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MAKING PEACE WITH DYING:
A PROPOSAL FOR PASTORAL SUPPORT

by
Robert L. Evans
St. Norbert College
De Pere, WI

A thesis project submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree
of

Master of Theological Studies

Approved:
_________________
Rev. Dalene Fuller Rogers, M. Div., Thesis Director
__________________
Rev. John Tourangeau, M. Div., Reader
__________________
Joanne Dupont Sandoval, Ph.D., Reader

© 2006 Robert L. Evans. All rights reserved.
The author hereby grants to St. Norbert College permission to reproduce and distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part.

ABSTRACT

There is a need for Roman Catholic Church initiatives today in the United States to assist people in dealing with issues of mortality and making peace with the inevitability of their death. Cumulative changes in demographics, healthcare, culture and Church have combined to create a poverty in meaning, faith-community and hope among believers with regard to their individual eschatologies. This poverty can be addressed through the lessons of the paschal mystery and recovering a living praxis of faith that involves a component of kenosis (self-emptying). Elements of a pastoral support program are proposed in this thesis which is intended to help prepare people for their eventual death in the context of the Catholic faith tradition.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION . . . . . 4

The Crux of the Problem

My Perspective

CHAPTER 2. FAITH . . . . . . 16

The Nature and Meaning of Faith

Faith in the Context of Death

Death in the Traditional Balance of Christian Formation

The Prophetic Role of the Church

CHAPTER 3. TAKING STOCK . . . . . 40

Changes Today

A Survey of Our Situation

CHAPTER 4. PASCHAL MYSTERY . . . . 68

The Paschal Mystery as “The Way”

Recovering Faith Community, Meaning and Hope in the Paschal Mystery

Summary

CHAPTER 5. A PROPOSAL . . . . . 86

Anticipating the Inherent Unmarketability of the Way of Christ

A Proposal for Death Ministry

WORKS CITED . . . . . . . 108




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CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION

The Crux of the Problem
I wish to speak of a poverty in this document, a poverty that has been building for generations in our Christian, Western culture with hardly notice or mention beyond the episodic observation by a theologian or philosopher. This is not about budgets, or social programs or the 401K plans that do seem to capture much of popular attention and conversation in our North American nation. But it is a poverty that affects everyone importantly and taps deep into the very soul of our human condition with its attendant dilemmas. This is a poverty not of money but of meaning, faith-community and hope; meaning being the most crucial factor since I believe the need for meaning is the strongest adult instinct in our species. It is a distinctly Christian form of poverty in death ministry, but tightly coupled and shaped by the culture and era.
The deficit is even more remarkable in context of the apparent abundance that marks our world today. Never before in the history of humankind has there existed the amount and diversity of resources available, both in material and intellectual forms, to address problems that confront persons or simply make life more comfortable and enjoyable, provided they are lucky enough to have the access. Ernest Becker described our intellectual situation as “choking on truth,” that we have so much information it has become difficult to compile it all and connect the dots meaningfully.¹ If our lives in this
age are compared against those of all of our human predecessors, one realizes how
blessed we are with a wealth of advantages; in fact, it surprises one as the blessings begin to be counted.
Even the most archetypal, central and inescapable dilemma of self-aware humankind--the certainty of personal death--has seen an accumulation of methods and knowledge to temporarily resist this most formidable of all adversaries. We now have better understanding, technologies and means to delay or counter (though not defeat) its power in forms unimaginable even less than a century ago. In this respect, our position is on virgin ground unreached by any of our homo-sapien ancestors in the thousands of preceding years of civilized existence.
In other respects however, despite these overwhelming advantages, there are warning signs that we have lost ground and actually are less capable than past humanity. Specifically, I believe we are less prepared for death, an event in everyone’s life that still remains as much an existential, spiritual and physical problem for us as it did for our predecessors. This is not to deny that today there is much available concerning the pragmatic planning needs for death such as estate and funeral planning, what kind of information to prepare and how to get this delivered to the family in a timely manner, what kinds of medical intervention a person desires for one’s self at the end. While such practicality is necessary and good, it leaves important facets and the deeper issues of facing mortality unaddressed. So, even more specifically, what I want to address is the poverty I discern in modern Christianity’s response to the pastoral demands with regard to what Monica Hellwig terms “individual eschatology.” She warns:
Many good Christians no longer know what to think about death, judgement,

CHAPTER 2. FAITH

The Nature and Meaning of Faith
The theme that I have chosen for this paper is death, but at its fundamental level this is really a discussion of faith, faith in the Christian context as a tool for dealing with death. There are many ways that people attempt to cope with death, but I believe faith is the most consistently meaningful and successful way. The human species is hardwired for the need for meaning and death is our biggest existential and spiritual puzzler, so it is no surprise that dealing with this dilemma is at the core of all great religions, whether ancient or relatively recent, though they come up with radically different approaches.
Having said this, an immediate difficulty is defining what faith actually is and how it functions in our lives. A comprehensive definition of faith is beyond the scope of this paper, but there are a couple of significant deviations I wish to consider that have driven popular culture into the poverty mentioned earlier. The fact that heritage Christian faith even incorporates an understanding of death (other than the death of Jesus) into its theology might surprise a lot of people today because of the shifts in modern understanding. More often than not, the message of Jesus is often now popularly cast as simply establishing right from wrong, good from bad; Jesus is seen as the ultimate spokesman and model for orthodoxy, drawing us the quintessential road map of correctness leading to salvation. This is reflected in the current popularity of the phrase, “What-would-Jesus-do?” In this paradigm one wants to gain solid membership in the “good” camp, mostly by claiming relationship with Jesus and doing “good” things, and
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steer clear of those people and actions that are “bad.” This is not to say that orthodoxy is not a component of faith, nor that there are not distinctions between right and wrong. However, there are clues that this simplistic definition of faith is discordant with the Gospels. For example, they record that Jesus often caught criticism for hanging out with the “wrong” crowd. This definition of faith would appear to miss something more fundamental and, taking the long view, deviates from traditional understanding.
Most current biblical academia has agreed upon the kingdom as the central message of Jesus in his ministry. Nearly everything he said and did was connected to fulfillment of this kingdom or bringing it to people’s attention. Albert Nolan writes that, by the time of Jesus, suffering, persecution and death had long been a part of the Jewish mythology in their faith stance, and had been modeled and proclaimed by their prophets. The message of Jesus was different. “Jesus had a new teaching and, in terms of that new teaching, suffering and death were closely associated with the coming of the kingdom.”⁶ Thus it would appear his understanding of faith contains another functional component; membership and practice in a correct orthodoxy is not enough and there are a plethora of scriptural examples where Jesus makes just that case (e.g., Mark 2:23-28, Matt. 15:1-20, Luke 18:9-14). Jesus is instructing about and urging us toward more than this. We run the risk of repeating the mistake of the rich man of the Gospels who thinks he has the bases covered by doing all the correct things, in his case “keeping the commandments” (Matt. 19:17). He was not able to understand nor accept the kenosis that Jesus holds out as an essential component of faith, kenosis (or the self-emptying) in his case as giving up his apparent wealth. Today, much of comfortable Western Christianity ignores the kenotic component of faith.
The Gospel evangelist Luke has Jesus wondering out loud if “the Son of man” would find any faith on earth (Luke 18:8). This passage is in the context of practicing prayer as one component of faith, though we understand that it is not saying God will measure faith simply by the amount of praying he finds. Also, there is a purpose--a function--being held out for the praying; praying is not just for praying’s sake or as the proportional measure of faith. The prayer here is purposeful: for maintaining a consistent relationship with and reliance upon God. Other scriptural examples can be found which demonstrate that Jesus intended his teachings to be prescriptive. There is purpose behind them to aid us in navigating our lives faithfully, with coherent meaning and toward the beneficence that God intends (Isa. 55), not simply a recipe for correctness. “In the last analysis faith is not a way of speaking or a way of thinking, it is a way of living and can only be adequately articulated in a living praxis.”⁷
Despite the possible denial by or disbelief of our contemporaries, the question whether Jesus would still find faith today is appropriate, even in our predominantly religious nation.⁸ Father Rolheiser believes the movement away from traditional faith has a long trajectory. “When Nietzsche’s madman smashes his lantern and shouts: ‘God is dead and we are his murders!’ the murdering process he is referring to is one which has taken place gradually, almost imperceptibly, through many centuries.”⁹ Just as the few sample quotes presented in Chapter 1 imply, there is something apparently missing. Is faith as we define and understand it consistent with the one Jesus talked about? A faith that is not balanced, that chooses some of the message while discarding other portions of it, can lead to some very unhealthy consequences.
We seem to have found ourselves in an era of nominal Christianity, whereby persons identify themselves as Christians by name and observe a subset of the precepts in the faith, while neglecting others, even though for perfectly human and understandable reasons. Technically, we are all nominal Christians at times and to some degree when we fall short of the call given by Jesus Christ. What is different today is the degree by which so much popular religion misses the full message of Christ and so has a narrow vision of God. “Rather God is experienced and related to as a religion, a church, a moral philosophy, a guide for private virtue, an imperative for justice, or as a nostalgia for proper propriety.”¹⁰ Nominal Christianity is faith’s version of the Potemkin village: little substance behind the facade. Because of the functional component of faith as a way of living, this selective type of faith has its consequences in how it disables us.
In his book The Heart of Christianity, Marcus Borg has a chapter with an interesting comparison of the modern understanding of faith with the pre-modern expression. He states that faith is made up of head and heart components and today the former overwhelmingly predominates the latter. The need for literalistic truth is a fairly recent development, most likely a response to the Enlightenment, and the rise of sciences, which stress the successful understanding and use of accurate facts. That facts have become the currency of belief displacing metaphorical and mythical truth is corroborated by May. “There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular-though profoundly mistaken-definition of myth as falsehood.”¹¹
The pre-modern sense of faith was strongly tied to believing, not so much as intellectual assent to factual truth, but as a commitment to a truth that involved one’s passion. Borg recovers the ancient ties of the word believe to belove. Faith has a relational component. “Given the premodern meaning of ‘believe,’ to believe in God is to belove God.”¹² Keeping this relational element in mind, and appreciating the committed nature that a faith as beloving God creates, one can at least begin to catch a faint glimpse how the martyrs were able to accept and face death for that faith. They were able to find ultimate meaning that was more important than the event of their deaths. By comparison, it is reasonable to say that today’s version of faith is emotionally disconnected from its source, except for superficial and episodic manifestations.
Given that the general state of Christian faith today falls short of that which Jesus preached, what difference does it make in our lives? What purpose does faith have in the day to day events, and especially when a crisis occurs? The sad events of Hurricane Katrina’s impact upon New Orleans provides a graphic analogy with nominal Christianity, that assists in describing the situation I see our population facing as the storm clouds of personal death approach. News coverage and personal accounts gave us a striking example of the awful consequences when protective structures, such as the waterway levees, no longer have the strength to act as they should. For whatever reason, be it poor design or maintenance, those barriers had eroded and then failed under the forces exposing the people to catastrophe which, for a while, they had to negotiate on their own. Before the storm appeared, most of these people thought the structures they saw were up to the job, and their authorities assured them they were.
Unfortunately, this can be an appropriate analogy for the situation I see in our American spirituality, though I want to focus later on the effects simply with regard to death and dying. The Church, and its repository of faith, has long had protective functions for its people, the ultimate of course being salvation. Christ did not incarnate simply to reiterate orthodoxy nor to undergo the passion, death and resurrection as an isolated redemptive act--functional but removed in personal relevance from all the people in the world. The protective nature in Christian faith derives from God’s intention and message held in the incarnation, passion and resurrection as lived by Christ. This intention holds personal relevance for each of us, now, and the lessons from Jesus Christ still tie directly to how we live our lives and understand our mythology. A proper grounding in, and practice of, our faith helps us to negotiate our daily lives meaningfully, connected to our God, no matter what disturbing events may come our way, though this does not mean that sorrow is not involved. This way of Christ is a route to the mind of St. Paul with regard to how he handled his fate, including hardships and death. Traditional Christian faith grounds our lives in essential meaning.
By analogy then, there are structures in Christianity that act as bulwarks to protect people against erosive and destructive forces. These structures are built on the foundation of Jesus Christ and the Gospels, and held together by the interpretive wisdom and teachings constructed over many years. Yet, remembering the warnings by Hellwig, May and Marty in the previous chapter, there is a significant body of data showing these structures have been weakened by neglect, misunderstanding or disuse. They no longer provide the protection needed in a rapidly changing world and must be afforded attention so they can be rebuilt properly and appropriate to the kinds of forces present. In this chapter, I will review the eroded nature of the popular understanding of faith and offer some general correctives.
Faith in the Context of Death
Returning to my original theme, the question arises--what does faith have to do with our ability to face death? Additionally, with all the significant challenges facing the Church in the United States today, why would the dearth of theological support for individual eschatology present a problem of any relative urgency. In a word, the answer to both is meaning.
Scientific studies have often pointed to the significance of death in the human condition, though there are two sides to this coin. The first is its motivational power. “Here we introduce one of the great rediscoveries of modern thought: that of all things that move man, one of the principal ones is his terror of death.”¹³ Ernest Becker, a social scientist, drove this point home is his notable text, which not only speaks of this event’s significance, but also how the underlying fear can be understood as the prime, though submerged, motivation for the dysfunction, strife and hatred that mars the historical track of humanity. He theorized that a deep, subconscious fear of death drives mans' motivations; thus we move to what he called “the heroic”--we attempt to find immortality either literally (which is impossible) or through meaning. If faith does not provide this function, man will automatically find another entity that will. In a companion text, Becker wrote:
Man still gropes for transcendence, but now this is not necessarily nature and
God, but the SS or the CIA; the only thing that remains constant is that the
individual still gives himself with the same humble trembling as the primitive to
this totemic ancestor. The stake is identical–immortality power–and the unit of
motivation is still the single individual and his fears and hopes.¹⁴

