PREPARING FOR DEATH--SPIRIT [W, 1-12-22]

 

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

We should start this new year, I think, by getting ready to die…

As my friend, Bob, was coming very close to his last day on earth, I prayed with him. Not very well, because my throat was choked up, and so was my heart. We were such close friends for so long. When I ended, praying for good memories and good hopes, he said, “Don’t worry. I have no unfinished business.”

As the old joke line goes, “You had only one thing to do…” So it is with old age. We have only one thing to do, which is to get ready to die. That means finishing up our “business,” in four areas—spirit, body, relationships, and possessions.

All four are a process. We’re never quite done with any one of them. As my dentist replies, when I say, hopefully, “Maybe I’ll die before I have to come back here again…” “You need teeth right up to the end.” Spirit and body and relationships and possessions are all like teeth—we need at least some of each right up to the end. But we can be better prepared to die if we work on our unfinished business.

Of course, we don’t know the exact time of our death, so we need to get ready and stay that way, which is why I don’t understand people who get all worked up about figuring out the date for the end of the world. The end of your world might be at any moment, regardless of what you read in Daniel or Revelation, or what you get from Q on the web, so just get ready for the end and stay that way.

In this column I want to talk about working on the unfinished business of SPIRIT [Mind, soul, brain, etc.] We’ll do body and relationships and possessions in consequent columns. [Don’t worry; I don’t think this will be as boring as it sounds.]

There are “disciplines” we can do to get our spirits ready—prayer, meditation, etc. I think the main need, though, is acceptance, acceptance of the mystery of death. I’m not quite sure that there is a “discipline” or “method” to get to acceptance.

I believe that there will be some sort of life for my spirit after my body is dead. But no one has any idea what that might be like. For me to be ready to die, I need now to accept that there may be nothing at all. If so, that is okay. It has been a gift to have a life in the body. If there is something more, fine. I’ll accept that gift when it comes, too.

The first thing we must do as babies is learn to trust, that someone will care for us, even though we have no idea what the future is like. That is exactly the last thing we do as old people, learn to trust in that same way.

To be ready for death, I have to say: It’s okay that I don’t understand. Life, be it now or in the future, is a mystery. So is death. I shall go forward to the mystery of death in faith.

John Robert McFarland