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On Dying

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When I sat down with the pastor at St. Maximillian’s to discuss my spiritual journey, the pitch was pretty blunt: “Tell me, Brian, do you want to die, or live forever?”

Today, I have arrows in my quiver that I didn’t have then. “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.” [Matt. 16:25] Not that I wasn’t concerned about survival then, but that concern was overshadowed by incredibly powerful dreams. I needed somebody to help me sort through them, so the response he got back was a disappointed stare.

Now I didn’t expect to die, so the sense in which I was losing my life at that time was that held by most people reading Jesus’s words. My way of living was being consumed by powerful forces that I could not overcome with force. The only weapon that I had was my heart. I was committed to surrendering myself to loving, no matter the cost.

But in an earlier era, most people would have taken those words as a literal pronouncement: those that perish for me will find life. Certainly death was part of the early Christian experience, with thousands of martyrs to the faith. But how is that “for Christ”?

We celebrate sacrificial nobility in those that died in combat securing our freedom. That was perhaps also the understanding of those that died fighting for the faith during the Crusades and other Christian wars. But how does that square with the first part: “Whoever wants to save his life will lose it”? Doesn’t every warrior wish to return to home and family?

Christ died on the cross to bring perfect love into the world. In Matt. 10-38, he admonishes “…he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.” From this, it seems clear that to die for Jesus is dying to bring love into the world. That is hard, because the only reason that our lives are not filled with love is because we chose, of our own will, to reject it. Why would we do that? Because we’re infected with a disease called selfishness.

Look at what Jesus did on the cross: he submitted to the religious and secular authorities of his age. They forced their wills upon him, and he did not resist. Because of that, they became stuck in his compassion. He infected them with the seeds of loving.

Obviously, that is taking a great long time to work itself out. But the message is that dying is nothing to fear, at least so long as the manner of our dying is to bring love into the world.

Now Jesus’s surrender to evil was obvious and dramatic, involving public orations and processions. Very few people in Jerusalem would have been unaware. For most of us, taking up the cross is a lonely, silent affair. We don’t wrestle with Satan in all his power, we wrestle with petty evil in spouses and bosses, employees and rapists. That can have its toll on us. A family member once shared an anecdote about a visit with a rich business partner, a man that took his children up to the top of a building to throw paper airplanes down into the streets in violation of a sign that said “Do not throw paper airplanes.” (Think about it: would you go out of your way to do that?) This was a pattern in his business dealings as well. His wife was a twisted crone, beaten down by the burden of the anger that the world had mounted against her husband.

How long should we struggle against the burden of others’ sin? Only so long as we can face it without falling into fear. Trying to live with uncontrollable pain is heroic until we lose our heroism. Then it becomes a slow cancerous submission of our souls to evil.

Is there hope? Always, but Jesus offers the guarantee this way: “whoever loses his life for me will find it.” Jesus could have chosen to hang on the cross in suffering, suffer into eternity. But he did not because he knew that another life awaited him. He knew that to attain that life he needed to surrender his body.

Thus it is with those that suffer pain in this world, pain brought on by their sin and the sins of others. They need to lose their bodies to selfishness, to let it wind itself into their flesh, and then to escape into death, purified in spirit as was Jesus. It is thus that we weaken evil by trapping it in decaying matter, and free those portions of our soul into loving as are willing to accept love.

So when you pronounce against death, remember that death was Jesus’s tool of choice. Look into the soul of the person dying, and do not push them past their ability to endure. Do not block that moment of release, lest you stretch it into a torment of possession.

Rather, send them off with that most tender of incantations: “S(he) has gone to a better world.” With that little push too empower them, perhaps they’ll be motivated to look back in time when they get there, and reach out to pull us through behind them.

The Philosphical State

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I studied my moral and ethical philosophy with Albert Tussman at U.C. Berkeley. He taught there well into his 70s, I believe, and resolved to give it up when a coed popped her bubble gum before his lecture. I guess that her action crystalized his sense that nothing was sacred to the generation he was teaching.

His wisdom to me was granted one Spring day when he broke out of his office hour to take me out on the lawn under the clock tower. He allowed me to unburden myself of my concerns for the future. When I finally realized what a great honor he had granted me, I asked what he considered to be the most important source of philosophical understanding in our age. His response is relevant to this discussion: the decisions of the Supreme Court. He supported the judgment with the observations that they decided matters that had to be implemented by systems that were critical to the survival of the citizens of the nation, but that they had absolutely no power to effect change. Thus their decisions had to be crafted in a way to build consensus between the parties in the matter.

“Philo sophia“, indeed.

So what about academic philosophy? Well, these are people involved in far more abstract issues regarding the accessibility of truth and the nature of human experience. These become esoteric for at least two reasons.

The first is the categorization problem. As in the sciences, we start with coarse categories of experience and then, when that coarseness frustrates our powers of explanation, we refine. That means a never-ending progression of inventive vocabulary that ultimately leaves the common man standing out in the hallway (metaphorically). What becomes even more interesting is when thinkers in two traditions of philosophy try to reconcile their categorization schemes. Ach! Me noggin!

