Mortality Wisdom
By Charles Rush
April 14, 2013
Proverbs 1: 7, 4: 5-6, 11: 30 and Luke 12: 15-21
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would suppose that the majority of people spend almost no time reflecting on their death and how that should structure their life. Like one of my relatives, not a particularly reflective guy. He lived for about 80 years. One morning, he was up, getting an early start on his ‘to do' list. And he was very good at clicking through a ‘to do' list. He starts his lawn tractor to mow the grass, lights his cigar that he always like to smoke when he cut the grass, adjusted his Master's Golf hat, mowed a couple of lanes, had an aneurism, keeled over the steering wheel, and died.
Even at 80, his
life didn't so much conclude as just kind of run out of tape. I would suspect
that it is precisely what he intended. He didn't waste a lot of time worrying
about why he was here. A practical man, he just got up and lived his life every
day until one day, he was dead. And death was just simply viewed as an enemy,
the end, game over. I would suspect that a sizable majority of our ancestors
led their lives pretty much like this, especially when we had to spend so much
time and energy simply surviving. Your are alive,
alive, alive and then you aren't.
Jesus suggests
in our parable that this isn't a complete way of living, however prevalent it
might be. Our spiritual dispositions are actually more complex. Death is not simply
an enemy. It is actually “woven into the warp and woof of our existence.”[i]
And its function is actually to help us move toward maturity and hopefully
completion.
Completion? What an interesting concept. Who are you when
you are complete? What would you look like if you were a complete person? Could
you envision that? If you could digest all of your accomplishments and your
failures, what you've learned about people, about the world, about the meaning
of life, who would you be at 120? Not the physical person, what would your soul
look like?
I intentionally
picked 120 because it is just beyond our mortal lives. What if that completed
person could talk to you right now and give you some advice as to what you need
to do next and what is important in the present phase of life that you are in…
What do you think you would say to yourself? We do get visits from the future
every once in a long while and it is the wisdom that comes from our mortality
drawing us towards completion.
Depth psychologist describe our psychic life as an interplay
between the two primordial human drives, libido and thanatos, the life force
and the death instinct. Libido is the instinct towards vitality. It surges in
us seeking sensuality, seeking pleasure, seeking the new. It is full of
conquest and it aims us towards success. It is aggressive, seeks union, procreation.
It is full of ambition but also creativity and artistic expression.
We make movies
about libido, the exhilaration of falling in love, the daring adventure of
first romance that beckons us out of our comfort zone and into a rollicking
adventure. We start crazy new enterprises with not enough resources,
we start families we can't really afford from the present alone because we are
following where ‘the life force' points us. This is the part of us that is
building a newer, bigger barns right up til the end
of our lives because creating, developing, and conquering make us feel alive.
The life force
is strongest early in life and it is a factor throughout all of our life. It is
one of our greatest prizes and yet it also is the source of so much of our
trouble. Our infidelities, our rash judgments and risky behaviors, our indulgence
in food, wine, ambition, our fascination with power… It is striving and
therefore the source of most of the conflict of our existence.
The ying to the
yang of libido is Thanatos, the instinct towards death. Thanatos retreats from
active outreach in an attempt to develop stasis and quietude. Thanatos shuns
conflict and struggle. It is our internal drive to retreat from the outside
world and all of the bruises that it leaves on our lives, to recuperate, to
simply be, to heal, to rest, to cease from activity. Thanatos we experience as
our desire to simply veg out.
Eventually, we
are preparing ourselves for the season of life when we are forced to slow down,
to do less, to let go of the endless production of more that basic survival
requires so immediately and forcefully most all of our lives.
We experience
‘the death force' throughout our lives when we've been injured, when we've been
rejected, when we fail at something important. We want to simply crawl inside,
stop trying, stop everything, and sometimes we just feel like dying.
While we
experience the ‘death force' throughout our life, we experience it more deeply
and more regularly in the second half of life. We witnessed the ‘death force' a
couple weeks ago watching that basketball player from Louisiville
break his leg during a game, leaving the court with not only the pain of
injury, but also realizing that his athletic life was surely over, youth itself
slipping away.
But thanatos becomes more arresting each decade. There comes a
point in mid-life when you wake up from a dream, usually many of them, where
you are trying to get away and you can't seem to make progress and your on some precarious ledge, one you would never be
tempted to approach in real life, and then the vertigo or perhaps you are
actually starting to fall… And you wake up at 4 a.m. wide awake and you get out
of bed quick like the bed might be cursed and walk around light headed and
anxious, breathing a little more deeply and intentionally than usual. Thanatos
starts to become more pronounced precisely at that time of life when we are
most burdened with responsibilities and our dreams reflect back to us the
anxiety that comes from having so many people dependent on us, not only at our
jobs but also from our families.
At some point in
mid-life, you also have a petite morte, a small
death. Earlier this week, I was visiting a big strong guy in the hospital and
just as I got there he passed out from pain. Some surgeries are particularly
traumatic for the body and this was one of them. It is like your body is
overwhelmed and you just lose consciousness… which must be what death really
feels like.
I was listening
to the doctors telling him over and over that this is a regular response to
this particular surgery, that it didn't mean that
anything serious was going on, telling him that he was going to be okay. I'm
standing out in the hall, overhearing all of this, and I know exactly what he
is going through. Despite the comforting words of the expert medical team, I
know that he is overwhelmed with anxiety at the moment because I've been
through it. You have this visceral, bodily anxiety that just takes control once
you are at mid-life and beyond because your subconscious has just experienced a
kind of test run at death and it is more unnerving than you imagine that it
would be. I don't care how big or strong or tough you might happen to be during
the regular week.