As our society becomes more secular, religion thus acting less in this role of connecting to the heroic, it turns to other mythic forces. Thus, increasing militarism and patriotism in our society might be the canary-in-the-mine signaling a diminution of mythic power in our modern distortion of religions and could account for the abundance of flag lapel pins. Again, I wish to stress that according to these studies, this meaning-mechanism occurs below our conscious notice. Also, religion and other ideologies are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but the danger lies in which source we choose, and ultimately place our faith in, for achieving the heroic.
The second side of the coin is the psychological need to avoid facing the personal reality of death. Most persons can deal with it in short exposures and superficially, but few can attend to their end directly and deeply, if at all, without the supporting structure of meaning. These studies also consider the mechanisms and reasons that such a basic existential and universal problem in the human conditions remains ostensibly out of our sight and daily awareness, or as Becker poetically described, “the deeper reason that Montaigne’s peasant isn’t troubled until the very end, when the Angel of Death, who has always been sitting on his shoulder, extends his wing.”¹⁵ Becker observed that Freud came to the conclusion that our unconscious does not know death, thus on a basic level we are programmed, in a sense, to deny death despite the apparent power it has over our lives. There is evidence of cultural differences in how this plays out among different nations, but this denial seems particularly strong in our country. Arnold Toynbee is quoted as saying that “death is un-American.”¹⁶
The essential Christian message, the Gospels of Jesus Christ, would seem to agree that death is a primary issue of our human existence and how we give meaning to that existence. While the climax of all four gospel texts is the resurrection, the centerpiece is the passion narrative. With respect to addressing the human condition, one could thus say that the Church should see the work around dealing with death as one of its main tasks. Obviously, this work is not only counter-cultural, but militates against the comfortable grain of human nature.
Refocusing on the Good News as passion narrative rather than resurrection is antagonistic to the human need to avoid death.¹⁷ We would prefer to repress and ignore the undesirable as Becker notes:
man cuts out for himself a manageable world: he throws himself into action
uncritically, unthinkingly. He accepts the cultural programming that turns his
nose where he is supposed to look; he doesn’t bite the world off in one piece as
a giant would, but in small manageable pieces, as a beaver does.¹⁸

We have recently heard the term of “dumbing down” characterizing some trends in education and general society. In similar fashion, what Becker is describing as an avoidance of our death issues could be considered an ongoing repression, which we all do so as not to go crazy, as a “numbing down.” Small wonder that churches themselves avoid talking about the hard messages inherent in the Gospel since it goes against not only the pastor’s, but also the congregation’s personal programming to avoid the topic and as an institution it does not want to scare off or offend the faithful.
Jesus suffered a similar dilemma with his flock in John 6:52-66: “When many of his disciples heard it, they said, ‘This teaching is difficult; who can accept it’?” The narrative in this pericope may be about Jewish taboos around flesh and blood, but the meta-narrative is about death, not only a challenge to accept Jesus’ impending death as observers, but to go so far in the commitment as to symbolically ingest it. The idea of getting that close to death was repugnant to many of his followers and they left.
Despite our natural avoidance of dying and death, they are topics that must be engaged. Faith in this context acts as a relief valve, helping people with their individual eschatological questions rather than letting this pressure build and find outlets in destructive ways. Faith can provide the meaning for how death fits into their lives, but only if it is intelligible and connects their setting with the unchanging truths of the Gospel. Without this formation however, and especially in these days of complexity and fast decisions, it can be excruciatingly difficult and soul-rending for persons to deal with the issues of death lacking the proper context of faith as a meaningful backdrop.
Death in the Traditional Balance of Christian Formation
In his book Denial of the Soul, M. Scott Peck observes, “In the latter years of his life, Freud came to believe that almost everything about human behavior could ultimately be reduced to two opposing forces: Eros and Thanatos.”¹⁹ Expressing more than just love, eros is also the complete range of life-urges or, as Peck quotes Dylan Thomas, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”²⁰ Thanatos is the opposite side of that coin, not merely death, but all those self-defeating and injurious forces we struggle against. Within the great wisdom--or myth if you allow--of Christianity there echoes a similar dyad in the configuration of life and death. The two major seasons of our liturgical calendar are Advent (an anticipatory celebration of a beginning life) and Lent (an anticipatory marking of life’s end) that together constitute a narrative for framing and explaining the human condition and humanity’s relationship with God. For most of its existence, the wisdom of the Church has been to hold these two seminal realities (life versus death) together in an appreciative and complementary balance, rather than favoring one and neglecting the other.
There is a wonderful poem by T. S. Elliot, written in 1922, “The Journey of the Magi,” that captures this connectedness in the philosophical reminisces of one of the wise men that ends with this reflection:
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down -
This set down.
This: were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Here the focus sharpens further as I believe that our societal expression of Christianity has somehow lost this balance and has been weakened by its neglect, or avoidance, of the thanatos element within its tradition. That such an avoidance could occur clandestinely is understandable because the Church exists within, and its membership is made up of, the surrounding culture. Thus, lacking sufficient vigilance or awareness, contemporary trends can bleed into Church thinking and practice if they are not noticed and intentionally responded to--akin to the moral narrative of a frog sitting passively in heating water.
In the larger arena, our fellow citizens, whether secular or not, spend nearly all of their energy, either innocently or without reflection, embracing eros with all of its desires and accumulation, while doing everything to avoid the kenosis and death embodied in thanatos. The avoidance extends so far as to resist talking about death or loss in polite society, or attempting to recast and exploit death as a form of entertainment. There are some exceptions, though out of the mainstream and only by a minority willing to engage in critical thinking. Here, there have been islands of activity in discussions around the issues of death such as how our culture denies or fears it, how to define it, how to handle it, how to grieve it. Even so, if the Church neglects to protect its traditional domain and provide counter-responsive ministry, it cannot expect the secular world to pick up the slack and attend to death in a meaningful way, or in the same way, as the theology of the Church had. The world is neither equipped nor interested in bringing God and religion into the equation and cannot find utility or sense in death, especially in our consumer-driven world, because death defeats continuing consumption.
Thus, there seems to be a parallel dynamic in the Western Church. Its focus and activities favors the realm of eros but with much less attention paid to thanatos, with the exception of naming the “culture of death” that weaves through popular culture. Yet if there is even a smidgeon of truth in Freud’s diagnosis that eros and thanatos are balancing counterweights in human behavior, should there not be more assertive pastoral engagement in addressing the issues of thanatos. Think to yourself, how much pastoral energy or thought is going into this second realm of human behavior? Even if one disagrees with the stark duality that Freud supposes, it would be rash to dismiss the concept entirely as we see, and others have documented, many examples of its truth personified in our news and in the people we meet. And yet if there is some truth in this concept, how is it that we have come to a place where our attention is focused almost exclusively on the eros and what cost do we incur as a community by neglecting the thanatos?
Perhaps another way to roughly characterize and gauge the imbalance is by way of a comparison of soul versus spirit, using my own nontraditional definitions. To clarify, I do not mean the specific entities so much as the qualitative expressions of a person and their personality, as two forms of lived spirituality. This is tricky semantic ground and I do not wish to get lost in theological technicalities here as there are many different ideas about what these are and how they function.²¹ Before I begin this short analysis let me state I am not arguing one aspect is superior or preferable to the other, but that both are needed in active expression in our lives.
In general it seems to me, from reading through various sources, that there is agreement that the two aspects of spirit and soul differ in distinction and feel. For instance, when one speaks of doing “soul-work,” there is an understood nuance of an earthiness and sobriety connected to the activity. My understanding of the difference in distinction is this: soul operates in the every day, is the earthy element of a person’s essence and also incorporates the sober regions of pain, loss and death. I think of St. John of the Cross as a representative. Soul’s movement and language is typically descendant. Soulwork takes into account human limitations.
In contrast, spirit is lofty, strives for the heavens, beyond-the-ordinary and the exhilarating. I think of Norman Vincent Peale as a representative. Spirit is often associated with the dynamic expressions and activity of a person, using the gifts and inspirations provided by God; thus our popular saying “That’s the spirit!” Spirit’s movement and language is typically ascendant. Spiritwork celebrates the human potential.
In this less-than-precise offering of the dyad-configuration of soul and spirit, a parallel dynamic to that of eros and thanatos emerges. Again, a healthy posture contains a balanced participation of both spirit and soul in one’s life, but it is believable (and I feel empirical) that we have favored the spirit in our modern religion and society to the negligence of soul. Thomas Moore, strikingly, begins his book Care of the Soul, “The great malady of the twentieth century, implicated in all of our troubles and affecting us individually and socially is ‘loss of soul’.”²² It would seem that he also finds an imbalance in contemporary life, though his definition of soul is somewhat different. Spiritwork is what we want whereas soulwork is what we need, yet for a balanced life of faith, both must be present.
Rolheiser speaks of two “functions” of the soul that must be kept in balance. One function is to imbue our life with energy, and so has a principle of “chaos” to it, while the other function is to keep our lives integrated, having a principle of “order.” “In a manner of speaking, the soul has a principle of chaos and a principle of order within it and its health depends upon giving each its due.”²³ There are undoubtably many ways to characterize this kind of dyad and I do not mean to equate the preceding three as completely interchangeable. For my purposes I will use the language of soulwork versus spiritwork for the remainder of this paper.
It would be easy to dismiss the imbalance in emphasis between soul and spirit as an interesting but mostly irrelevant feature of the modern age, with no real consequences. I argue otherwise and have considered a number of examples of true import and lessons to us all. One of the earliest biblical narratives, that of the tower of Babel, speaks about man’s arrogance and presumption in relation to God (“let us make a name for ourselves,” Gen. 11:4), but it is also an expression of spirit unrestrained by soul. The people in this story are impressed and proud of their abilities and so use them to literally attempt to ascend to God’s level through their own handiwork.
For our own era, a stark recurrence of this lesson can be seen in the ascendancy and fall, with tragic consequences for everybody, of Nazi Germany. The Germans of the 1930's, who had suffered defeat and humiliation for years, found their spirit in their increasing technological and organizational abilities they are so well-known for. They were not crazy or bad to applaud this spirit and their newfound capabilities, especially in light of their hunger for something other than failure. Unfortunately, they were so hungry for success that they missed the miasma hidden in the imbalance of spirit versus soul; in the lack of respect for thanatos. That imbalance turned a potentially healthy expression of spirit into a monster of pride and death unrestrained by the expression of soul. Certainly Adolf Hitler was the focal point and manipulator of this dynamic, but the people of this society co-opted in this dynamic to deadly ends.
It is also worth noting that this happened in a nation as educated, creative and Christian as Germany is, perhaps acting as a lesson on the weakness of nominal Christianity. I think it is no coincidence that the best known of their religious critics was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who is legendary for his gritty and challenging work that speaks of attending to the soul. In his book The Cost of Discipleship, he points out a stark corrective path that draws on the soul, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”²⁴ Of course the Nazi regime instinctively knew the threat this re-balancing would be to their project and so had to eliminate his influence by imprisonment and eventually hanging.
Because of sin, an integral part of the human condition, we are all at threat of repeating this kind of story when we let, or choose to have, spirit overshadow soul. The imbalance is not benign, especially not in today’s nuclear-capable world. It is exceedingly ironic that to save this world, to save our existence and lives and souls, we must deliberately walk the path of the grave. If one believes in the central lesson of the Christian narrative however, that is the only conclusion one can reach.
Doing soulwork means bringing in the self-reflective and penitential strains of spirituality, those movements that human nature tends to avoid when possible. Perhaps the following quote best captures the mechanism whereby doing soulwork keeps self-destructive impulses in check.
Thoughts that dwell on the individual’s past infidelities toward a loving God
effect a movement away from self-love to a passionate love of God. This leads
to the existential awareness of man’s own weakness and propensity toward evil,
and hence to the consideration of the possibility of an eternity separated from
God.²⁵

