A CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY

May 2016

I find myself keep coming back to a question that my body posed to my mind during the conversations we shared after the operation for bowel cancer and before we decided whether or not to proceed with chemotherapy [see ‘Listening and Deciding’]. My body asked: “Why am I doing this to myself?” i.e. ‘why is a part of my body, the cancer, seeking to damage the body itself, and possibly bring about its death?’ It’s as if my body was at war with itself. Why?

One answer is that I don’t know, and I doubt anybody does. But I’m aware that my body is not alone in behaving thus: my mind often chooses a course of action that it knows is unwise, so does my heart and even my soul. I seem to possess this self-destructive capacity within me. And again, I wonder why?

Another answer is that our bodies seem created to decay, run down, cease to function. It is simply the reality of the matter that our bodies die. Death may be internally caused, as with cancer, or externally, as with an accident, but it will inevitably come. And this is true of all of creation: all things come to an end, everything has its ‘sell by’ date. Why?

I’m reminded of the hymn ‘Abide with me’ and its line; “Change and decay in all around I see,” written by a man dying of tuberculosis as he watched the glories of the setting sun.

We are each of us going to die one day, and we find the notion difficult to take, sufficiently so that we spend a good deal of our lives ignoring its reality. And again, I wonder why? Is there something within us that rebels against the finiteness of everything, and especially of oneself? It might simply be an unwillingness, or an inability to accept that ‘I’ will one day cease to exist. But I’ve come to suspect that its something other than that.

Do we have a sense, a memory, of something eternal?  Is there something in us that rebels against the finiteness of everything? I wonder if people accepted this more readily in the past, because there was little they could do to prevent it.  So they sought help from beyond themselves. Nowadays, we assume that death is something that we ought to be able to put off, & to some extent we can.  In the past it seemed more natural to trust in something greater than oneself. Today our blooming self confidence means that we think we ought to be able to defeat death.  So far we havent. We can delay it but not prevent it.

Suppose that death is part of the plan, rather than a sign of the failure of the plan? Perhaps death is a gift?  What would life be like if this was not so?  Everybody living for ever! There would be constant wars, as there would not be enough resources for an infinite number of people.. People would never grow up as there would always be the elders there.  Life might seem meaningless if it were to go on forever.  But our life experience teaches us over & over again, to learn to let go and embrace the new, the unknown. This is the way we grow.  Is a life full of little deaths preparing us for something?