The second is the desire to maintain lineage so as to preserve as much from the past as possible. Now the Supreme Court is going through an activist stage in which this principle is less important, but in general philosophers are wary of throwing anything away. This means that they tend not to reclaim words used in the past, but rather to invent new ones.

My clearly stated intention at everdeepening.org was to buck this latter trend. I set out to reclaim words in common usage to try and help people out of the moral and ethical morass that imprecision of everyday use has bequeathed to us. First and foremost of those words was “love.”

Imprecision in everyday use is mostly a problem when power is conditioned upon avoidance of responsibility. When the shit hits the fan, a typical sound bite is “Well, that’s not what I understand the word to mean”, or “But that’s not what I meant.”

I was put onto this by the confusion regarding the phrase “I love you”, which I realized meant, in most usage, “I love myself.” In other words: “I feel good when I’m around you – let me  use this token to bind you to me.”

While the power of precision has been valuable to me in managing my personal relationships, it’s been essential to me in surviving my spiritual engagements. When we know what it means to love others, we know what it means to love ourself. That understanding has protected me from a lot of harmful associations that presented themselves with a great deal of shiny glitter.

Perfect Love, Imperfect Justice

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Seeking fuel for criticism of religion, there is no better place to look than the old testament. When presented the contrast between the simple message of forgiveness in the New Testament and the corporal punishments of Leviticus, the best I have been offered is the tortured logic that “Christ’s sacrifice satisfied the desire of God for perfect justice.”

The contradictions in this message drove me from Christianity. Perfect justice? Dear God, who created us, with all of our flaws and weakness? What right has our maker to pass judgment on us?

To the atheist, these debates lack any merit. The books of the Bible are clearly an amalgamation of myths and histories from different cultures and eras. What kind of consistency would we expect to find?

But to the fundamentalist, these are central issues. If murder is justifiable in the eyes of the Lord, then there are principles that justify state-sanctioned execution, and even warfare. More moderately, social repression of “deviant” behaviors has a holy sanction, regardless of the psychological and political consequences to the oppressed class.

As I implied, resolving this contradiction was critical to the acceptability of Christianity in my mind. Given the obvious justification of the atheist’s position, I was ultimately astonished that there should be any coherence in scripture as I sought through it for answers to the problem. That coherence I found is evidence that the work of Divine Love on human nature involves transfers of focus from one culture to another as the opportunity best presents itself to heal our separation from the Almighty.

Let us trace the history of justice since that separation was first recognized. It begins with fratricide, a crime certainly more horrific than adultery, for which Leviticus demands death. What was the response of the Divine to that act? Not murder, but banishment. Not rejection, but protection.

What is the purpose of this program? As God had counseled Cain earlier “Evil crouches at your door. But you can master it.” Cain lost that struggle with evil. His jealousy overcame him, and he murdered his brother. So God sends him away with his personal devil, knowing that the display of mercy and concern will give Cain strength as he struggles for the rest of his life to civilize the spirit that bound itself to him through his brother’s murder.

This is the work of an engineer, using humanity as a tool to heal brokenness in the realm of spirit.

Then we come to Noah and the flood. Here we see God, in an act of desperation, attempting to purge the world of human evil. Several historical events have been proposed as the precursor of this story: an asteroid impact, the release of flood waters from glaciers on the Asian steppes, and rising sea levels fed by Ice Age melt that eventually flooded continental shelves. There seems to be no lack of material mechanisms to explain the myth, but this doesn’t let God of the hook: why didn’t He intervene to remove His creatures from the path of destruction?

The simple answer is that nobody was listening. But God still regrets the consequences, and this is central to the thread of the history of justice in the Bible. He announces that no longer will He intervene to dispense justice over men – the cost to the rest of reality is too great. From this point forward, men will maintain their own courts of justice.

In this context, the words of Jesus take on a different weight. Asked to identify the commandments, he replies “Love thy God with all thy heart and mind and soul. And love thy neighbor as thyself. All the rest of the law is derived from these.” But derived by who? Clearly, in the post-flood context, by men. Elsewhere, Jesus asserts “I came not to overthrow the law, but to restore it.” Reading his proclamations and efforts to the reclamation of sinners, clearly Jesus is referring to the law of unconditional love that granted mercy to Cain.

The Law of the Torah is a human construct, serving human ends, motivated by divine principle, but expedient where human patience reaches its end. Jesus did not die to satisfy a Divine need for Perfect Justice. He died and rose again to demonstrate the imperfection and ineffectuality of human justice, and give us the courage to struggle against the tyranny of misguided enforcement.

In the end, then, there are no just wars, because wars perpetuate and strengthen the spirit of violence. There is no just persecution, because persecution always separates us from those that we are intended to heal. Any pronouncements to the contrary contradict the teachings and acts of Jesus. They are not the teachings of Christianity.