|
This is our challenge regarding death –
to hold the dialectic together, to accept the mystery, not to
imagine that we can soften it on any side, but that life in the
largest sense, in the end can genuinely win out.
That life-affirming
attitude means -- and I want to repeat it one more time because it’s
hard to hold together – to maintain the fierceness for life while
accepting what is inescapable and, if you are mourning, not to
soften the loss at all. It is a genuine loss and if you miss the
loss, you will miss an important experience of being human. It is
not a fun experience at that moment, but you will miss the full
experience of being human and then of tying that loss to the service
of life by making that person’s life a blessing not just in your
mind, but in life with real action.
I want to give you
three practices that can begin to integrate this attitude.
Practice #1:
"Writing Your Obituary"
The first is to encourage you once a
year to write your own obituary. This is incredibly humbling. What
really are the successes of your life? What do you really want
written about you? When you combine the confrontation with the
devastation of loss – with the end of yourself –it is easier to
determine what’s really important. Once a year write your obituary.
Practice #2:
"Quarterly Remembrance"
The second practice that you can do is
actually to look back on the people in your lives who have died and
seriously remember each person at least once during the year. I
suggest remembering each person at least once a quarter, once each
season, because each season brings different feelings. Spring
brings the opening – what do you celebrate about that person’s
life? Summer is hot – what was hot about that person’s life? Fall
is a harvest time – what do you need to harvest from that person’s
life? Winter is cold and cool – what’s the cool stuff that you may
need to forgive?
Practice #3:
"Preparing Our Ethical
Will"
The third practice
that I want to suggest is the most sophisticated practice of all and
if you do it, I promise all the messages that we spoke about tonight
will be integrated. It’s called the ethical will. You know how you
write a will in which you insure your financial resources are
distributed the way you want. Well, you need to do the same thing
with your intellectual and emotional and ethical resources. That’s
why Moses was able to die atop the hill confident that though he had
not completed the project of his life, the project wasn’t over. The
project continued because he was assured that his ethics – his
values – had been transmitted to his people. Well, each one of us
has to write an ethical will. You should do that once a year or
once every two years.
|