For this mechanism to work, a person must have the humility and awareness to know God as greater, and more real, than themselves. Soul keeps the ultimate pointer of love redirected toward God, the beloved focus of faith, balancing the temptation of unchecked-spirit to twist the pointer in the direction of one’s self.
But the work of soul, as the path through kenosis, is a hard sell in today’s culture. Not only because we are so used to the successes and luxuries of modern living, but also because this avoidance has always been a part of human nature. It is true that there are hardships and losses in everyone’s life, even the most comfortable of us, but these may occur as accidental events. What is different about the soulwork I am speaking of is this is the intentional practice of a discipline that fits into an understanding of what it means to deliberately take up one’s cross. Supporting this practice is a theology and a sense of meaning, and the work that leads the person through spiritual growth and salvation as Jesus promised. Outside the context of faith, the language of descent is scarcely intelligible to a normally striving human being.
We have a scriptural example of the clash between basic human nature and this
hard message of the way of Christ. I see this as the reason Jesus makes his statement about foxes and birds having their homes but the Son of man with nowhere to lay his head (Matt. 8:20, Luke 9:58). This quotation occurs in the context of great crowds beginning to collect around him and naturally some believe he will lead them to seeing a triumphal, ascendant course in his ministry--the path of the spirit. The traditional Jewish concept of Messiah was of the person who would re-establish the Davidic dynasty. Jesus counters instead with this statement so that they know his path is not one of worldly glory, dominion and ascendancy. He discourages their labeling him as Messiah. Instead, his way is one of suffering and rejection--death--it is a story of descent and submission quite unlike the path they had in mind. This is the path of the soul.
The lesson here is that even in Jesus’ time, we have an example of human nature desiring the ascent of spirit and hoping to avoid the descent of soul. As this example shows, faith can be defined as many things, but it is not necessarily the faith that God understands, especially when grounded solely in human objectives. We have to look to Jesus Christ for his instruction of what faith all encompasses (from the point of view of God) and we do not have the luxury of picking and choosing among the parts. Faith is a package deal; all parts must be operative in order for it to be coherent and life-giving as intended by God.
While there are other aspects of this imbalance, my intent is simply to look at this dynamic in terms of how it manifests today in relation to preparing for dying and death. Yet as a last word, Becker observes that the ability to hold both spirit and soul in balanced concert is no easy task, one he judges as “loaded with ambiguity impossible to resolve.” So Becker poses this question, “How does one lean on God and give over everything to Him and still stand on his own feet as a passionate human being?”²⁶ The premise I will follow is that the seeds of the answer lie in following “the way” as mapped out by Jesus Christ. Following this way holds tremendous challenge and promise together in a paradoxical fashion, like a unmapped path that can only be understood in its course by a commitment to walk it.
The Prophetic Role of the Church
I see an urgent need for the Church to provide the support and meaning that people require in facing their mortality, and this work is a legitimate concern of pastoral ministry. “We have today few specialists of the soul to advise us when we succumb to moods and emotional pain, or when as a nation we find ourselves confronting a host of evils.”²⁷ There has been theological activity around this topic but it has not resulted in many tools directly applicable to the average person struggling with mortality. Monica Hellwig maps out the center of this need.
What has been written about individual eschatology in the last several decades
has been very cautious about trying to decipher the symbols of hope. That has
left one area of concern–that is, the consideration of death itself and of the
process of dying. . . . The basic question, as all these authors see it, is how we
are to make sense of life in the face of death and what the Gospel of Jesus as the
Christ tells us about death and about the meaning of human life in face of
death.²⁸

Perhaps, because of the immediacy and power of the Gospel message in their day, the martyrs we revere from the early Church had a better sense of loss and death as meaningful components of life and not something to be avoided at all costs. Today, though we might still revere the martyrs, it is very difficult for us to truly identify with their thinking and perspective, given the huge differences in our formative experiences and understanding. Few of us have the balanced formation necessary to faithfully walk in their shoes. It seems some of the early Christians, such as Perpetua, were able to call upon this resource to embrace the ideal mind of St. Paul. She was put to death in a North African Roman coliseum in 203 C.E., not a theologian or a Church leader, but a young mother with a family who was able to make sense of her fate and mark it down in writing for future generations to read--a testimony of her faith in God through Jesus Christ.
The martyrs’ sober embrace of death illustrates one of the traditional strengths of Christianity, a strength not to be found elsewhere since it is so counter-cultural and seemingly counter-intuitive. It makes sense that this wisdom of the Church would be disdained by popular society. We were warned by Christ that the more the Church modeled popular society, rather than standing on its own belief and perspective, the more compromised it would become. The Church had to stick to its beliefs, no matter how counter-cultural or discordant it is with the “world”. If our contemporary Church underplays the soulwork component in formation for its people, they are disarmed for one of the most significant event in their lives, one event that the world only makes worse in its complexity and secularity. People die without the empowering that religion could give them to face death from a faithful and meaning-filled stance. As a result, suffering and spiritual distress are common companions at the deathbed.
Yet to begin talking about the difficult work necessary for a vibrant and balanced spirituality, Moltmann says the Church will put itself at odds with popular culture and the consumer society. “To fit itself for this task, Christianity must abandon particular environmental forms–those that the Church has assumed because its adherents are also citizens in a particular society. . . . Christianity must become the salt of the earth, a fiery salt in the wounds of the earth.”²⁹ Becker also warns of the sociological problem this prophetic role creates in displacing other ideologies.
And the crisis of society is, of course, the crisis of organized religion too:
religion is no longer valid as a hero system, and so the youth scorn it. If
traditional culture is discredited as heroics, then the church that supports that
culture automatically discredits itself. If the church on the other hand, chooses
to insist on its own special heroics, it might find that in crucial ways it must
work against the culture to recruit youth to be anti-heroes to the ways of life of
the society they live in. This is the dilemma of religion in our time.³⁰

There may be opportunities to learn from others how to do this successfully in the modern world. Pope John Paul II had said that the Church needed to learn how to breathe with two lungs, referring to the Western and Eastern bodies. What strikes me about his statement is with respect to the tradition of pathos in the Eastern Orthodox practices, a strong element of the soulwork that I have been attempting to describe. Perhaps his call was a prophetic expression of the need for more balance of soul and spirit. The qualitative difference of the two spheres of Christianity is characterized by Father Richard Rohr as the appreciation of “big mind” in the Eastern Church, versus the “small mind” of its Western counterpart. Rohr says, “Big mind sees the whole, a panoramic awareness; . . . Small mind wants to explain and analyze.”³¹ A part of the difference I infer here is the inclusion of the affective and sensual that is integrated into the paradigm of big mind, whereas small mind focuses on the intellectual and analytical.
Father George Maloney has written a book that introduces Eastern Christian spirituality of the fourth to eighth centuries. One of his chapters is entitled “Weep: There is No Other Way!” in which he explains the central part that compunction (the weeping for one’s sins) plays in Eastern spirituality. He quotes a fourth century Abbot Poemen:
One of the brethren asked Abba Poemen, saying, “Father, what shall I do in the
matter of my sins?” The old man said: “Whoever wishes to blot out his offenses
can do so by means of weeping; for weeping is the path which the Scriptures
have taught us, and the Fathers have also wept continually, and there is no other
path except that of tears.”³²

The emotive role of spirituality is a concept that has little familiarity in the arena of Western Christianity, but this example displays how there may be value in exploring the late Pope’s lead in this direction. Likewise, there may be lessons to be learned in other quarters, such as in the conversation with the Jewish faith and re-evangelization of Europe that Pope Benedict XVI has called for.
Another problem is being able to show people the value of the “narrow gate,” the hard work of attending to the soul in a world that rejects this notion (Matt 7:13-14). Practitioners of Christianity have to understand that soulwork is a pathway to something greater, that one does not stay in this place of suffering. The passage through the desert is not endless, but leads elsewhere. Fr. Maloney makes this point, “per crucem, ad lucem (through the cross, to light). Compunction was the dying process and joy was the resurrection of all of one’s powers into a new life that produced a hundredfold in peace and joy.”³³ This message needs to be made intelligible to the average believer, so that it explains why it remains a part of the way. A strikingly parallel explanation was penned by Anne Lindbergh, some 60 years after her firstborn son had been kidnapped and murdered.
What I am saying is not simply the old Puritan truism that “suffering
teaches.” I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught,
all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added
mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness, and the willingness to
remain vulnerable. All these and other factors combined, if the circumstances
are right, can teach and can lead to rebirth.³⁴

There has to be something more in the Church’s response to death than just administration of anointing in the last hours of someone’s life. Some form of outreach and formation that recovers and instructs about kenosis (and about the meaning of death in life, that gets people to practice their soulwork, that forms supportive community) is needed. These measures are needed because we live in a changing and complex world that works at odds to these notions, and because we have a larger population which are stranded from community and meaning and are disconnected from their spiritual resources.
This is not a call for the Church to walk away from joy onto a morbid journey,
but a call for balance. The Gospels are still the “Good News” and not the “Dire Warnings.” I respect St. Paul’s call to not quench the Spirit (1 Thess. 5:19). This call is not so much turning down the volume on the joyous, hopeful and uplifting strains of our faith as it is turning up the volume on the sacrificial, penitential and soulful ones. I suspect that by attending to the difficult and sadder elements of our theology, we will be able to better appreciate and celebrate the happier elements. Rohr quotes Oscar Wilde on the necessity of having the affective qualities also engaged in our faith, to embrace both pain and joy. “Oscar Wilde put it perfectly: ‘Only the senses can cure the soul and only the soul can cure the senses’.”³⁵
The bulk of the work of re-introducing the concept and practice of kenosis and soulwork must occur in the Church, as a thematic inclusion in the discussion of faith. It cannot wait until churchgoers find themselves in a medical crisis, nor at their life’s end for reasons discussed in the next chapter.

