Death Stinks:

[Laudate_Dominum]

[i]I'm just trying to start a conversation so feel free to pick apart everything that I say. [/i]

Death is a horror. I was spending time with a beautiful family one day and it occurred to me that, from one perspective, at some point every one of those beautiful, innocent children was going to be gone and the only thing left in this world would be a rotting corpse in the ground, itself destined to oblivion. When you look upon another person with love and truly perceive their dignity how can one interpret death as anything but a most terrible indignity, a violation? In light of this I can understand the historical tendency of Christians to think of persons simply as souls.

I was spending time with a friend recently and while enjoying her company I stopped to examine the experience and I realized that on a fundamental level my affective disposition toward this person includes something that can best be described as a desire that they exist forever. The thought of this person one day ceasing to exist is utterly horrific. In fact, such a thought is absolutely incompatible with my experience of that person as a person--and yet I know discursively that one day she will in fact be gone.

I know that many people do not believe in God, or the soul, or an afterlife, but how can a person committed to such a thing truly love another person in authenticity? To look adoringly into the eyes of one's newborn child, or to be at the side of one's beloved parent as they die; as I see it such encounters demand a kind of faith that this person will not die, they will not vanish into nothingness, they are far more than a mere biological machine that will one day 'turn off' and become a mound of stench ridden filth before ultimately disappearing entirely.

I realize that as Catholics we have the hope of the resurrection and of heaven, but in spite of this faith how can one deeply gaze into the eyes of a beloved person and not feel some horror at the thought that this body before you will rot away? It is understandable that man, with the light of reason alone, would tend to disparage bodily existence and quite often consider it synonymous with evil. Similarly, there is a certain horror to a beloved person losing their mind and seemingly losing who they are (or were) in the process. The extreme decay of the mind and personality, as well as the grotesque decay of the body seem to be great indignities and violations that are inflicted upon people indiscriminately.

For me personally, it is these sorts of basic existential issues that cause me to resent superficial and watered down religion. Spineless, feel good religiosity is worse than irreligion in my book. It is also this general category of experience that makes me consider many of the conventional arguments for the existence of God to be distasteful. Approaching such ultimate questions from a stand point of logic puzzles, or some pseudo-scientific attempt to demonstrate the existence of a cause or designer, or a 'that than which nothing greater can be conceived'. These things are interesting for sure, but they rarely stir the heart or speak to the more human issues. Is my baby a worthless blob of flesh or a miraculous new being? Is my sister's life utterly worthless and meaningless? Is she going to cease to exist someday? Is then the love I have for her a farce? And what of the value and dignity I perceive in her? Is this just a stupid lie and in fact our existence is ultimately an impersonal void?
Perhaps all of the relationships, thoughts, experiences, desires, dreams and values of my life are as empty and arbitrary and the process of natural selection.

One thing is sure, we will all cease to exist as we do now, we will all be destroyed and our flesh will be reduced to dust (unless we do the body works thing I guess). For many the mind will decay and existence will become a strange, barren confusion: unto death of course.

I can remember when I was very young losing a great deal of sleep over the prospect of personal annihilation. For me this has always been the heart of the matter. Growing up I learned that for some religions personal annihilation is a goal. I also encountered attitudes which said that this is simply the brute fact of our existence and one should man up and accept it with stoicism or else you are living in a dream land and might as well believe in Santa Claus and have an imaginary friend. They would say that many of our beliefs are simply manifestations of wish fulfillment. Early on my problem with this was that it did not mesh well with the facts of my struggle toward religious faith.

According to the testimony of the Holy Apostles which we have received the Christ granted forgiveness to sinners, He restored dignity to the woman of sin, He bestowed sanity and personal integrity upon the demoniacs and He raised the corpse of Lazarus to life. In my experience it was the Holy Gospels which truly and boldly spoke to the issues at hand with directness and profundity.
Of course one of the first natural questions (for a person of our age anyway) would be how it can be expected that we give assent to such radical stories on the basis of a collection of ancient documents? A non-believer might simply write off the conversion experience of another person as an instance of wish fulfillment or of copping out from facing the cold, lonely truth of our existence. The truth must by default be some form of nihilism because anything positive or meaningful that one could say can be criticized on psychological grounds. One is simply projecting, or sublimating or essentially acting on a psychological need of some kind.

The world, as it is presented to us "scientifically" and empirically, offers little in the way of discerning the ultimate nature and end of persons, or whether or not there is any ultimate nature or end to begin with. This is part of why I can't say that I arrived at Catholic Faith by way of a scientific disclosure of the structures in the world. For example the common arguments for the existence of God were only interesting to me after I had already attained faith in God.

I still cannot describe systematically or procedurally how this faith was attained. Perhaps it would be best to say it was a gift of God and nothing more. I remember awaking in the midst of an enigmatic existence, and it was not as though coming into a relationship with the Living God somehow made the world less enigmatic or less mysterious, quite the contrary in fact.
Any description would be a pale caricature but if I were to attempt such a thing it would probably go something like this. If this world is in some sense a book, I had hitherto been studying the contours of the type, the shapes of the words, but failed to let the text speak on its own terms. The obscure words were at first intimations of love and beauty, and of the essence of personal encounter. It would be natural to read this as implying a grandiose and sublime type of experience but it was in fact situated in the everyday.
When reading the writings of another it is common to feel that one has developed some sense of the author as a person through said writings. There was something of this in the experience of which I speak. The legendary first encounter of Levinas with Monsieur Chouchani comes to mind as capturing a small fragment of what I'm trying to describe. When they first met, Levinas and the Chouchani apparently conversed all through the night. The following day when Levinas was asked about the experience he is said to have reported: "I can not tell what he knows, all I can say is that all that I know, he knows." Well, perhaps this is a silly example; on to the point.

