make.
I agree that freedom from the fear of death leads to freedom to live. That sounds trivially obvious looking at it; you now can risk all.
The awareness of our own mortality = Fear of death. Why this fear/ how this awareness? Has it always been there or did it arrive? No other animal has them. It’s one of the world’s greatest mystery’s and leads to God-delusions.
Denial. I think the only way we can function is by denying the impending nature of our death.
The aged. It is said – and I have heard first hand – that those near the brink of the natural variety of it are calm.
I wonder if religion (true) helps? I suspect this fear is instinctive in us all. I guess a true belief in a beneficent “other side” does help … it at least removes fear of the unknown. Many believers do not have this belief, sadly, rather the reverse, never really being sure they will miss landing in the ‘other’ place.
People say the act of dying is incredibly lonely – you have front and present in your mind all the people you are soon going to miss.
‘Heroism’. The giving away of ones life. It is this, it is believed, that can allow the VERY few to properly play at war without being frightened bystanders. This was your point I suppose– they have already given the game away and so can be free of this fear.
On this. Peer pressure/ human bonding. There was this cool write-up of a specific American victory in battle in WW2. After having had the hell blown out of them by artillery, the sorry remainder of the unit, after picking themselves up >in order to sate the urge to go find what happened to their mates (just like after an earthquake)< turned up back on the front lines just in time to see the Germans walking up. And so they won the battle. Heroism? Lack of fear? Nope – just human bonding. The writer (personally there) recognised it as that; the best units, basically, are the ones that stick together. The Germans were great at it. There are examples from WW1 too.
The notion of it as being a place we go to to escape the travails of this life. This can be a comfort both to 'victims' and survivors of their death.
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