CHAPTER 3. TAKING STOCK

Changes Today
In the first chapter, I spoke of a poverty of pastoral resources in preparation for death, a poverty of meaning, faith community and hope. I mentioned my belief that how we address this will impact the shape, direction and relevancy of Christianity in the near future. Even if this is too dramatic, circumstances will force some type of change. For a brief span of time, in post-agrarian American society when family members no longer died at home, we have been able to keep the death of those that matter most to us at arms length and mostly out of sight. In so doing we have hit upon a temporary fix to the inner tensions Becker described around dealing with our own mortality. Yet this fix carries a cost and will be unsustainable in the future.
Less than a half century from now, our replacements will have more than doubled in
numbers. It is hard to see how we can continue to keep the secret, with such
multitudes doing the dying. We will have to give up the notion that death is
catastrophe, or detestable, or avoidable, or even strange. We will need to learn more
about the cycling of life in the rest of the system and about our connection to the
process.³⁶

This is just one trend occurring, but there are many others ongoing that has radically changed our existence, and how we understand and respond to it. Part of the learning must include a faith perspective that is in step with the changing landscape and responsive to the shifting needs of believers. There are many reasons why the current nature of our

CHAPTER 4. PASCHAL MYSTERY

In the face of subliminal formation and nominal Christianity, an observation by St. Paul resonates strongly with the Church’s present dilemma, that proclaiming Christ crucified continues to be a stumbling block and foolishness to most contemporary hearers (1 Cor. 1:23). Rohr begins his book with this brief verse to himself:

Inherent Unmarketability
How do you make attractive that which is not?
How do you sell emptiness, vulnerability, and nonsuccess?
How do you talk descent when everything is about ascent?
How can you possibly market letting-go in a capitalist culture?
How do you present Jesus to a Promethean mind?
How do you talk about dying to a church trying to appear perfect?
This is not going to work (which might be my first step).⁷⁹

It is only through the lesson of the paschal mystery, integrating its message into the living praxis of believers, that any of this might come to pass. This is obviously a dilemma reaching into all parts of Christian living, but the motivation to address this in a ministry around death and dying could be the start to a subtle paradigm shift. There is an obvious hunger for wholeness and meaning in the average person’s lives, and in their making peace with having to die, that presents an opportunity for evangelization and a blossoming of the vision of Vatican II. It has to start with the fundamental understanding, and living, of the Gospel message.
Too often Christians give in to the temptation to skip directly to the resurrection as the foundation for their hope, meaning and community, since the passion and death of Jesus appear to lack these elements to the rational mind. This supports the idea that there is no value to be found in discomfort or loss or death--a defeating posture because when these calamities inevitably arrive in our lives we are left with only despair, fear and isolation. But the Gospels present the opportunity of redemption from this desperate state in the paradox of Jesus’ way, and we have been assured that this is the only path to the resurrection. “And he said to all, ‘If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake, he will save it’” (Luke 9:23-24).
We all want the resurrection, but must pass through our personal form of passion and death in order to obtain this. It is crucial that today’s believers be able to see that the foundations for hope, meaning and community actually do lie here, that there is no need, or success, in trying to skip to the reward of resurrection. Embracing the way of Jesus Christ prepares us for the approaching storm and assures us that God is still with us even as it rages and batters our person. In this chapter then, I will review the paschal mystery as our foundation of Christian meaning, hope and faith community that enables us to faithfully weather our personal storms and death.
The Paschal Mystery as “The Way”
For Christians struggling to understand the ultimate meaning of their lives, it is important to be able to see the personal relevance, and call, of the paschal mystery. This is the treasure hidden in the fields and the pearl of great value that we must diligently search for. When Christ bids us come and die, he does so not to increase our pain but to help us find meaning and salvation in the struggle that inevitably comes to all. The call to follow Christ is not an interesting historical footnote, made just to Jewish peasants in the first century, but an invitation to every generation to walk the way of preparation that brings community, meaning and hope into the synthesis of mankind’s existence. It does exact a cost, especially difficult in the presence of any residue of narcissism, to surrender completely to God’s providence.
This essential pattern in Christianity is unmistakable when one is ready to see it in the narrative examples of the Bible and consistently throughout the broad sweep of the Christian tradition. Borg notes, “The synoptic gospels not only report that Jesus spoke about dying as the path to new life; their literary structure as a whole is also shaped by the theme of death and resurrection as ‘the way’ of Jesus.”⁸⁰ It is no coincidence that the passion and resurrection narrative is the centerpiece and focus of all four Gospels, nor that Mark’s work begins by quoting Isaiah about “the way of the Lord.”⁸¹ We are being instructed directly that this is the only way to follow Jesus Christ and that faithfulness requires a path of kenosis, a process of self-emptying and completely letting go into God’s hands. How difficult this is when the ego has formed in the American mythology of self-making and rugged independence. This is nothing less than a titanic clash of mythologies.
It is in the wilderness that the way of the Lord is prepared, in the desert that the highway for God is made straight (Isa. 40:3). Both of these terrains have long been symbolic as places where people go for self-purification and re-alignment with God’s will in a process of asceticism and self-emptying. The Israelites had to wander for forty years in the desert, a symbolic passage that is replete with struggles of human will and “stiffneck” behavior that must be given up before arrival at the promised land. Why would we think that our pattern would be any different?
Even more frightening to the human psyche is that all human journeys must end in death. There was no escape even for Jesus the Christ, despite his divine person. The climactic point of the Gospels is that even he had to die, as we all do, and that acceptance of the way of Christ, the way to the kingdom of God, leads through true human death.
Reflection on the meaning of the death of Jesus can be severely impeded by a too
facile understanding of the resurrection, which strips it of mystery and spiritual import
and leaves it looking more like a magic trick...on this matter Church teaching has been
very clear: Jesus really suffered and really died.⁸²

Imagine if it became common knowledge that the original ending of Mark, the oldest Gospel, had no comforting reappearance of Jesus, only a sentinel to announce his rising to the terrified and amazed community (Mark 16:8). The early readers had to draw upon their faith that the way of Christ, drummed throughout this Gospel, had not turned out to be a disappointing illusion after all.83 This evangelist’s challenge to accept Christ’s way is at the same time threatening and reassuring. Threatening because no one willingly wants to go through hardship and death, but reassuring because this hardship and death has at last a meaning and hope through the pattern that our God established and Jesus experienced as the “first fruits” (1 Cor.15:20-23).
There is another meaning of “the way” here, one perhaps more hopeful and intelligible to the contemporary human mind, but it requires the ability to read the Gospels outside of the literalistic box, to see the metaphorical meanings. Borg connects the idea of being born again, in the form that the Gospels meant, with the image of dying and rising again. He notes, the phrase “to take up the cross” in the first century literally meant to die in execution, yet Luke also uses the word “daily” in his passage to indicate the metaphorical rather than literal meaning (Luke 9:23). Thus this admonition to walk the way of death is also about transformation, that the old self dies to give rise to the new; a theme understood and employed by St. Paul. “When Paul resolved to ‘preach nothing but Christ and Christ crucified,’ this is most centrally what he meant: the cross as symbol of the process of personal transformation at the heart of the Christian life.”^{84 Note that Paul does not speak of Christ resurrected, but Christ crucified.}
This is where the value of soulwork comes into play. We cannot defeat the arrival of death, but we are equipped to prepare for it in metaphorical daily deaths and to discover the meaning of our life in the face of death that Christ promises from following his way. In everybody’s life, there is always hardship and sacrifice. The self-giving of a busy mother, staying up at night with a sick child even though she has to go to work in the morning, is an example of a sacrifice that has the potential of a metaphorical death. If she is aware of the pattern, she can honor the meaning it holds as a part of her personal theology rather than the emptiness of seeing it as nothing more than a nuisance. Seeing in the paradigm of God’s way in these daily events is also a way of praying always.
The path of the soul, the way of Jesus, is bigger than intellectual knowing. We refer to the paschal mystery because it cannot be fully explained, but must be walked. It requires trust that Jesus was intentional and purposeful in prescribing this kind of a path and that traveling thus will produce the results he promises, nothing less than the coming of the kingdom. Honoring the mystery rather than demanding explanation is one of the things we can learn from Eastern practice. “The Eastern Orthodox Church very early moved toward paradox and mystery. In fact, many of the Eastern fathers said, ‘if you can explain it, it’s not true.’”85
We have empirical clues in our own midst that this indeed is how the Christian pattern works. They are found in the stories of persons who have undergone terrific hardship and loss, then emerged with a changed, more hopeful and grounded spirit. These people often describe the hardship as the best thing to happen to them--a blessing. We want to celebrate their triumph and imaginatively read ourselves into the success of their story, but have a hard time truly appropriating the depth of their via dolorosa and appreciating its tenor of uncertainty. Suffering is not the work of the intellect and the soul moves to the cadence of kairos.
Recovering Faith Community, Meaning and Hope in the Paschal Mystery
Religion functions in the exposition of ultimate meaning. More to the point, Christianity holds within the paschal mystery a powerful ameliorative theology around the meaning in death, hope in Jesus Christ and faith community as the sacred vessel holding all this together. Yet this theology also demands vulnerability and trust in God, a task requiring effort and intention. The disciples were to learn what this meant. “But Jesus said to them, ‘You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or to be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?’” (Mark 10:38).
Jesus’ challenge implies the need for a process of deliberate formation to close the gap between our mind and the mind of Christ. It requires our being reborn into a new way of thinking and acting, and a new way of seeing. Borg says that the way is about nothing less than transformation, “the path of transformation that leads to and through death and resurrection.”86 The path is narrow, and many to choose to avoid it, but it can lead to a recovery of meaning, hope and faith community as resources to help us prepare for our death.
Meaning
From his imprisonment, Paul wrote “Living is Christ and dying is gain” (Phil 1:21) as he faced the uncertainty of his peril, weighing whether he would rather die at the hands of his captors or be freed to resume his ministry. I see this as an expression of his complete trust in God’s providence; he accepts either fate equally in his vulnerability to faith. At the same time, this is difficult for him and he struggles emotionally with his predicament, speaking of suffering and struggle later in the same passage. By “Living is Christ,” I understand him to be saying his life efforts are dedicated to following and modeling all that Christ taught. By accepting the call to evangelization from Christ, he accepts whatever consequences it brings just as Christ accepted his cross. The meaning of his fate rests in the connection to God’s intent and his commitment stems from beloving God as his basis of faith. Is this possible for us as we face our fate? Not without practice and grieving.
Thus we come to the first level of meaning, the meaning of Christ’s death as “the way” in our living. In other words, Christ urges us to practice our dying in our life when he talks about taking up the cross and following. I mentioned the example of a mother experiencing a metaphorical dying to herself in the unexpected crisis of a sick child. The soulwork discussed previously are intentional practices of this kind of dying, stepwise movements away from narcissism (self-love) to reverence (love of God). Peck calls this ego defeat and says it is essential learning, “ego defeat that is central to the process of dying: learning how to give up control.”87
There are at least two lessons that come from this practice. The first lesson is learning how to let go and the second is that there is something greater than ourselves that we can rely on. “To save one’s life means to hold onto it, to love it and be attached to it and therefore to fear death. To lose one’s life is to let go of it, to be detached from it and therefore to be willing to die.”88 Human nature is such that these lessons must be taken in small portions over time. Yet as these start to be learned in those small portions, the ideal mind of Paul becomes more accessible and we also begin to comprehend how dying could possibly be understood as gain.
Working to remove our ego from being our central concern, thus freeing us to more closely align our intentions with God’s, builds existential meaning. It reopens the narrow field of vision and options to that of the transcendent, so that the meaning of our life in the face of death, as Hellwig says, has an ultimate purpose in the mind of God. We may not fully understand the purpose and have to guard with humility against arrogantly presuming the intention, but knowing that we are children of God is freeing. We have as much or more purpose than the birds of the air or the lilies of the field. This reconnecting also brings back the heroic into the simple daily acts one performs by being blessed by God himself. We no longer have to find meaning in false ideologies and limited institutions. By having a meaning that is eternally connected, our fear of death is addressed. The affective (felt) power of this is clear; if God is for us who can be against?
The second level of meaning in Christ’s death is found in our death. As St. Paul assures us, through the death and resurrection of Christ, we have been redeemed and have purpose beyond death.
If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. But
in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. For
since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come
through a human being; for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ
(1 Cor. 15:19-22).