There is Another. There is a basis to this world and everything that I encounter and experience on every level; a [i]logos [/i]I suppose, which discloses a mystery that must be [i]at least[/i] personal. That sums up the heart of my initial move toward Catholicism.

The next phase was truly the move to faith in God. This faith did not unfold according to some process of intellectual assent but rather as a personal encounter unfolds; manifestly revealed yet never exhausted in its mystery. The faith that I have is unbelievable. Faith in the love of God revealed in Christ is unbelievable. The more deeply its content is grasped the more unbelievable it becomes; it is too good to be true. For me it is likened to an encounter with a beloved person. In the apprehension of the mystery and goodness of another it is clear that they shall not die; they will not see corruption. "I know you, and I know that you will not die." The transcendence of faith and the immanence of certitude are coincident in this moment. This is what I know as faith; it is the truth that is disclosed in the totality of personal encounter. The faith does not precede the encounter but is disclosed in the encounter. I love because I have faith in love, but it can be said with equal validity that I have faith in love because I have truly encountered love. To some this would sound like delusion and nonsense, and to such as these I would attempt to articulate the Christian Faith in more appropriate terms, offering logical arguments and such, but ultimately we are referring to the incommunicability of things unseen.

Why don't people simply default to a relationship with God? Why does God "hide" as it were? Why must things as basic as the transcendent dignity and value of persons rest upon such seemingly obscure grounds? Why must we have uncertainty about our own fate after death, whether we continue to exist or not? Seems a bit twisted that something such as this should be uncertain--the words cruel and horrible come to mind. Are my loved ones destined to simply disintegrate? Is personal existence as temporary and transient as the things of this world that surround us?
I am a being who wonders about the nature of existence and about my own existence. Am I all that is? A temporary and illusory character in a ruthlessly impersonal drama in which, in the final act, I am revealed as nothing at all. If persons are destroyed and the encounter is a lie than I am all that is, from my perspective; and that something that I am is mere frustration and death—I don't matter—in the end I don't even exist. Sartre indeed captured the gist of things when he wrote that we "are born for no reason, continue through weakness and die by accident."
If one is "reasonable" they will accept the sinister absurdity of reality for the only apparent alternative is to give in to self-deception, wishful thinking or fantastic coping mechanisms of one sort or another.

According to my perspective it is precisely this kind of nihilistic attitude which represents the most neurotic form of coping mechanism, it is the epitomic "giving in", and it ironically appears to be a most cowardly and dogmatically narrow disposition toward the experience of being. But certainly on the surface it cannot be called "unreasonable", or so we tend to think.


Shoot! I have to go and I've yet to get to my real point... I'll finish my rant when I get a chance assuming this thread doesn't die horribly (hmm.. somehow that would be fitting).

Peace.

[Maggyie]

[quote]I was spending time with a friend recently and while enjoying her company I stopped to examine the experience and I realized that on a fundamental level my affective disposition toward this person includes something that can best be described as a desire that they exist forever. The thought of this person one day ceasing to exist is utterly horrific. In fact, such a thought is absolutely incompatible with my experience of that person as a person--and yet I know discursively that one day she will in fact be gone.

I know that many people do not believe in God, or the soul, or an afterlife, but how can a person committed to such a thing truly love another person in authenticity? To look adoringly into the eyes of one's newborn child, or to be at the side of one's beloved parent as they die; as I see it such encounters demand a kind of faith that this person will not die, they will not vanish into nothingness, they are far more than a mere biological machine that will one day 'turn off' and become a mound of stench ridden filth before ultimately disappearing entirely.[/quote]

I remember reading somewhere about how love is ultimately an expression of our desire for the eternal, for what will not die or decay (in other words, our longing for God).

It even works its way into our vocabulary - "I'll always love you," "Love never dies," "I'll love you forever," "Love is eternal," "Love conquers all." Calvin Klein even has a perfume called "Eternity Love" (Don't ask how I know that ) I have atheist friends who seem to love their families very much, but I've never understood how they do it: If the other person is just a carbon-based organism, a random arrangement of cells that will ultimately cease to exist, how can you invest them with such significance?

[Extra ecclesiam nulla salus]

Death is so bad. I am afraid to die.

btw very good writing

Edited February 20, 2007 by Extra ecclesiam nulla salus

[Paddington]

[quote name='Extra ecclesiam nulla salus' post='1201050' date='Feb 20 2007, 01:52 AM']btw very good writing[/quote]

Indeed!

[misereremi]

LD- I really "felt" everything you posted. I echo your reflections (but couldn't possibly articulate them as well as you just did!)
As a child my faith consoled me whenever I saw a corpse of a loved one, or witnessed someone's death. I'd always remember the time my Dad took me to the catacombs and explained what "memento mori" means.

I work with some amazingly brave people, who cope much better than I do when we are in the presence of the dying, but I feel sorry for-and pray for- them, and all those who do not believe that there is an eternal afterlife, that there is more than "nothingness" when the body perishes.


God bless