| REMEMBER THAT THEY AREN’T JUST NUMBERS |
I caught myself the other day. While watching the news and hearing about the steady climbing of the national death rate due to COVID-19 – for a second, I found myself almost feeling-less. The dead had unwittingly, unconsciously, morphed into a series of daily numbers. The danger of statistics regarding death, given day after day, hour by hour, is much akin to what, in the 1960’s, the era of expansive nuclear proliferation, was called “psychic numbing.” It is a condition whereby the sheer amount and constant flow of negative or alarming information can numb our senses, can blunt our sensibilities – all in a reactive psychological attempt to protect our minds and our emotions from the actual horror of it all. Then it was the threat of nuclear annihilation. Now it is the steady din of footsteps towards the graves of our fellow citizens who became the innocent victims of a hideous disease. We do well to give these departed victims consideration and, as daunting as it may seem, consider our own fate as well. This is the realism of a global tragedy. We have, over the last three months, been forced to look at everything, including our Orthodox faith, in different and deeper ways. For example, the crucifixion of Jesus has never been only about his death — but also ours. In his book entitled Living in the Light of Death, Prof. Lawrence Rosenberg, former Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard University, says it like this: we are being asked “to come face-to-face with the law of impermanence in an intimate way.” That is what scares us or numbs us. We will not be here forever. What is the “law of impermanence”? It is this. Everything dies, including us. Whatever the tragedy or the means, we will leave this mortal realm. Jesus speaks of this in several ways. One that comes to mind is in Matt. 6:19-21: “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Jesus died because we die, he suffered because we suffer, and his Resurrection assures us of our rising from the dead as He rose. In a great sense, all of Great Lent and Holy Pascha become a metaphor and a mirror for our human life. — start to finish. If we tie ourselves too much to anything in this life that is governed by time, we will eventually be greatly disappointed. Because everything bound to time will fail us in time. Change is inevitable. Change is a sign of both life and death simultaneously. There is nothing that exists that is not subject to this truth. We need to meditate on, as the Orthodox funeral service says, “the brevity of our life.” St. Dorotheos of Gaza reminds us: “A man obtains the fear of God if he has the remembrance of his unavoidable death; If he tests himself every evening as to how he has spent the day, and every morning as to how he has spent the night, and if he is not offensive in his relations with others.” The departed who have been taken from us by COVOD-19 have become our teachers. Firstly, in their silence they urge us, in the final words of St. John Chrysostom, to “give glory to God for all things.” It does not mean that God points his finger at us now and then and decides we need a good pandemic to wake us up. It is more like, when a pandemic, or a tornado comes, or someone cuts us off in traffic, or the grocery store runs out of something we desperately need, or whatever, happens, it becomes a tool for us to learn and grow and change and die a little to our demand that life be as we want it to be all the time. We need to die to the illusion that we are in control. Stephen Mitchell, the American poet and translator, provides an interpretive translation of Psalm 1 that illustrates what it means to die to self. His interpretation reads like this: “Blessed are the man and the woman who have grown beyond their greed, and have put an end to their hatred, and no longer nurture illusions. But they delight in the way things are and keep their hearts open, day and night…” That is not the way we usually read Psalm 1 and yet his interpretation speaks volumes! Putting away greed, anger, and illusions, and rejoicing in the way things are no matter how they are, we begin to understand what taking up the cross really means: it means to empty ourselves of ourselves. To be filled with the Spirit, we must become empty. An ancient rule in Byzantine monasticism, often hung on monastery walls, keeps things in perspective: “Die before you die and you will never die.” The resistance to and denial of death is a normal thing. We all feel it from time to time, when we get sick and now much more often in the face of the pandemic. Overcoming that fear, our resistance, our denial, is the point of Christ’s work. Our Hly Father St. Maximus the Confessor wrote: “It is the fear of death that is the root of sin, It is the poison that infects us and the lens through which we see.” The Cross, the Tomb, and the Resurrection are for Christ and for each of us the ultimate experience of God. His journey mirrors our journey through life. Slowly but surely we walk through life to the end of it, through the doorway of death, and into Resurrection. The Lord took all this on himself because we do. And at every step of the way God is with us. There is a story that points to what can happen when we embrace the truth of our impermanence and awaken to the beauty of each and every moment. It tells of a friend’s visit to a woman who lived in an iron lung. The doctors and nurses told the visitor that she was the most joyful person they had ever known. The visitor wondered how this could be! What joy could one find trapped living inside a giant, noisy, cumbersome breathing machine? The visitor walked into the room and saw her. When asked how she could be so positive and joyful. She replied, “Every so often someone opens a window and a breeze comes through.” That was it! In the simple feel of a cool breeze on her face she found a reason to rejoice. This simple act of gratitude infected her whole life. The little things. The little moments. The iron lung was her Golgotha and Tomb, the open window and the breeze, her Resurrection. Do we feel the breeze of the Holy Spirit blowing in our lives? If not, we must ask ourselves, what windows do we need to open? Fear closes windows. Greed shuts windows. Anger locks them. Dying to these things that constitute the very core of every sin we can commit before we die takes away the sting of death. Letting go of all that allows us the freedom to walk out of the house of fear we have built for ourselves. If we pay attention to the small things of the here and now, the blessings, the graces, the people,, the wonder and beauty of nature, and the miracle of the human person – slowly but surely we will die to the forces and influences that seek to rob us of hope and of the promise that, in death, for those who have been faithful, life is merely changed – never ended! PRAYER FOR THOSE WHO DEPARTED BECAUSE OF COVID-19 Faithfully in the Risen Lord, |