This is the promise of the new covenant with all humanity, Gentiles and Jews alike. From the Gospels we know that God has made this choice and displayed a preferential option for all humanity in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. Our death has meaning in the pattern of the paschal mystery as the way to sharing in this new covenant. We truly must suffer death--and death is not easy--but beyond death we truly have promise, the hope, of the resurrection.
We cannot explain how this happens and the only appropriate posture, perhaps, is that of the Holy Fool. “The final stage of the wisdom of faith is what we might call the Holy Fool. Ironically the Holy Fool is one who knows he doesn’t know but doesn’t need to either. . . . That’s the freedom. The Fool doesn’t need to know.”89
Hope
Hope is a tricky thing. It is essentially non-empirical since it addresses what is to come. The object of hope is that which cannot be experienced, but only imagined--the future. Whereas meaning is largely addressed intellectually, hope is mostly non-rational. Using Borg’s terminology, hope is more a matter of the heart or the “fiducia” as “radical trust in God.”90 Therefore, hope is more dangerous; it is a high wire act, especially when that future is beyond our mortal bounds.
With respect to the paschal mystery, the hope I am discussing is not a secular version but the unique hope generated through the events of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is existential hope which has many parallels with the meaning described above in how it connects to the mystery, but its nature is very different from meaning. Its power lies in directly countering the suppressed and ever-present fear of death that Becker talks about and to do this it necessarily works at the same level, below the realm of our consciousness. This hope engages our mythic fear of dis-solution. In the crisis of death, a poverty of this resource is tangible and devastating. “Too often in our society, the fatally ill person has only one hope, the hope for a cure. When that hope becomes unrealistic, the patient has nothing left to ease the emotional pain of dying.”91 Cultural forms of hope in wealth, power and status (among others) lack a bridge to the transcendent and thus will always dead-end at the wall of mortality.
As a startling, and paradoxical, example of its non-rationality, Moltmann insists that this hope can only be obtained by giving up all hope in surrender to God’s power. “Since it is hope in the power of God who calls non-being into being, it recognizes the beginning in the end. Its way is not the capability of disappointment, but actual disappointment.”92
For a problem as insoluble and universal as death, only an answer that is commensurately powerful and inconceivable as resurrection will work, but before resurrection came the scandal of the cross, the crucifixion and death of Jesus.
To his sinful followers then and now, his death (looked at without evasions) is in the
first place appalling–the collapse of all the promises and all the hope. Looked at in the
light of our ordinary criteria, his death can only be seen as a dismal failure of power to
accomplish his purpose.93

Hellwig exposes the dangers in a superficial reading of the mystery. Nominal Christianity wants to leapfrog from the passion to resurrection without acknowledging the depth of scandal and loss of human-bound hope the cross represents. If we take the resurrection for granted (so easy because we know the rest of the story) it means we miss the inconceivable nature of any hope rising from the passion and death of Jesus Christ; an inconceivability suffered by the disciples until Easter. A formation that lacks the appreciation and experience of the difficult path demanded by the way of Jesus Christ will almost certainly mean taking the resurrection for granted. Thus, there will be a lack of appreciation for how impossible this hope is and the significance of resurrection as an unwarranted gift to us personally and universally.
Yet, when Jesus calls us to accept kenosis and we follow him in the way of his cross, our eyes become opened to, and our ears finally hear, what has really happened in the paschal mystery and the resurrection--against all logical expectations we are saved. God has made possible the impossible (Matt. 19:26). That God has freely chosen to do this accentuates this inconceivable hope.
The thought has been expressed that if Jesus loves the human community so much that
he radically surrenders himself to accomplish his purpose, then the love of God which
is expressed in his death is more compassionate than one might have dared to hope. . . .
In other words, traditional piety has looked at the death of Jesus, saying in effect that
God is other than we could ever have supposed God to be by reading off the
possibilities out of our own cumulative experience without Jesus.94

This is the kind of hope in Jesus Christ that Marty says people in homes for the aged and wards of the terminally ill are looking for; this is the hope that provides the spiritual and emotive lift to sustain them in their passage from this world into the next. This is truly food for the journey. We are the agents charged with alerting them that such a hope exists, but we can only do so if we ourselves have become aware of it and live it. We may resist such agency because the way of the cross is frightening to ourselves as a narrative of suffering, yet we have to trust the pattern has merit. As observed in a pastoral letter by the Oregon and Washington Bishops, “Still, the loss of all hope is a worse evil than physical suffering.”95 Thus existential hope, as with meaning in the face of death, is an exercise in communion.
Faith Community
Of these three themes, the deficit in community is the most problematic for American faith in general and the contemporary depreciation of fraternal support to the dying, outside of immediate friends and family, in particular. Most Christians can at least see through the glass darkly when it comes to the presence of both meaning and hope in the paschal mystery. However, our cultural inclination and training runs counter, and is therefore blind, to the Gospels lessons of community in the cross of Christ. Our country believes in individualism as May observes:
Americans cling to the myth of individualism as though it were the only normal way
to live, unaware that it was unknown in the Middle Ages (except for hermits) and
would have been considered psychotic in classical Greece. . . . Even in religion, which
is supposed to work for community, this individualism is shown in the revivalism that
swept the middle west and far west like a prairie fire in the middle of the nineteenth
century.96

It would also seem that the passion narrative is the antithesis of community since Jesus is abandoned by all his followers, denied by Peter, is surrounded by hostile groups and ends up on the cross between two strangers. John’s Gospel does have a friendly group briefly near the cross, but the other three make a point of his isolation by placing them at a “distance” or “afar”. I mentioned that most people I have met wish to die without pain and with someone who cares nearby. Yet, ironically, this is just what Jesus was denied in his last hours of life. To our modern minds, the way of the cross could lead to the dispersal of community.
So what can the passion narrative and the paschal mystery teach us about the community of faith connected with our death? There have been times in my ministry when I have heard complaints about God’s seeming indifference to a person’s suffering and death; usually this is presumed from the absence of miraculous cures or a prolonged dying rather than a quick death. Behind this idea seems to lie the assumption that although this death is an event of great significance in the human sphere, it is viewed casually or indifferently by an immortal being. I suspect that the case is exactly the opposite and our misconception begins with missing the communal significance of death in the pattern of Jesus Christ.
We have forgotten the sacred character death often held in human understanding and its communal function in relating to an awesome God. One such example is the central religious role of the sacrifice of live animals in the Jerusalem Temple--recast in the Christian appropriation of Christ’s death as the new and final sacrifice. Today, we most often talk and think in terms of death as something we own individually, as a private commodity with no direct connection to anyone else. Our society argues euthanasia, abortion and capital punishment as contentious issues of planning and legalities, but not of sacred and communal effects. We forget that the person dying in the hospital bed is, for the moment, closer to God than ourselves, the veil of separation is about to part ever so briefly and in their presence we stand on holy ground. Perhaps it is we, not God, who have reduced death to the ordinary. This modern paradigm of individualism, and the overvaluation of comfort, only heightens the suffering that we impose on someone’s death, “We Americans are always on the move to escape the anxiety of the human paradox and the anxiety of death. But the price for this evasion is a deep loneliness and a sense of isolation.”97
The pericope of Jesus’ anointing in Bethany provides a narrative example of this evasion that we should be able to relate to. The men in this group, despite the danger of a journey by this hunted man into Jerusalem at Passover, seem to be evading the possibility things will go wrong. They continue in the human-bound hope that this is still a journey of ascent and Jesus will eventually overturn the dominant powers. They miss the gravity and sacred nature of the moment, distracted by their own false comfort, so that they put their energies into an argument about finances. The woman, however, clearly sees the holy ground in the impending danger, understands that Jesus could, and probably will, die and addresses this with the appropriate response by tending to Jesus, “she has done what she could” (Mark 14:8). She connects with Jesus in a meaningful way of “good service” that salves the isolation Jesus must have been feeling at such a crucial moment.
We know that the way of Christ led to his death, but we do not seem to know it was not an individual exercise of divine purchase to obtain salvation for humanity--that is, beyond that purchase we assume there is no other connection to and through each of us. His death as model and endpoint of his way binds the individual destinies of all people powerfully and meaningfully together. Salvation is not an individual enterprise in the mind of Christ. “The willingness to die for mankind is an expression of universal solidarity. Jesus’ willingness to die for all men is therefore a service just as everything else in his life is a service, a service rendered to all men.”98 In the paschal mystery, there is no room for the mythology of the “left-behind”, a discretion of human fantasy rather than God’s making and a dangerous presumption; one to which Jesus’ reply when it arises is the need for service instead of presumption (Matt. 20:21-28, Mark 10:37-45).
Hellwig succinctly captures the lessons of service found in the life and death of Jesus.

What we learn in Jesus is that to be human is to appropriate reality in order to give,
to become in order to serve, to be so as to be for others, to live because the purpose of
life is beyond oneself and to die because human existence is oriented to communion.
What we experience in the death of Jesus is the power to realize the human.99

The essence of his self-giving directly challenges our society’s mythology of individualism and private destinies.
The death of Jesus reveals the peak of human perfection in the one whose self-
possession is sufficient to ground an unreserved gift of himself. In him the perfection of
human freedom is revealed not as utmost independence but as total transcendence of
self-seeking, bursting barriers to human community in such a radical way that universal
possibilities erupt from it.100

Perhaps most unexpected of all, by integrating these lessons wholly into our thinking and practice, by shifting our priorities from narcissistic goals to service of others in community, we address the very nature of our own deaths in the process.
No matter how inadequately one responds to the call for such continuous surrenders,
the on-going experience of them gives us some understanding of what it is to die.
Likewise, the transformed mode of being beyond each surrender or dying gives us the
analogy by which to understand what is meant by resurrection.101

Despite the apparent lack of community in the passion narrative, Jesus’ willingness to endure death is exactly an intentional, universal and timeless act of community. His experience is a clear indicator of God’s statement in the favor of humanity and on the sacred nature of each individuals’ death. God does not take death lightly, but uses it in Jesus Christ as the instrument for our redemption, “that being ‘of one substance with us according to his manhood’ he redeems and transforms our possibilities from within. This is the manner in which death may be said to ‘lose its sting.’”102 If we were only able to understand the sacred place of a person’s death, and its direct connection to our lives of faith in the way God does, we might not be so hesitant to place ourselves at the bedside of our dying companions.
Summary
This chapter has been an overview of the supportive and communal potential of the paschal mystery in regard to death and dying. It only scratches the surface of theological understanding within Christian tradition to show how powerful the passion and resurrection narrative can be in affirming that God is with us, even in the darkest and most terrifying moments of our lives. Other than the Jewish tradition, I can think of no other source that has this kind of perspective of the redemptive nature of dying and death. The appreciation of this theology can only come through a sober and direct confrontation with our mortality in the context of faith, but we do not have to move too soon to the resurrection for our solace as is often the temptation.
Sometimes Christians have not been completely honest with themselves about this [the
inability to know what comes after death]. The stark reality is too easily evaded by
saying “Jesus has been there and Jesus has been raised from the dead on the third day
and has returned to tell us about it.”103

Not only are the answers about what comes after death impossible to obtain, this futile striving is a subtle evasion of the way of Christ that can only lead to more frustration.
The paradox of losing our life in order to save it must be embraced as a kenotic surrender to God’s will and pattern. As terrible and terrifying as this sounds to our modern sensibilities, this act of ultimate trust leads to our salvation. As God has already displayed his solidarity with us in Jesus Christ, we can show our solidarity to each other on this difficult path by combining our limited forces and ideas in an intentional gathering, in a process of formation that brings these issues and fears into a safe and sacred space, the topic of the next chapter. The chopping-up of our lives can be intentionally re-integrated in this forum so that we are prepared for our final days and present to those who have suffered similar loss, “A community that is not afraid to gather around its dying and to be fully present to the bereaved, helping them to reconstitute their lives, is by that very fact building up the analogies by which the symbols of hope can be apprehended.”104
In true fashion of a paradox, by entering willingly and faithfully into the somber acceptance of death, we can live the remainder of our lives with more joy and less fear of the future, through the cross to the light.

