4.11.2011 DYING WELL

Going down singing by carolyn arends, ct, 4.2011, p56

(the author tells briefly of the recent death of her father.)...after several hours, he gave up on conversation. he started singing.

what are you humming? my mom asked. my dad repeatedly tried to answer through the mask before yanking it off again. 'with Christ in the vessel, i can smile at the storm', he gasped. wow, murmured my mom, before singing it with him.

my dad learned 'with Christ in the vessel' at camp imadene in 1949, the summer he asked Jesus into his 8 year old heart. 6 decades later, hours before his death, that silly old camp song was still embedded in his soul and mind, and he was singing it at the top of his nearly worn out lungs.

i have never liked thinking about my own death. but i've considered it enough to know i hope i go down singing or at least speaking or thinking, something about Jesus.

i suppose that is why i found myself sobbing on an airplane while reading margaret guenther's 'th practice of prayer'. in one section,l she discusses the eastern christian discipline of continuously repeating the Jesus prayer: 'Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner'. she reports her own efforts to incorporate the practice into her daily life, even sizing up the logs he chops for firewood by the number of Jesus prayers she'll likely get through before they are cut.

... 'i hope that by imprinting..the prayer..on my subconscious, it will be with me for the rest of my life, especially at the end, when other words will perhaps be lost to me'.

..many early christian communities encouraged believers to engage in the spiritual discipline of considering their own deaths - not in order to ceate morbid fear, but to put this life in the proper perspective. memento mori, medieval monks would say to each other in the hallways ;remember your mortality', or more literally, 'remember you will die'.

death unaddressed is the bogeyman in the basement; it keeps us looking over our shoulders and holds us back from entering joyously into the days we are given. but death dragged out from the shadows and held up to the light of the gospel not only loses its sting, it becomes an essential reminder to wisely use the life we have.

when we remember the mortality of those around us, they become more valuable to us. madeleine l'engle once noted that when people die, it is the sins of omission, rather than the sins of commission, that haunt us. 'if only i had called more', we lament. remembering a loved on's death before it happens can spur us into the sort of action we won't regret later.

and REMEMBERING OUR MORTALITY HELPS REORDER OUR PRIORITIES; a race toward a finish line has a different sense of purpose and urgency than a jog around the block. when a believer acknowledges that he is headed toward death (tomorrow or in 50 years), he can stop expending the tremendous energy it takes to deny his mortality and start living into his sternal destiny, here and now. and he can be intentional about investing himself in the things he wants to be with him at the end, much the way guenther seeks to make the prayer a permanent part of her..

i don't want to romanticize death. my friend...calls it 'the great gash', and i must confess that on the 6 month anniversary of my father's passing, the hole left by him is still gaping.

but though death hurts, it is not the end. though we mourn, we do not mourn as those who have no hope. and so i offer my dread of death to the author of Life, asking Him to help me to number my days rightly. i don't know how many i've got, but i want to use everyone of them to get the truth about who Jesus is - and who i am in Him - more deeply ingrained....'

notes on death: i am deeply scarred in spirit by the way i was so little involved in my mother's and father's last years...at the time all i was thinking about was myself. God has forgiven, i know, and yet the searing pain can come still at times. i look very much to see them after i am face to face with Jesus. i look forward to the experience of being forgiven by them and...how will it all be...getting, possibly, to know them, spend time with them, do things with them in service to our God? i don't know. i just know that He will wipe away all our tears...and all will be well at last.

i'm not exactly sure when it began, but God has given me a joyful anticipation of death and a longing to be with the One who has loved me from eternity past and forever. the sooner the better...to be completely cleansed of all my sins and made like Him.

i personally believe that the better one lives, the closer to God, the more obedient...the better one will die whenever and how ever it may happen. may You help me live my belief.