He was a good
friend and I was so grateful to be able to slip in at that precise moment when
the medical team was done with their assurances but before his body really
believed what they were saying. I walked in, grabbed his hand, put my other
hand on his forehead and I said to him, “I'm not staying, just praying”.
He wasn't able
to really talk at that moment, so he made a two word response, ‘thank you.' And
I did what the disciples did in the bible. I laid hands on him and prayed for a
“peace which passes understanding”, for strength, for the comfort of God's
presence and power. And even though he could only whisper, we repeated the Lord's prayer together. I don't care how big, how strong,
you are, what you want in that moment is to be prayed for, to be tucked in
tight, and cared for. It is shuddering and fearful that the force of death is
so near.
But that is not
all. In those moments right after a ‘small death', before you can even
consciously reflect on what you are thinking or feeling, you are immediately
aware of your incompleteness. Ah, this is where the image of your complete self
comes in. You suddenly become viscerally aware that you have something still to
do. This is not your actual death, it is just a petite morte,
and it awakens in you this visceral, subconscious awareness of something that
is unfinished in your life, something is unfinished in you.
Usually it is
also someone who is unfinished… A relationship that you have say, with your
spouse, your children, a sibling… In the midst of this undifferentiated anxiety
in the presence of death, you are also drenched in the fullness and abundance
of our life. It sweeps over you as a deep gratitude- for me it was a deep
gratitude for the life that I have had with my wife. And it doesn't have to do
with even with the quality of the relationship exactly, but you are filled with
a deep gratitude for the people that are your connection to life. You have this
immediate, palpable sense of wonder about simply being alive. Usually, you
first think of this person, or these people, and you want to be with them
hugging, sharing the love, simply being.
That is the
positive part of Thanatos. It is like we are feeling the pull of the future.
Our completed selves have momentarily transcended time and reminded us of what
is actually important in our lives right now and what we need to be about
shortly and what that should look like. It is not just a drive towards death,
but also a drive towards completing who we were meant to become in relation to
our family and friends around us. We have that sense of appreciation, of
newness, and delight and we are filled for a brief period of time with a drive
to complete what we've known so far in part.
In the second
half of our life, this experience beckons us to start reflecting on the bigger
picture and our place in it. The second half of life beckons some philosophical
reflection, not in an abstract sense but in a quite personal sense. As we grow
towards completion, we seek wisdom about ourselves, we
seek meaning about our lives. As the Proverbs puts it, “Develop wisdom and
understanding in your lifetime; develop it and do not forget what you have
learned. Do not forsake what you have learned from her and she will preserve
you.” We might say, she will lead you toward
completion.
It is possible
to more or less ignore this invitation to a wider reflection. In our culture,
fixated as we are on youth, seduced as we are by our technological prowess and
our control over the physical world, it is possible to ignore the pull of the
future. What people often do is try to divert themselves by doubling down on
fitness, cosmetically enhancing our physical image, taking on a new adventure,
or developing a new romantic interest. It is possible, in other words, to do
what we have done earlier in our lives and ramp up libido again and revive us
for a while. It does work, except that we can't actually go back can we? Psychotherapists call that regression, simply trying to
revert to an earlier, safer time of our lives.
But the point of
life, spiritually speaking, is to evolve in concert with the stages of life
that we go through. So the techniques of the past have less utility and
fulfillment, unless they are corralled to promote our transcendent
transformation towards completeness. As Jesus said, our lives are not simply
about building another barn, to store and expand our fortunes forever. The
point of our lives is realizing who we are meant to become in godly humanity.
The older we
get, it is not so much about starting something new as it is about deepening a
few relationships that, realizing as we do, that these are substantially
important to us. In the second half of life, we spend more time reflecting,
more interior work on who we are becoming and what the significance of our
lives have been.
Sometimes, I see
family members rolling their eyes because great grandma is telling a story, a
story that they have heard a hundred times and it is like ‘enough already'. It
is understandable. But what they don't recognize is that great grandma is
usually telling that story because it evokes for her this internal discussion
that she is having with herself about what her life has been about, why it was
significant that she lived, what it is that she brought to her family, what it
is that she would like to leave with them, what wisdom she has figured out,
however simple that wisdom might actually be, but what she wants the next
generation to learn from her. She is developing her own meaning and sense of
significance. It is a broad philosophical task and it is also deeply personal.
Hopefully, you
start to take all of the threads of your life, your triumphs and also your failures, and you start to see how you became you only
because of them. Hopefully, you start to reflect on your friends and also on
those that were your enemies (people that hurt you) and you start to come to
terms realizing that you would not have grown in the ways that you grew had it
not been for the love of your friends and also the real hurts that your enemies
did to you. Hopefully, you start to realize that the dysfunctions you inherited
from the previous generation became precisely the places that you developed
your personal growth, so that even the really goofed up stuff from your family
becomes part of your integration.
And out of that
reflection, you start to develop a substantive legacy that you can leave, not
with everyone, but a substantive legacy that you can imprint on a few important
people that you can positively impact. That is the best we are given to do and
I don't care how famous or influential you might be in your vocational life.
This is the point.
As a culture, we
have been very good at unleashing libido, but less developed in seeing the
positive role of Thanatos. Today we have the good fortune of being able to live
longer physical lives, so that the second half of life will likely become
abundant and productive in a way that all previous generations could only dream
about. Let us hope that we will approach it with greater spiritual insight and
wisdom, understanding better the spiritual challenges that it entails. May your
life not simply quit. May your life actually conclude. May you find the meaning and significance that God
wants for you that you might become nearly completed in your sojourn on this earth. I hope the bigger picture begins to emerge and that
you will find your place in it. May peace be upon you.
Amen.