CHAPTER 5. A PROPOSAL

Death is a significant part of the human condition; it is the ultimate existential problem for every human that has ever lived and in this our situation has not changed. Despite the centuries of progress in civilization and sciences, there is no cure for death. Its sting may have been removed in Christ, but death has not been banished. Also, despite its apparent power behind human motivation and fears, it is the issue that our society avoids most; especially within our consumer-driven culture that strives for gain, and to defeat loss (which includes aging) at all costs. There appears to be a marked disparity between the significance of this issue and the attention we afford it. In caricature language: Everybody will face (experience) death, but nobody will face (discuss) death.
What has radically changed for us, in addition to the other factors discussed earlier, is the level of psychic avoidance in our culture of advancing death. Joseph Sharp notes the irony of this avoidance in a nation dedicated to the idea of preparedness.
But ask someone if they’ve prepared for dying and most likely any response will be in
terms of wills, insurance, and burial plots. Ask if there has been any deeper preparation,
such as emotional work or serious spiritual seeking and, usually, we’ll be answered with
silence. As far as the history of humankind, this is a particularly recent occurrence.¹⁰⁵

Religion is uniquely suited to answer these issues and in fact this could be described as its main task. In the previous chapter I discussed how the paschal mystery holds the answer to the human need for meaning, hope and faith community in the face of dying. Utilizing the pattern of the way established by Jesus Christ, our faith tradition has been the principal voice in teaching these lessons to people, answering a vital pastoral need. But the manner in which this need has been addressed by the Church in the past appears to be no longer sufficient in our world due to the changing conditions. The Church needs to formulate an outreach that takes account of these new conditions and reach outward pro-actively since people are less likely to engage these issues on their own. “Today we, the children of Western culture, post-modern, adult children of the enlightenment, struggle with practical atheism.”¹⁰⁶
In some ways the voice of the Church has become muted while in others it is being drowned out. There are a number of fronts on which changes have occurred that dampens its influence. It may be that these changes have occurred so subtly or gradually--or we are choking on so much truth--that they have collectively happened without being noticed as a whole in their implications. It is in this way I see the Church’s heritage of pastoral ministry, especially to the sick and dying, as the analogy of a protective structure eroding under the forces of modernity. Some form of rebuilding and shoring up is needed so that people are not floundering and isolated when the storm of death arrives.
The problem of death could be the seed of great opportunity. Marcus Borg talks about “thin places” as metaphorical windows of opportunity for experiencing the presence of God in our everyday lives. “Thin places are places where the veil momentarily lifts, and we behold God, experience the one in whom we live, all around us and within us.”¹⁰⁷ These places are arguably becoming rarer for most people in twenty-first century United States with the increase of subliminal formation, the worldly distractions, the tyranny of efficiency that keeps them preoccupied, just to name a few blinders. The prevailing environment is one of oppressing thickness with only a few momentary thin places peeking through; the approach and event of death is one of these.
I suspect that the hunger for spirituality is deeper and more prevalent than we know and is an almost instinctual yearning for those rare thin places. I also suspect this yearning transcends boundaries of religion, culture, status and even nation; ironically so does the inevitability of personal death. In this way, death could truly be the door for many to experience a spiritual rebirth if the resources were available and active at the time of their need. Because of its universality, death may also provide an opportunity for better understanding and cooperation among religions, cultures and nations, a topic for another paper.
So the question becomes whether the Roman Catholic Church in the United States can do anything to respond to this particular form of poverty and redeem the opportunity that lies within pastoral ministry around death? Is there another format for the Church, outside of owning hospitals and providing direct medical care, to remain involved with the eschatological intent of Jesus’ healing ministry? This is the topic of this final chapter. I wish to consider an outreach that would counter the subliminal formation and reconnect persons with the meaning, hope and faith community they require to face death. The final forms of this initiative will depend upon the input of many faithful and informed members of the Church and community; what I offer here is a general outline of the elements as a suggestion. Again, because of the broad reach of death, its power, and the potential to evangelize and connect meaningfully with believers in that “thin place,” I believe this ministry can influence the shape, direction and relevancy of Christianity.
Anticipating the Inherent Unmarketability of the Way of Christ
Any sort of a formative program that has death and dying as its main topic will need to anticipate and prepare for some challenges. The first is regarding the logistics, since time and resources are already incredibly stretched in the Church today. In order for this ministry to really have a chance of results in the lives of people, it needs to be as far in advance of death as possible, so that the learning and behaviors can be integrated into a living praxis. Little can be effectively accomplished in waiting until the last few days and hours of someone’s life and trying to build the foundation in a clinical setting. Not only will the de-programming of popular idolatry and cultivation of “the way” take time, but the actual living out of this praxis needs time to take root. Monica Hellwig finishes her book by reflecting on the examples of our recent ancestors, our “grandmothers,” as models of a good death.
. . . .facing death with total trust in God, and making a total surrender of oneself to
God. . . . But to die like this, as Christian spirituality has long reminded us, is generally
given at the end of life to those who, in the sense of relativizing all to the call of charity,
have been dying for a long time during their lives.¹⁰⁸

This last quote provides an illustration of the problem of making the hard messages in our tradition intelligible to the modern sensibility, and mitigating the natural human impulses to avoid hardship and death. Most of our contemporaries would not understand the concept of dying for a length of one’s life to be a positive thing, even just as a metaphor. A program that teaches the value of kenosis and soulwork will be judged as odd and unpopular, especially by those suffering from the psychological modernism defined earlier by Moore. The paradox of losing one’s life to save it continues to be vexing to the human spirit.
The only persons who usually understand how this works are those who have suffered or lost significantly in their lives already or have undertaken the praxis intentionally. This is probably why Jesus was often in the company of the poor and outcast, because his message made sense in the context of their difficult experiences. This being said, I agree with Borg that we should be careful not to cast the work of dying to self as an unhealthy tearing down, “When thus understood, the message of the cross becomes an instrument of oppressive authority and self-abdication.”¹⁰⁹ There is no reason to reverse our current situation so that the emphasis is all soul and no spirit.
Recovery of the traditional sense of the way of Christ will also appear odd, or dysfunctional, to general society and threatening to some Christian groups. Dying as gain is an idea that necessarily challenges today’s standards of efficiency, positivism, religion-as-correctness and death-as-failure, among the legion of current ideals. A religion that begins to speak this now-unfamiliar language may appear threatening and dangerously out of touch. There may be social disapproval and pressure to avoid such activities and ideas. Rejuvenating the prophetic voice could also be viewed as threatening to structures of power and authority in our nation. The demythologizing of the false idols of consumerism and secular ideologies could have repercussions if they were to actually bring measurable changes in how a group of people structure their lives and made decisions.
These issues will need to be considered and addressed in the planning of a pastoral outreach on dying and death. The most problematic are figuring out the resources and the forms that such a program would take. The participants could be wide-ranging in ages, though I suspect it would appeal more to the elderly and infirm. They are the most ready to engage in conversations around the end of life and associated losses based on my experience in lay pastoral ministry. Everybody comes to terms with mortality in their own way and timing and this should be respected, not forced. However, there is value in creative encouragement for this process to begin as early as possible so that the baby steps of praxis are possible.
A Proposal for Death Ministry
The Catholic Church has had a long heritage of providing comfort to the dying, owing to its unique perspective of thanatos and its charge of service, of “doing to one of the least.” In recent history, Mother Theresa was admired for the compassionate care she began to provide in 1949 to the destitute of Calcutta, who would otherwise die forgotten and untended in the streets. She did not change their economic situation or their status in life. What she did was affirm their worth and dignity as contemporary representatives of Christ, giving them comfort and companionship in their last days. She was criticized for not trying to change their economic plight, an echo of the charge against the woman at Bethany, since she understood what these poor needed most as they faced their final journey.¹¹⁰ By comparison, many of the dying in our medical institutions, and even some at home, have financial and materials means (and options) that these Indian poor could only dream of, but they are much poorer in the means that Mother Theresa provided. It is difficult for our cultural bias to acknowledge this reality so I will repeat--many of our dying in these modern United States are poorer in meaning, hope and faith community than those in the Calcutta dying houses of the Missionaries of Charity. Unless this shortfall is addressed, this phenomena will only widen judging by current trends.
Our lives are full of empirical data as to the trouble we are in and there are many voices warning of this condition if were only to take notice and be able to stitch the signs together into a comprehensive message. Joseph Sharps warns, “In this time of changing millennia, our Western culture must discover and create practices to prepare for death and dying that are practical and workable in its uniquely modernized society.”¹¹¹ A plea for Church involvement was made in a letter by the Bishops of Oregon and Washington, two states wrestling with public initiatives to allow euthanasia and assisted-suicide. “We ask parishes to develop support groups for terminally ill patients and their families, to help persons find meaning in suffering and to educate the faithful about the issues surrounding death.”¹¹²
I believe that these practices have to begin early, before a person’s entry into a clinical setting, and in a format that encourages the creation and continuation of a living praxis of faith. We Catholics take the very first step in Baptism, but do not continue the necessary formative process thereon because we do not connect it in our understanding to the end of life. “Baptism consecrates us and consecration is a conscriptive rope that takes us to where we would rather not go, namely, into that suffering that produces maturity.”¹¹³ As long as we misunderstand or resist this path through the ordinary course of our lives, we are left trying to catch up at the end under untenable circumstances; our lamps are left foolishly empty of the oil that could otherwise provide us light and entry into the bridegroom’s house. If, however, we could begin start our “dying” process while in relatively good health, in calmer and less distracting environments, and with people of similar awareness and goals, the benefits when death finally does come could be substantial and healing.
This is work properly suited to a community and climate of religious faith. Today, there is an increasing movement away from communal practices of faith toward individual spirituality. Preparation for death is necessarily communal if Jesus is to believed as prophet and model for the way. He intentionally built community around him, preached about it, and prayed for it every step of his way. His strongest condemnation was for practices that corroded community. Rolheiser stresses that as persons of faith in Christ, we give flesh to the continuation of Jesus Christ and his message to each other in a way that isolated spirituality cannot. Rolheiser quotes Jerome Murphy-O’Connor as follows:
The community mediates Christ to the world. The word that he spoke is not heard in
our contemporary world unless it is proclaimed by the community. The power that
flowed forth from him in order to enable response is no longer effective unless
manifested by the community.¹¹⁴

As a process of discovery, emotive expression and support among peers, this forum should be more than a classroom for catechism or a series of lectures. It should be a collaborative gathering, though with some structure and intentional steps, that cultivates a formation of informed and supportive community among the members. The re-established Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA) comes to mind as a successful and rewarding structure of a process followed by a rite, or symbolic activity, that could be used as a general model. This could be conducted in the parish as a pastoral outreach program, open to whomever felt the need, and facilitated by a coordinator; although there might need to be some provision made for persons unable to travel out of their living spaces. These are just some rough outlines for the format to begin the conversation. What is more crucial are the components that should make up this program.
Elements of the Program
Cassell refers to our modern medical systems as “temples of the technical order” which are dedicated to the curing of patients, and “revered both by medicine and the public” in this role. They are an example of the beneficial advancements our society has over previous generations, but entailing a certain cost as well. In this instance, “a shift of death from within the moral order to the technical order.”¹¹⁵ What I propose is a responsive measure to this shift in a program that would be dedicated to the healing of persons in the temple of moral order, the Church. Pastoral ministry still needs to be present in the medical institutions, but there is a need for a formative model of preparation and healing of persons struggling with their issues of death and dying in the greater community. Healing is a process of re-integration of body, mind and spirit into a whole person that can be achieved through diverse activities, but in a time frame that is paced more by kairos than chronos. The following is a listing of the essential elements that such a model would incorporate.
A Gathering of Community - Telling Our Stories
We now know, from academic studies of the Bible, that for thirty to fifty years prior to the written text of the Gospels, there was a vibrant oral tradition in which people shared their compelling experiences of faith and the stories of the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We can only imagine the range of emotions and fervor that the eyewitnesses of these events experienced in the telling, or what the hearing was like for the community, but evidence of the power can be seen in the conversions and spread of Christianity. In these early years, the very core of this message was a hard one, the passion narrative--suffering and death. The resurrection was celebrated too, but the complex intellectual structure around the resurrection we know today was yet to be developed. Even twenty years after Christ’s death, St. Paul proclaims “Christ crucified.” At this point in Christian history, stories of Jesus Christ linked his resurrection inextricably with his suffering and death.
There is power in the telling of stories, a power calling for discretion, “Death and life are in the power of the tongue” (Prov. 18:21). The oral tradition of early Christianity teaches us that even if the stories are emotional and painful, their expression to another who cares can liberating and hopeful. Studs Terkel wrote a remarkable text Will the Circle Be Unbroken?, collecting the stories of people on their experiences or thoughts around death. In one, an elderly Hispanic woman relates the difficulty of finding anyone willing to discuss her end-of-life issues, saying:
I find that the majority of people don’t want to discuss death. I tried to speak to my
family about what I want done when I die. I can’t find anybody that wants to talk to
me about it. I had to talk to my son-in-law. . .(Laughs) It’s like it’s never going to
happen. It’s like they’re ostriches with their heads in the sand.¹¹⁶

