A university friend died suddenly. Simon had sent me off in the direction of writing and performing, because I sang my poems to his guitar playing. I thanked him as I scattered soil on his casket. His face smiles from his Facebook page, but he has left behind a wife with three young daughters.
His was a humanist funeral, which the celebrant said was for those with no strong religious belief. The celebrant also said a person’s death was the last event of a person’s life, which it seems to me is a belief a lot stronger than many religious ones.
I intuitively regard true life as eternal.
Meeting two friends in Whitby last week, we walked some of the Cleveland way along the cliff tops next to the North Sea. Before going our separate ways, we prayed that as we left one anothers’ physical sight, we would not leave one another’s spiritual sight, and they seemed to stay with me while I travelled through train stations hundreds of miles away. How much more is this the case with those who have gone beyond nature.
Our proverb: “Out of sight out of mind”, does not take into account the mind of God, a spiritual sight.
In John’s gospel, after Jesus leaves his disciples physically, the writer stresses his spiritual presence: “If you loved me,” Jesus says: “you would rejoice that I am going to the Father, because the Father is greater than I … the Holy Spirit will remind you of all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you: I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”
The pain of a disciples loss is raw, but Jesus adds this qualification: “I do NOT give to you as the world gives.”
The world gives pain and trouble. Even today the world defines peace as merely a temporary cessation of open hostility, with tension and trouble still expressed or repressed. But true peace flows out from how we define who we are. Creations of God have an eternal nature, which is God.
Pain is real and we miss those we love, but true Love involves letting people be where they are. We will be there soon enough. Some say “Who is Jesus?” is the most important question in the world, but I disagree. “Who am I?” is the really dangerous question.
When the fourteenth century Christian Priest and mystic Meister Eckhart preached that “God and I are One”, he was brought before Pope John XXII and forced to recant. When the tenth century Islamic mystic Al Hallaj used language that claimed an identity with God, he was crucified.
Heresy got Jesus nailed to a cross. Claiming to be God today might not get you that, but it could possibly get you sectioned under the mental health act.
Mystics, however, are not psychotic, because when they say; “I am God”, they are not talking about their individual person, but their truest self.
Roman Catholic Thomas Merton put it clearly like this: “If I penetrate to the depths of my own existence and my own present reality, the indefinable am that is myself in its deepest roots, then through this deep centre I pass into the infinite I am, which is the very name of the Almighty.”
I am is one of the Hebrew names of God, the fullest background consciousness, the true light, the spiritual reality which makes hearts still, unafraid and untroubled.
But it cannot be grasped or defended, which is precisely why Jesus says it is a peace which the world cannot give. We identify with the presence beyond all our death.
St Augustine said: “People travel to wonder at the height of the mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering … [but] God is closer to you than you are to yourself."
Jesus’ physical presence left his disciples, but it wasn't the whole picture, just as it isn't the whole picture when our loved ones leave us physically. One day we will be changed too. “I am going away, and I am coming to you … I have told you this before it occurs,” says Jesus, “so that when it does, you may believe.”
There is a funeral prayer by the Quaker William Penn: “We give them back to thee, dear Lord, who gavest them to us. Yet thou didst not lose them in giving, so we have not lost them by their return. What thou gavest thou takest not away, O Lover of souls; for what is thine is ours also, if we are thine.”
So death is not the last event, it is merely the opposite of birth.
We miss them in time, but Life is outside time, it is eternal.
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