Choose Life

"We might do well to take a fresh look at what we might call the Christian mythology of heaven, hell, purgatory, judgment, and so on. It is more important than we might guess. We cannot assume that it is just something we have outgrown; we have only seen that certain images must not and cannot be taken literally any longer. On the other hand, a Christian can still fully believe in the reality these images try to depict. I can say that I believe in the resurrection of the body and in the last judgment; I do believe in these truths, but I wouldn’t press the imagery. I believe in the reality that stands behind it and I take the expression very lightly. It is meant to be an image, a beautiful poetic image, but no more.

Actually the myth of purgatory comes very close to the myth of reincarnation; it tries in general to answer the same questions and it comes up with largely the same answers-that there is justice and that you have to work out your karma. But just as I would not press the image of purgatory as if there were actually a fire burning somewhere with so many degrees of heat, so I personally would not press the imagery of reincarnation. But I can say that I do believe in both.

One reason why Christian tradition has always steered me away from preoccupation with reincarnation has not so much to do with doctrine as with spiritual practice. The finality of death is meant to challenge us to decision, the decision to be fully present here now, and so begin eternal life. For eternity rightly understood is not the perpetuation of time, on and on, but rather the overcoming of time by the now that does not pass away. But we are always looking for opportunities to postpone the decision.

So if you say: “Oh, after this I will have another life and another life,” you might never live, but keep dragging along half dead because you never face death. Don Juan says to Carlos Castaneda, “That is why you are so moody and not fully alive, because you forget you are to die; you live as if you were going to live forever.” What remembrance of death is meant to do, as I understand it, is to help us make the decision. Don Juan stresses death as the adviser.

Death makes us warriors. If you become aware that death is right over your left shoulder and if you turn quickly enough you can see him there, that makes you alive and alert to decisions.

As human beings, here and now, not as believers of this or that doctrine, we all know what life beyond time means. If we can say now, and know what we mean when we say now, we are speaking about a reality that is not in time. The now is; time is only possibility for becoming. Dying in all its forms and stages is our opportunity to pass from time into the now that does not pass away, from the mere possibility of becoming to being real.

In our human experience time is, to use a fine expression I heard somewhere, a measure for the energy it takes to grow. In that sense it has nothing to do with minutes and hours, years and eons, with clock time. And growing means to die to what we are in order to become what we are not yet. The seed has to die to become a plant, and we have to die to being children in order to become adolescents, and so on. But our most important death has to do with dying to our independence, as individuals, and so coming to life as persons in our interdependence.

We find this terribly difficult because we always want to retain our independence, the feeling that “I don’t owe anybody anything.” Then comes the moment of death, whether it is the ultimate death or a moment in the middle of life, and we give up our independence and come to life in interdependence, which is the joy of be-longing and of being together. This is what we really most want, but except for such moments we hang on to something which we don’t really want and yet are afraid to let go of-our independence and the isolation which necessarily goes with it. The moment we let it go, we die into the joy of interdependence.

The importance of our physical death fades away in comparison with this dying into what St. Paul calls the real life, Christ in us. He says in another passage: “I live, yet not I; Christ lives in me.” This is not a private statement about himself; he means that each one of us ought to be able to say that. As believers, you and I can say that as well as St. Paul; and that means that it is the true Self that lives in all of us; I-“yet not I; Christ lives in me.” The face we had before we were born, as the Buddhists put it, is the Christ-reality.

That doesn’t mean, narrowly, Jesus Christ, Jesus of Nazareth; it means the Christ. It is not separated from Jesus of Nazareth but is not limited to him. It comes very close to what Buddhists call Buddha nature, and Hindus call Atman, the lasting reality. But we are still afraid of losing our individuality in this all-embracing unity. I think we could overcome this fear by seeing that Divine Oneness is not achieved by the imposition of uniformity, but by the embracing of limitless variety; there is room for all our personal differences within it.

One time I talked with Eido Roshi about the question of the personality or impersonality of this ultimate reality, for here there seems to be what is generally thought of as an important difference of concepts between East and West, or between the Buddhists and the Christians. The Buddhists use the image of waves on the sea; each of us is just one wave that comes out and goes back into the sea. I told him that a Westerner does not readily accept this; he says, “I am somebody with self-consciousness, awareness, and self-possession. Am I just going back into some cosmic custard? If that sea out of which I came is impersonal and I am personal, then I would be more than the sea.” The answer Eido Roshi gave me was simple enough: “If the sea did not have all the perfection of personhood, from where would the waves have gotten it?”

That is a beautiful Buddhist answer, and it does full justice to the Christian concern. But we could also say: All right, the wave goes back into the ocean, and that is a beautiful picture; but that high point, when the wave was cresting, the moment when it was most alive, that, as T.S. Eliot said, is a moment that was not only in time but “in and out of time.” It was one of those now moments that does not pass away, that is eternity. And therefore anything that happens, at that moment of the fullest personhood, simply is; it does not belong to was or will be but to that which can never again be lost; maybe because it never was unrealized, maybe because it is a bursting forth of the eternal now into time. I experience it as being realized, but perhaps it is my homecoming.

I like the suggestion too that the virgin energy of a life in which personhood was never developed simply returns to the source, a wave that never crested. This image somehow connects with the idea of time running out. But the turning point of the spiritual life is the moment when time running out is turned into time being fulfilled. It rests with us whether death will be a fizzling out when our time runs out or an explosion of the fullness of time into the now of eternity.

In the book of Deuteronomy God says: “I place before you today life and death; choose life.” Choose life! Life is something we have to choose. One isn’t alive simply vegetating; it is by choosing, making a decision, that you become alive. In every spiritual tradition life is not something that you automatically have, it is something that you must choose, and what makes you choose life is the challenge of death-learning to die, not eventually, but here and now."

-- Brother David Steindl-Rast