This process should create a forum that gathers believers together over some span of time to discuss their issues and feelings about their own mortality, to vent their fears and grievances within a safe container of supportive community. It is important that this sharing comes out of their own experience and allows the expression of emotion, so that the communication is direct and authentic, which creates the possibility for emotional connection and bonding. The experiences of the past and present can be creatively tied to the narrative examples in our own Christian tradition, so that the Gospel messages become relevant and alive in their personal context. “When one considers what to say to the dying, the important factor is really not the way the symbols are explained in words. The really important factor is in the analogies in life experiences by which the dying person can apprehend the images of faith and hope.”¹¹⁷
Exercises of Imagination and Emotion
In an age and culture that stresses rationality and literal thinking, which has bled over into religion, a counter response of exercising the imaginative and emotive powers in the context of faith and mortality is helpful. Imagining the future from the perspective of faith is important for nurturing existential hope. Shifting the experience of faith from the intellectual (believing God) to the emotive (beloving God) can only come through an engagement and practice of the emotions. Thus, while the sharing of stories honors the past and present, the imagination unlocks the promise of the future. The emotive dynamic creates ownership in all of this work; true feelings cannot be hypothetical or detached.
Kubler-Ross advocated this kind of engagement in her landmark text as a way of defusing the destructive power from denying death. “If all of us would make an all-out effort to contemplate our own death, to deal with our anxieties surrounding the concept of our death, and to help others familiarize themselves with these thoughts, perhaps there could be less destructiveness around us.”¹¹⁸
Within the Catholic tradition, the material written by Father Anthony de Mello, especially his book Wellsprings, comes to mind as a collection of exercises that could be used in a gathering to imaginatively process and anticipate the eventuality of death. In his opening notes for the text, he connects the purpose of the exercises to engage different levels of human awareness, ending in a contemplative pose, “This book is meant to lead from mind to sense, from thought to fantasy and feeling-then, I hope, through feeling, fantasy, and sense to silence.”¹¹⁹
Everybody is different in how they process the concept of their lives’ end and a range of emotions should be expected, including anticipatory grief. Kubler-Ross described a general format of five emotional stages that people can move through when they are dying and some of these may be expressed in some degree, even though there may not be a reality of imminent death for an individual. The discussion of this theory could be helpful so that people can understand their experiences and vocalize them if need be.
Later in the process, after the stronger emotions have run their course, an intentional cultivation of gratitude, encouraging people to name and honor the good things that have made up their lives, is a potent tool for facing one’s mortality. “A grateful person is a powerful person, for gratitude generates power. All abundance is based on being grateful for what we have.”¹²⁰ The obvious objects of gratitude could be God, or significant persons, but it also could be directed to one’s self as a form of recognition and a redemptive claiming of power. It is not uncommon for pious individuals to play down, or deliberately ignore, their assets which they see as a form of humility required by religion. However, the recognition of things they have done well, or talents, is important in claiming and affirming personal dignity and emphasizing their status of being blessed, and loved, by God. The first exercise, “The Conclusion,” in de Mello’s book is a wonderful model for fostering gratitude.¹²¹
Catechesis and Instruction
Because of the increasing complexity in our healthcare and social systems with regard to dying and the deficiency of instruction on “individual eschatology” (as per Hellwig), there is a need for catechesis and instruction on things pertaining to death and dying. The temptation to make this information the predominant portion of the program must be resisted, especially since there is so much available. Some of this could be handled by providing referrals or suggestions of further study. Even so, informing people on what to anticipate in the medical, legal and administrative issues with respect to death and dying can reduce anxiety and prepare them for making decisions. I will not attempt to list out these topics here because there are so many potential candidates and there are many informed sources advising on the pragmatic choices.
Part of this education could be teaching, and encouraging, people to read their Bible, both in forms of study and of prayer. The assumption that our contemporaries already do this reading, or know how to, can no longer be taken for granted.
When the set of “The Great Books of the Western World” was first published in 1952,
some critics objected to the absence of the Bible, which, they said, certainly deserved to
be regarded, by any criterion, as a “great book.” The reply was that everyone could be
expected to own a Bible already. Today that seems much less likely to be true, even for
otherwise quite literate people.¹²²

Not only might they either not own or never access the Scriptures, the way our world understands these writings has significantly changed. “In Christian history, the more-than-literal meaning of biblical texts has always been most important. Only in the last few decades has their literal factuality been emphasized as crucial.”¹²³
The ability to read the Bible and appreciate its more-than-literal sense would seem to be important for comprehending how the Good News is found in the paschal mystery, but our pejorative understanding of myth works against us. “Without myth we are like a race of brain-injured people unable to go beyond the word and hear the person who is speaking.”¹²⁴ Again, an activity of Bible study itself could be handled as a spin-off, but a discussion of the way the Scriptures work and a judicious selection of material pertaining to death and dying, such as those discussed in the previous chapter, could be helpful. The advantage here is having the fruits of so much good academic biblical study in recent decades (unbeknownst to most Catholics) that can now be utilized.
A discussion around the sacrament of anointing, the conceptual and theological evolution from the Tridentine form to the current understanding, would be important since this is the most immediate catechetical issue for most families when death arrives and, surprisingly, not widely understood.
In 1993, the Catholic Health Association created a notebook of study materials entitled Caring For Persons at the End of Life.¹²⁵ This guide was divided into four modules for different levels of personnel in Catholic hospitals, providing guidance specifically in response to the trends in assisted-suicide and euthanasia. Each of its four modules begin by reflecting on personal experiences, followed by guided learning on selected facts and statistics around contemporary death and dying. As a general model, this kind of a study guide might be useful in organizing and presenting the factual material collected for this program, though the selection among the abundance of topics and materials could be daunting. The prime objectives and boundaries of such a guide would have to be clear.
Ritual
In the same way that the RCIA completes a process of learning with a ritual activity, there are a number of reasons for, and options of, rituals in a ministry around death and dying. For example, a blessing that hearkens to the woman anointing Jesus in the house of Simon at Bethany could be the Church’s way of preparing persons, and showing support, to “prepare them for burial.” This anointing would be for anyone doing the emotional and faithful work of anticipating their mortality, even while in good health, and does not have to be equated with the sacrament of anointing for those who are ill.
Activities that express the symbolic are important for any mythology. “Rituals are physical expressions of the myths, as in holidays and the sacraments of religion. . . . Rituals and myths supply fixed points in a world of bewildering change and disappointment.”¹²⁶ Rituals are a necessary avenue to involve the senses and body movement along with the intellectual work of comprehending the mythology. They communicate at levels different from those we normally use and speak to us about the possibilities beyond our limited and rational awareness. They also are a method for building and affirming the communal nature of faith.
Another story from Terkel’s book illustrates this symbolic power, even in the case of an impromptu observance of ritual. A paramedic in Chicago, someone not inclined to participating in any religion, tells this story:
In the African-American community on the West Side [of Chicago] they made a
prayer circle around the ambulance as we’re doing CPR in the back. I looked out, all
of a sudden they’re circling the ambulance, holding hands and praying. The neighbors
heard about it, they came out of the church. I was struck by it. I almost didn’t want to
leave.¹²⁷

A number of potential rituals come to mind. Even though it may be culturally driven, the distribution of ashes on Ash Wednesday are well-attended services in this area, even better attended than other services throughout Lent and Holy Week. There is something about feeling the ashes placed on the forehead and the visibility of this mark. This may be an indication of the need for people to participate in something that symbolically marks them for death in the hopeful promise of faith. The Tenebrae service, with its use of stark lighting and simplicity to remind of the passion and death of Jesus Christ could be another model reaching into the sober anticipation of death, but also connecting to Christ’s death in symbolic solidarity.
Even though it exists in other Christian Churches, there is a rite called “Communion for the Dying” that is reserved for persons who are diagnosed with a terminal condition. An example of this ritual being used as a healing integrative process involving family and community is described in an article by O. Duane Weeks in an online newsletter. Weeks provides the descriptive context that explains how this activity allows for the honoring of the intended person, but also for the difficult passages that life contains, and he reports an interesting short term recovery that speaks to the healing power by performing this recognition.¹²⁸
Reconciliation
It is not uncommon to find dying persons still holding grievances with friends, family or events of their life. This emotional turmoil is a difficult obstacle, especially as it can become mixed up with the anger that naturally results from having to endure a life-threatening illness, as one of the stages Kubler-Ross identified. So it would be vital in a program designed for healing to address these grievances before this stage is ever reached. Not only would this be a gift to the person, but to their friends and family as well. “Often the mourner longs not only for the accustomed communion with the one now dead, but also for the opportunity to redress a wrong, complete a service, or fulfill or redeem the relationship.”¹²⁹
In one of his exercises, Father de Mello says, “One way of living in the past is holding on to grievances.”¹³⁰ Preparing oneself for the future requires letting go of the past, to remove its distracting influence so that the future can be faced squarely. Reconciliation can also liberate a person’s ability to experience gratitude, to claim the past gratefully rather than wishing it had been something other than it was. This does not mean that a person has to deny or condone an injury, but to make a conscious decision not to let it hold them back any longer. This is another context in which a passage through grieving and anger may have to occur first, to honor and release the grievance.
Reconciliation is a motion of healing by finding peace with ourselves and our God. We pray for forgiveness of our sins in the Lord’s Prayer as we forgive others. So we know that this is a threshold that we must cross if we expect forgiveness from our God when we die. Reconciliation is an existential and spiritual tying up of loose ends. People motivated by their awareness of impending death are likely ready to address this before it is too late.
Prayer, Contemplation and Retreat
Prayer is always a helpful activity, but especially in this process of healing and preparation for death. Jesus went to the garden for prayer as his last act before arrest. Contemplation is different in that it is a silent prayer that allows God the space to pray in the person. It is an intentional quieting of the mind and emotions, to pray at a level we do not often use as described by Rolheiser in The Shattered Lantern.¹³¹ A retreat allows the group to escape the cultural white noise that tends to mask or dilute the soulful work necessary for integration of learning and experiences. Retreats must be encouraged so that, even if for a short while, the soul has room to breathe unhindered and away from the usual distractions of life.
These three elements act as reminders that God is an active member in this program and in each person’s life, something that is so easily forgotten in our busy world. Healing best occurs if these are incorporated into a living praxis, to quiet some of the distracting voices and nurture a trust in God. Or as Rolheiser says, “We need some therapy. We need to do some contemplative exercises if we are to regain a vital sense of God.”¹³²
Conclusion
Hellwig notes that the crucial test for the understanding of an individual eschatology is in the way it makes it possible for one to confront their own death. However, she says believers face a quandary here--that the Church teaches the certainty of existential hope in Christ, but the content of the promises are in “figurative imagery” only, an especially difficult hurdle for citizens of the post-Enlightenment era.
The hope is important, but the content of the hope cannot be systematically deciphered-
this is what the Church teaching appears in the last analysis to say. In terms of
confronting one’s own death, this means that a Christian death must ultimately be an act
of utter trust and self-surrender.¹³³

This eschatological punch-line is a lot to swallow in the last few moments of one’s life, not a bite-sized piece of comprehension that Becker says we are used to digesting. It is really too much to expect people to take this in without some preparation and is probably too much even to digest fully in the limited span of a program around dying and death.
This is why I say that the Church must begin preparing the ground ahead of time, by reintroducing the kenotic quality of Christian faith in preaching and ritual. Believers have to hear again the truly traditional message of the paschal mystery and the value of soulwork as the way. They need to know that loss and death occur in their lives not as punishment by God or because of their failure to act correctly, but as part of the mystery that can bring about redemptive rebirth. There must be a public voice to the concept that ego-defeat is okay and is consistent with the message and pattern of Jesus Christ, as scandalous as that may sound outside the context of Christian faith. In one of his earlier works, Pope Benedict XVI affirmed this very thing.
While faith does not deliberately seek out suffering, it knows that without the Passion
life does not discover its own wholeness, but closes the door on its own potential
plenitude. If life at its highest demands the Passion, then faith must reject apatheia, the
attempt to avoid suffering, as contrary to human nature.¹³⁴

