A CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY

August 2016

A recent brush with cancer, that may not yet be over, together with the deaths of family members, and my own advancing years, have led me to consider my own mortality and to think again about what I believe lies beyond death, if indeed anything does.  I take this to be a healthy exercise and am grateful that life has encouraged me to mull on it.  The more so, as it’s the big taboo subject in our materialistic society: it’s the conversation nobody wants to have and all seem keen to avoid.  So far, my mullings have been encouraging, my trust in God has been deepened, and without in any way desirous of death, I find myself increasingly confident that death is not the end, and there is a part of me that is curious about it will be like.  What has nourished my confidence?

Observing the natural world, of which I am a part, I notice that nothing ever disappears, but over time everything changes into something else, and is transformed. There is a constant process of recycling: of birth, growth, maturity, decline, death, and decay which in turn leads to new birth.  This appears to be true of everything.  Why should we be different? 

Moreover, this pattern replays itself constantly throughout our lives. We grow and then we have to let go and move on to more growth and yet more letting go.  We grow in our mothers’ womb, but we have to leave that place of apparent security where everything we need is supplied, to be born into the world. We have to leave home for school; we leave one school for another; we leave education to begin work, we leave home to create a new home of our own; in time we leave work and retire. We continue with this process of growth followed by loss, followed by a fresh opportunity for growth, throughout our lives. Life is a constant process of growth through letting go of what has become familiar. You might argue that life is designed for us to learn to do this gracefully and hopefully.  The opportunities for transformation come thick and fast, we often don’t welcome them, indeed, we are sometimes dragged kicking and screaming into them, but what looks unfamiliar and frightening frequently turns out to be full of gift and new possibilities.  Hopefully as our lives draw to an end we will have become accustomed to this pattern, and learnt to appreciate it as gift, and that therefore there is never anything to be afraid of. As angels in the New Testament always seems to say, ‘Fear not.’

Does this process come to an end at death?  Physically it does. When we die our bodies return to the earth, whether we’re buried or cremated, the result is the same. But are we just our bodies? Is there more to us than that?  

“A starting point for any reflection on the nature of life is death, comparing the dead body of a person or animal or plant with the living state that preceded it. The amount of matter in the dead body is the same as in the living body, the form of the body is the same, and the chemicals in it are the same, at least immediately after death. But something has changed. The most obvious conclusion is that something has left the body and since there’s little or no change in weight, that which has left is essentially immaterial.” [Rupert Sheldrake]

I can remember coming to a similar conclusion on witnessing the birth of each of my daughters.  When confronted with the awe and wonder of the arrival of a new life, I found myself wondering ‘where has this new life come from?’ A basic understanding of the biology involved felt like a wholly inadequate answer. It seemed obvious that something more than that was involved: that we are more than just our bodies.

“So universal is the assumption that something does happen next that the reductionist scientific culture of the West is almost alone in its unshakeable belief in the finality of death.” [Peter and Elizabeth Fenwick ]   

If there was a democratic vote amongst all the humans who’ve ever lived on whether they believed in life in some form, after death, there would be an overwhelming ‘Yes’ vote.   That doesn’t necessarily mean that its true, of course.  But we do seem to be hard wired to believe it.  

Irvin Yalom wrote: “I have noted two particularly powerful and common methods of allaying fears about death, two beliefs or delusions, that afford a sense of safety. One is the belief in personal specialness; and the other, the belief in an ultimate rescuer………these are universal beliefs which, at some level of consciousness, exist in all of us.”   

What Yalom is saying sounds very like an example of what I have elsewhere referred to as a ‘Memory of Home’. The assumption that death is not the end runs pretty deep in us, perhaps even is innate in us, and evidence is emerging that supports this assumption.