Hope and death

‘Why all this commotion and crying? The child is not dead, but asleep.’ But they laughed at him. So he turned them all out and, taking with him the child’s father and mother and his own companions, he went into the place where the child lay. And taking the child by the hand he said to her, ‘Talitha, kum!’ which means, ‘little girl, I tell you to get up.’ The little girl got up at once and began to walk about, for she was twelve years old.

Mark 5:39 - 42

I've not lost a child, and it is my deepest hope that I will not have to endure such a loss, and yet I know many who have. I watched my grandfather bury my father, my mother bury a son, a brother bury his daughter. And I have some special friends who have lost their child through stillbirth or neonatal death. Despite the passing the years, the loss of a child is a wound that seldom heals and the rawness persists.

Death places huge, unexpected challenges before us. None of us can be shielded from death, nor can we escape it. In the history of humanity there have been many attempts to explain what lies beyond it. Some argue that death brings extinction of the self, others suggest a cycle of lives before reaching one’s highest potential or that there a continuation of the self after death. Still others proclaim a unity with creation that sees the self extinguished.

The Christian explanation is complex, for while it builds on the Hebrew experience it is strongly influenced by Greek philosophy. Christians link life after death to salvation: that is, because we are separated from God by sin, we need to be reunited with him. God took human form, the person of Jesus, to save humanity by the way he lived, died and the rose from death. His resurrection became a foretaste of what awaited the faithful. The Christian scriptures advise that on the last day all will be judged and the righteous will be raised. Many modern Christian thinkers propose that all humanity will ultimately be saved. In the post-modern world, our loved ones ‘live forever’ in our hearts.

Mark (5:21 - 43) relates two interconnected stories, both well known. One is known as Jairus’ daughter, and the other, the Woman who touched Jesus’ cloak. Each story is a story about life, hope and the healing power of Jesus. In Jairus’ daughter a court official asks Jesus to heal his desperately sick daughter. Before Jesus can get there, the girl dies. Jesus tells the family that she is only asleep and bids her to wake. Now what held Jesus up was that on his way to Jairus’ home, was a woman who suffered from terrible haemorrhaging touched Jesus’ cloak in the hope of being healed of her disease. Jesus asks that whoever touched him declare themselves. The woman steps forward and Jesus recognises her faith.

The raising of Jairus’s daughter, like the story of Lazarus is a clear reminder of God’s power over death, of the promise of eternal life, of the offer of salvation for those who have faith. Both these stories speak to our deepest need for hope, that there must be, that there is such hope and salvation.

But what do you tell the parent who has lost a child? How do you explain hope in the face of their hopelessness? Or ease the pain when a child is stolen from your heart? To bring consolation to the bereaved is Christian duty (cf Matthew 5:4), but it may well be that the promise of everlasting life in Christ will ease the torment of such a loss.

Peter Douglas

Mindfulness is being elevated into a form of secular salvation

by Carmody Grey

An artist I know was recently advised by a woman at his local parish that the new thing these days is “mindfulness”. He should start to develop Christian art around that theme, she suggested. He wasn’t enthused by the idea. But the woman was raising an interesting point. Mindfulness is taking off in the churches and in popular culture, and in the corporate and business world as well.

Mindfulness was one of the great gifts I received through many years of Zen training. The undisciplined mind can be a tyrant. Its circularity, its relentless narration and re-narration of events, leads to exhaustion and even despair. I learned to watch the mind: neither to follow thoughts, nor resist them.

Suspending judgement, suspending reaction, you discover that you have a choice about how you relate to the chatterings of your own mind. In that choice lies a freedom from the stories you tell yourself about the world, which leads not only to a radical self-acceptance, but to a liberating acceptance of others.

Mindfulness meditation is, quite simply, the best natural tonic for the troubled mind and body I have ever discovered. I rely on it daily. and I would unhesitatingly recommend it to anyone. Mindfulness practices have always played a central role in Christian spirituality, and are surely indispensable in any serious commitment to contemplative prayer. But I am concerned about the way mindfulness is increasingly being elevated into a form of secular salvation. 

“The now”, people say, “is all that exists”. I hears this nostrum everywhere: the present moment alone is real; dwelling in the past or in the future is a spiritual pathology. No one envies the wandering mind, addicted to rehashing the past, worrying about or hankering after the future. But to hold absolutely to the unreality of the past and the future is a form of quietism, a denial of time and history. When mindfulness is practised as a denial of time, it becomes Gnosticism. 

Christianity cannot be translated into a philosophy of the pure present. Brother Roger of Taizé observed: “Jesus did not say, Be yourself. He said, Be with me.” The Gospel does not offer us an escape from the vicissitudes of history. It actually exposes us more to history, for it draws us into the drama and uncertainty of a relationship which unfolds through time.

I once heard a Dominican friar say that the reason Thomas Aquinas was such a great thinker is that he was able to explain the truth in propositions, with no reliance on fables or stories. I almost choked on my tea. God chose story above any other form to tell us who he is.

Human beings are creatures of memory and anticipation. Each one of us knows ourself and others only by the constant recuperation of beginnings, and anticipation of endings. That is how we have an identity at all. In the fragile memory and faltering hope of God’s people – their griefs, regrets, longings and fears – are sanctified the memories and hopes of every person.

Perhaps most revealingly, the contemporary cult of mindfulness expresses one of the aspirations most dear to the modern world: the escape from suffering. Mindfulness is supposed to be the cure of all suffering, and, indeed, its power to ease pain is extraordinary.

It is true that memory of the past and anticipation of the future are forms of suffering in the sense that they are uncomfortable reminders of our fragility, our participation in a very imperfect story over which we do not have total control. Richard Rohr, a passionate advocate of mindfulness, warns that to seek an absolute wholeness in this life is a kind of idolatry.

Mindfulness in our cultural discourse seems to hold out the promise of an avoidance of the pain of this endemic incompleteness, of the risk and discomfort of being creatures in time.  But Christianity does not allow us to avoid this risk, this discomfort. Every Sunday, we memorialise history’s terrible ambiguity – the death of an innocent man. In doing so, we discipline ourselves not to seek a false escape from the darkness of history.

But this is not, in the end, a bleak practice. For what we solemnly commemorate in the Eucharist is God’s faithfulness to us through time, a faithfulness which turns our stories into stories of resurrection. Christianity is not redemption from time. It is the redemption of time. ­Mindfulness is invaluable; but it is not everything.

Carmody Grey is assistant professor in Catholic theology at Durham University. This article was published in The Tablet on 21 June 2018