The analogies that Hellwig talks about can only come about empirically, through the practice of soulwork, and the experience of taking up the cross daily within the evangelical container of faith.
Obtaining the mind of Christ, or of St. Paul, cannot be reduced to an intellectual exercise, but requires walking a similar path by analogy, a path that is advisedly narrow and with a passage through the wilderness. A commitment to walk this, however, has Christ’s assurance that it leads to salvation and that the very act of walking it will gradually reveal its purpose. At his retreats, Rohr likes to say, “We do not think ourselves into new ways of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking.”¹³⁵ The difficulty of this charge to follow the way of Christ can be assuaged through the resources of meaning, hope and faith community, but it can never be completely defeated. There must be the ultimate surrender to trust in God.
There have been a number of occasions in my ministry when I have tried to connect dying persons with that sort of trust, to assure them that they are not abandoned nor being punished by God with affliction and death. This can be problematic depending upon their understanding of faith and God, and complicated by their family’s denial or fears. Usually they are most grateful for the freedom to talk openly and for an agenda-less sharing in the Scriptures or prayer by a representative of Church. I cannot help but feel that this activity would be more fruitful, and a wider spread, if persons had some form of preparation both in the teaching by their Church and through a program on dying and death.
I admit I have never seen a program like this and cannot vouch for its efficacy or success. The initial catalyst for wanting to do this study comes out of my experiences from pastoral ministry in healthcare settings, primarily hospitals. As pertains to the Roman Catholic Church, which I know best, official pastoral intervention prior to death is usually in the form of administration of sacramental anointing in the last few hours of a patient’s life and usually when that person is in a critical state and no longer conscious. Often the family who only recently finally heard--or perhaps more accurately finally understood--the critical and imminent condition of their loved one, makes an urgent request for “last rites.” Their use of the terms extreme unction or last rites hints at ignorance of the current practices of the Church and many times they have no real connection with any parish. Another difficulty is if a priest is not able to arrive before the patient dies (and after going through the anxiety of the death process) the family can be feeling guilt or regret added to the usual feeling of loss.
Many times I have asked myself, “How could this be different?” The question comes not only out of professional capacity, or personal self-interest (for myself and my loved ones), but also out of empathy for those persons I see struggling to find meaning and reassurance in such an emotionally-charged, grief and confusion-filled situation. In this I hear an echo of Martha’s cry, “Lord if you only had been here . . .” My hope is that with a general reclamation and preaching by the Church about the need for soulwork, and with a program such as this in place, we will find the Lord by our side at these critical last moments.

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1 “And here we are in the closing decades of the 20^th century, choking on truth.” Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: The Free Press, 1973), x.
4

2 Monica K. Hellwig, What Are They Saying about Death and Christian Hope? (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 1.

3 Rollo May, The Cry For Myth (New York: Dell, 1991), 29.

4 All scriptural passages are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.

5 Martin E. Marty, The Public Church (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 169.

6 Albert Nolan, Jesus Before Christianity (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1978), 112.

7 Ibid., 139.

8 Though the figures vary between Census Bureau, academic studies and polls, roughly only 15% of Americans self-identify as having no religion.

9 Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God (New York: Crossroad, 2001), 25.

10 Ibid., 18.

11 May, 23.

12 Marcus J. Borg, The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003), 41.

13 Becker, Denial of Death, 11.

14 Ernest Becker, Escape From Evil (New York: The Free Press, 1975), 119.

15 Becker, Denial of Death, 23.

16 Cited in Daniel C. Maguire, Death by Choice (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1974), 1.

17 As we will see later, the Gospel of Mark’s original ending, after the death of Jesus, was only a brief statement of his resurrection.

18 Becker, Denial of Death, 23.

19 M. Scott Peck, Denial of the Soul: Spiritual and Medical Perspectives on Euthanasia and Mortality (New York: Harmony Books, 1997), 108.

20 Ibid., 109.

21 The Catholic Catechism, while clear in distinguishing that each person has a body and soul, also allows for presence of a spirit. “Sometimes the soul is distinguished from the spirit: St. Paul for instance prays that God may sanctify his people ‘wholly,’ with ‘spirit and soul and body’ . . . The Church teaches that this distinction does not introduce a duality into the soul.” Article 367 in Catechism of the Catholic Church (New Hope, Kentucky: Urbi et Orbi Communications,1994), 93.

22 Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), xi.

23 Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality (New York: Doubleday, 1999), 25.

24 Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The Cost of Discipleship (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 89.

25 George A. Maloney, Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh: An Introduction to Eastern Christian Spirituality (New York: Crossroad, 1997), 93.

26 Becker, Denial of Death, 259.

27 Moore, xi.

28 Hellwig, 12-13.

29 I assume Moltmann uses the word “Church” referring to the entire Christian body. Jurgen Moltmann, “Hope without Faith: An Eschatological Humanism without God,” trans. John Cummings, in Is God Dead?, ed. Johannes Metz, vol. 16, Concilium: Theology in the Age of Renewal (New York: Paulist Press, 1966), 40.

30 Becker, Denial of Death, 7.

31 “Small” here is not meant in a pejorative sense as per Father Rohr. Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer (New York: Crossroad, 1999), 107.

32 Maloney, 92.

33 Maloney, 97.

34 Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead: Diaries and Letters (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 214.

35 Rohr, 102.

36 Lewis Thomas, “The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher,” cited in The Last Dance: Encountering Death and Dying, by Lynne Ann Despelder and Albert Lee Strickland (Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield, 1983), 22.

40

37 Rolheiser, Shattered Lantern, 40-41.

38 Joan Neet George, “Grandmother When Your Child Died,” in The Last Dance, 17.

39 National Center for Health Statistics, “Life Expectancy Hits Record High,” 28 Feb. 2006, online; available from http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/05facts/lifeexpectancy.htm; accessed 10 Mar. 2006.

40 Michael A. Simpson, The Facts of Death: A Complete Guide for Being Prepared (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1979), 9-10.

41 Janet Kornblum, “Crisis in Elder Care Foreseen,” USA Today, online; available from http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2005-12-11-eldercare-aging_x.htm; accessed 10 Mar. 2006.

42 The Catholic Health Association, Division of Theology, Mission, and Ethics, Caring For Persons at the End of Life: A Facilitator’s Guide to Educational Modules for Healthcare Leaders (St. Louis: The Catholic Health Association, 1993), 26.

43 Simpson, 17.

44 Frank Hobbs and Nicole Stoops, U.S. Census Bureau, Census 2000 Special Reports, Series CENSR-4, “Demographic Trends in the 20^th Century” (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2002), online; available from http://www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/censr-4.pdf;
accessed 10 Mar. 2006.

45 David B. Caruso, “Manhattan No. 1 for Nation’s Singles,” Albuquerque Journal, 3 Sept. 2005, section B, page 8.

46 Eric J. Cassell, “Being and Becoming Dead,” in Death in American Experience, ed. Arien Mack (New York: Schocken Books, 1973), 170.

47 Ibid., 175.

48 Peck, 230.

49 Cassell, “Being and Becoming Dead,” 162.

50 Ibid., 173.

51 Ibid., 163.

52 Marwan S. Abouljoud and Marlon F. Levy, “Principles of Brain Death Diagnosis,” in Vademecum: Organ Procurement and Preservation, ed. Goran B. Klintmalm and Marlon F. Levy (Austin, Texas: Landes Bioscience, 1999), 1-3.

53 A good perspective by Rebecca Dresser (lawyer) can be found in the May/June 2005 issue of the Hastings Center Report.

54 The Catholic Health Association, 26-27.

55 Daniel Berrigan, We Die Before We Live: Talking With the Very Ill (New York: Seabury Press, 1980), 2-3.

56 Ibid., 4.

57 Raymond Brown, An Introduction to New Testament Christology (New York: Paulist Press, 1994), 62.

58 Hector Avalos, Health Care and the Rise of Christianity (Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson, 1999), 114.

59 Ibid., 3.

60 For a more complete perspective, see Ministry and Meaning: A Religious History of Catholic Health Care in the United States by Christopher J. Kauffman (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1995).

61 Brown, An Introduction to New Testament Christology, 64.

62 Ibid., 65.

63 Marty, 26.

64 Ibid., 28.

65 Ibid., 5.

66 This was written in 1992, before the updated fourth version of The Diagnostic and Standard Manual (DSM-IV) was available.

67 Moore, 206.

68 Becker, Denial of Death, 190.

69 Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy, and Their Own Families (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 29.

70 Rolheiser, Shattered Lantern, 18.

71 May, 15.

72 Ibid., 30-31.

73 Rolheiser, Shattered Lantern, 31.

74 May, 112.

75 Moore, 204.

76 Rolheiser, Holy Longing, 113.

77 Hellwig, 12-13.

78 Rolheiser, Holy Longing, 46-47.

79 Rohr, 11.
68

80 Borg, 108.

81 “ . . . from every point of view the passion is the central narrative in the Christian story.” Raymond Brown in the Preface to The Death of the Messiah (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 1:vii.

82 Hellwig, 48.

83 “A central theme of Mark’s gospel is ‘the way’.” Marcus Borg in The Heart of Christianity, 108.

84 Borg, 111.

85 Rohr, 107.

86 Borg, 109.

87 Peck, 176.

88 Nolan, 113.

89 Rohr, 106.

90 Borg, 31.

91 Linda Jacobs Altman, Death : An Introduction to Medical-Ethical Dilemmas (Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow Publishers, 2000), 22.

92 Moltmann, 34.

93 Hellwig, 44.

94 Ibid., 45.

95 Oregon and Washington Bishops, “Living and Dying Well,” included in Appendix of The Catholic Health Association’s Caring For Persons at the End of Life: A Facilitator’s Guide to Educational Modules for Healthcare Leaders. [Letter originally published in Origins 21, no. 22 (7 Nov. 1991), 347-352.]

96 May, 109-10.

97 Ibid., 106.

98 Nolan, 114.

99 Hellwig, 46.

100 Ibid., 45.

101 Ibid., 52.

102 Ibid., 47.

103 Ibid., 7.

104 Ibid., 82.

105 Joseph Sharp, Living Our Dying: A Way to the Sacred in Everyday Life (New York: Hyperion, 1996), 27.
86

106 Rolheiser, Shattered Lantern, 203.

107 Borg, 156.

108 Hellwig, 90.

109 Borg, 112.

110 For a brief history on Mother Theresa, and the criticism, refer to the online source at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Theresa.

111 Sharp, 28.

112 Oregon and Washington Bishops, 352.

113 Rolheiser, Holy Longing, 122.

114 Ibid., 80.

115 Eric J. Cassell, “Dying in a Technological Society,” in Death and Dying: Challenge and Change, ed. Robert Fulton, Eric Markusen, Greg Own, Jane L. Scheiber (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1978), 126.

116 Studs Terkel, Will the Circle Be Unbroken? (New York: The New Press, 2001), 118.

117 Hellwig, 82.

118 Kubler-Ross, Death and Dying, 27.

119 Anthony de Mello, Wellsprings: A Book of Spiritual Exercises (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1985), 12.

120 Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler, Life Lessons (New York: Scribner, 2000), 103.

121 de Mello, 14-15.

122 Jaroslav Pelikan, On Searching the Scriptures-Your Own or Someone Else’s: A Reader’s Guide to Sacred Writings and Methods of Studying Them (New York: Book-Of-The-Month Club, 1992.), vii.

123 Borg, 56.

124 May, 23.

125 Full reference on page 44.

126 May, 50-51.

127 Terkel, 44.

128 O. Duane Weeks, “A Pre-Death Ritual for Mable,” in The Forum (ADEC, Oct., Nov., Dec. 2005) online; available at http://www.adec.org/pdf/Forum_Oct_05.pdf; accessed 12 Mar. 2006.

129 Hellwig, 83.

130 de Mello, 107.

131 Rolheiser, Shattered Lantern, 196-200.

132 Ibid., 203.

133 Hellwig, 87.

134 Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, ed. Aidan Nichols, O.P., trans. Michael Waldstein (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1988), 101.

135 Rohr, 20.