Life's Key Question

LIFE'S KEY QUESTION

The heaviness of such a question is enough to intimidate a person with a spirituality deeper than my own, and when it’s asked by someone twice your age whose heart seems already deeply charitable, faith-filled, and wonderfully-mellowed through years of quiet prayer, then perhaps the best answer is silence. I wasn’t so naive as to offer him much by way of an answer, his trust in me notwithstanding.

How do we prepare to die? How do we live so that death does not catch us unaware?

The first thing that needs to be said is that anything we do to prepare for death should not be morbid or be something that distances or separates us from life and each other. We don’t prepare for death by withdrawing from life. The opposite is true. What prepares us for death, anoints us for it, in Christ’s phrase, is a deeper, more intimate, fuller entry into life. We get ready for death by beginning to live our lives as we should have been living them all along.

How do we do that?

We prepare ourselves for death by loving deeply and by expressing love, appreciation, and gratitude to each other. Jesus says as much. When the woman at Bethany poured an entire bottle of expensive ointment on his feet and dried his feet with her hair, he commented on her lavish expression of affection and gratitude by saying: “She has anointed me for my impending death.” What he meant should not be piously misinterpreted. He wasn’t saying: “Since I’m soon to die, let her waste this ointment!” He was saying rather: “When I come to die, it’s going to be easier because, at this moment, I am truly tasting life. It’s easier to die when one has been, even for a moment, fully alive.”

Had that old monk cornered Jesus and asked him the same question he asked me, I suspect, Jesus might have said: Prepare for death by living more fully now.

Work at loving more deeply, less discriminately, more affectionately, and more gratefully. Tell those close to you that you love them, and death will never catch you like a thief in the night.”

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