I write this at my mother's bedside. She is at the Bowers' Hospice House in Beckley, West Virginia. She came here after being diagnosed just last month with pancreatic cancer and spending the last few weeks in and out of hospitals. Her last words to me were yesterday afternoon, whispered "I love yous" to me and to my infant son. She has been mostly unresponsive since then. Her family is now relegated mostly to watching her die.
My mother is a deeply religious person, with a belief in a personal God, the reality of the devil, and an afterlife spent in the eternal peace of Heaven or the eternal torment of Hell. I shared those beliefs until about seven years ago. Mine has been a gradual process of losing faith, part of what could be called a midlife crisis, I suppose.
I haven't discussed this very much with my mother. I think it would cause her too much distress. That is, after all, one of the things that makes religion so very successful. It is near torture to imagine yourself and your loved ones facing eternity separated from all comfort, your bodies being burned with a "fire that is not quenched," and subjected to unspeakable torments for eons. The alternative, by contrast, is a promise of life eternal, a life without pain or even emotional distress, where God Himself "wipes every tear" from your eye. The only price to be paid? Believe. It is that simple, we are told. The price of Heaven has been paid for us by another if we only believe.
That sounds like a good deal, doesn't it?
Only it isn't. Not really. Because belief in this instance means subjugating one's mind to the teachings of others, abandoning critical thought, waiving one's right to question. It means accepting as truth that which goes against reason and to do so without evidence at all, because "faith is the evidence of things not seen." It is to completely surrender one's life, the only one we are certain exists, for the promise of another that no one has seen.
It took me some time to reach this point in my own thinking and I'm well aware that most of you reading this will disagree quite sharply. As I was relaying to someone today, the question turned for me on a spiritual level, not on matters of science, as is the case with so many. It's a topic for another post, but suffice it to say that it did not happen overnight.
To have won the right again to question all received wisdom, to reject anything that comes without evidence, to organize your morality on human reasoning rather than 3000-year-old tribal ethics, to marvel at science and human understanding, and to again be humbled at how little we truly know − well, that is liberty. As was said, "The truth will set you free."
Yet I have expressed to many my reticence to abandon all that I once knew. For all they lack if understood literally, Christian scriptures are rich with metaphor for shaping life's meaning. Eating forbidden fruit does bring knowledge of good and evil, a loss of innocence but growth in wisdom. We have witnessed our own Davids slay mocking Goliaths. We know the power of grace in our lives and that forgiveness exceeds vengeance in every way.
I still think in those terms and truly long for the experience of the "holy," not something supernatural but the setting apart of times and spaces as sacred to the human spirit. I relish Christian mythology without being beholden to its cosmology or ethics.
It is at times like right now that I long for it the most. I'm at my dying mother's bedside, the scene of dozens of bluegrass songs, where those old-time mothers say, "I've just seen the Rock of Ages − Jacob's ladder coming down!" I want something of that experience, without needing to abandon reason. I long for this to be a sacred time, a time to reflect on a life well-spent, a time to ponder life's hardest questions and construct meaning for the dying and those that remain.
A few short years ago, it would have been impossible for me to imagine meaning apart from God. "Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever," I would have told you. To reject Yaweh, whose very name suggests that He is the ground of all being, is to have no meaning at all.
It's not like that for me any more.
I suppose I'm "apostate," to use the old-fashioned term. Even as I type that, I realize it is likely to land me on more than one church prayer list. That's okay.
The meaning I make at this passing is one that acknowledges what we know of this cosmos and re-imagines those tropes that served to comfort me in the past.
I look at my mother and I hear the Apostle's words, that hers is a body "sown in corruption, but raised in incorruption; sown in mortality, but raised in immortality." Then I think about what might become of her body after her death. It will be returned to the earth, sown in one sense, and provide life again to plants and animals and again to generations after us. And her DNA we now know was sown in the five children she bore and again in her grandchildren, and will continue on as long as her progeny continue to reproduce. The words she spoke, at home and in the classroom where she taught, were sown in the minds of her children and students, and will bear fruit long after she has perished. This, then, is true immortality. This is immortality rooted in the cosmos as we know it.
I look at my mother and I hear the words of the Preacher: "As one dies, so dies the other . . . All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return." Then my mind turns to what astrophysicists tell us of our origins some 13.8 billion years ago, and the fate that awaits us many eons from now. Because every atom that is in us − every bit of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon − was there at the big bang. "We are made of star dust." And when the cosmos cools, all that is shall return to star dust, including those atoms in her body now.
It is a triumph of the human spirit that we even know this, that great women and men asked questions and questioned assumptions and made these discoveries.
So as I sit with her here, in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, these things are a great comfort to me. They are the meaning I make in the face of death.
I meditate on them in the knowledge that my mother does not share my beliefs. That is okay, too, because there is no Hell for the unbeliever in a world of reason. There is only love for her and a great sadness, knowing how much I will miss her.
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