At first, this idea of Death - especially if it's come close - seems absolutely terrifying! Death is beyond anything we've ever experienced. Our fears tell us that Death is a darkness, a nothingness, that will engulf us, and we will no longer be ourselves. We fight the very idea of dying!
Even the thought of meeting God after death can seem terrifying. God can seem to engulf us as much as death does. If we've managed to keep ourselves separated from God in this life and lived life the way that we've wanted to, on our terms instead of God's, we will not be so sure that we want to be united to God in the next.
But - let's revisit that serious illness or health scare or death of a loved one. That experience gave you a new set of eyes, a new list of priorities, by "stripping away" everything that was previously important. It gave a "Little Death" to the way you thought and felt previously. It threw you back to the Essential You, the You who forever has lived in the shining Presence of God: your soul. Your soul never changes, never sickens, never grows old - because your soul is united with God Who is Love, with the Risen Christ, from the beginning of time and into eternity!
And, Who is this God? This God loves every one of us personally, whether we are male or female, whether we are rich or poor, whatever our race or our culture or language or our sexual orientation is. Why? Because God created us individually for a reason - to love us without end. God in Jesus even died for us and forgave our sins and promised us that we would rise from the dead so that our false selves could be stripped away and our souls could be His. We belong to this God more than we have ever "belonged" elsewhere.
Certain experiences that are traumatic can do us good by stripping away our false sense of self - that self that thinks we are important because of our accomplishments, status, money, or power. They can strip us down to our soul, our True Self, which is our soul united to God Who is Love. Our false self is ego-centric, is selfish, sees itself as separate from God, from people, even from all of creation. Our false self urges and tempts us to dominate, to use others, to lie, to fight to "succeed." Any "little Deaths" in our lives - difficulties, illnesses, disappointments, frustrations - are a stripping away of our false preoccupations, selfishness, and deceptions to remind us of what is Real, True, Everlasting.
Our True Self reminds us that we are united to God Who is Love, and so we are not separate from God or others or this created universe. When we pray, meditate, contemplate, talk to God, God gradually reveals to us throughout our lives that we are in reality one organically with everyone and everything - our families, friends, co-workers, as well as the people of every nation on earth, and we are also in relationship with the earth, and its mountains, oceans, plants, animals, fish, even insects. Scripture reminds us that creation itself groans, waiting for itself to be re-created.
Which is why, even when we know we are dying, we know that we are returning to who we most truly are - people of joy and love forever united to God, our Beloved, to all of God's children, and to God's universe, each of us remaining resoundingly the unique individual we are and rejoicing in the individuality of everyone and everything else! Our physical bodies become spiritualized bodies, but we are still ourselves, only expanded and enriched selves.
William Stafford speaks of our True Self as a thread.
There is a thread you follow. It goes among
Things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
—William Stafford [1]
Fr. Richard Rohr comments,
"My words for the thread that Stafford speaks of are the True Self. Your True Self is who you are, and always have been, created in the image and likeness of God who is love (1 John 4:8, 16). Love is both who you are and who you are still becoming, like a sunflower seed that becomes its own sunflower. Most of human history has called the True Self your “soul” or your participation in the eternal life of God.
"The great surprise and irony is that 'you' or who you think you are, have nothing to do with your True Self’s original creation, and you can never get rid of it. It’s sort of disempowering and utterly empowering at the same time, isn’t it? All you can do is nurture your True Self, which is saying quite a lot. It is love becoming love in this unique form called 'me.'
"The dying process at every stage of life is a natural opportunity to let go of the small, separate self and return to the fullness of True Self...
"The True Self will surely have doubts about the unknown. But the True Self is the Risen Christ in you, and hence, it is not afraid of death. It has already been to hell and back. The Risen Christ in us knows that it will never lose anything real by dying. This is the necessary suffering of walking the full human path. That is what Jesus did and why we are invited to “reproduce the pattern of his death,” each in our own way, so that we can also take our place in the “force field” of God’s universal resurrection (see Philippians 3:10-11 and Acts 3:21)."
Our lives are meant to prepare us for our dying. The more we consciously pray and become more loving, the more we are releasing our souls from all those layers of the false self that cocoon us and prevent us from eventually becoming free butterflies. And God works with our soul during the process of dying itself, the Nearing Death experience. As we die - no matter how long or short that time is - God weans us away from life as we know it, graces us with greater understandings of love and union, and prepares us for a passage to a new, deeper, form of life.
Kathleen Dowling Singh (1946–2017), was a hospice worker and psychotherapist who accompanied many people at death’s threshold. In her remarkable book, "The Grace in Dying", Singh described what she called the “Nearing Death Experience” that she observed time and again:
"I realized that what I had been witnessing in the process of dying was grace, all around, shimmering and penetrating. I began, with newly opened eyes, to observe the subtlety of this grace and to observe the qualities of grace in those nearing death. I became aware that all of the observed qualities of the Nearing Death Experience point to the fact that there is profound psychoalchemy occurring here, a passage to deeper being. As I worked with dying people from all walks of life and at many different levels of spiritual evolution, normative patterns of change, of transformations in consciousness, became apparent.
"There appears to be a universal, sequential progression into deeper, subtler, and more enveloping dimensions of awareness, identity, and being as we begin to die—a movement from the periphery into the Center. Further, I realized that the transformation I was observing in people who were nearing death was the same psychoalchemy—in a greatly accelerated mode—that I had noticed in myself through two and a half decades of practicing contemplative disciplines and in the people with whom I had worked as a psychospiritual counselor.
"I have come to believe that the time of dying effects a transformation from perceived tragedy to experienced grace. Beyond that, I think this transformation is a universal process. Although relatively unexamined, the Nearing Death Experience has profound implications....
"My experience is that most people who are dying have no conscious desire for transcendence; most of us do not live at the level of depth where such a longing is a conscious priority. And, yet, everyone does seem to enter a transcendent and transformed level of consciousness in the Nearing Death Experience. . . . It is rather profound and encouraging to contemplate these indications that the life and death of a human being is so exquisitely calibrated as to automatically produce union with Spirit."
The well-known Trappist (Cistercian) monk and spiritual writer Fr. Thomas Keating said
"To accept death is to accept God."
The more we open our souls to the grace of God - Love - Who lives within us, the more we open ourselves to God - Love - in the world around us - then the more we come to trust God and all the ways God works with us and loves us. And then, when our soul leads us, gradually we can lose our fear of death. When we know that on the other side of Death, we are simply being transformed into a being of More Love, Joy, and Peace, we can hand ourselves over to God, daily, and for our future.
We know that when God sees us, always, God sees us as being His.
Why should we fear death? Christ has already conquered death for us. Imagine living in the deepest, most loving and intimate relationships with everyone who has or does or will exist - without wars, misunderstandings, arguments, or tearful separations! Imagine petting the lion and riding the winds and the dolphins. Imagine seeing, touching, kissing the unbelievable Face of God, imagine knowing God as lovingly and intimately as God knows us......
Scripture tells us that we cannot even begin to imagine the delights God has prepared for us past death! We can't imagine, but we can trust the Giver of Life and daily prepare for death by living out of our True Selves, our souls united with the Risen Christ. Christ has passed through death already and will transfigure our fears of death into the joyful expectation of deeper, greater Love united with Him!