For Old Age
May the light of your soul mind you.
May all your worry and anxiousness about your age
Be transfigured.
May you be given wisdom for the eyes of your soul
To see this as a time of gracious harvesting.
May you have the passion to heal what has hurt you,
And allow it to come closer and become one with you.
May you have great dignity,
And a sense of how free you are,
Above all, may you be given the wonderful gift
Of meeting the eternal light that is within you.
May you be blessed;
And may you find a wonderful love
In your self for your self.
From To Bless the Space Between Us
DEATH
“Death…is a time of great homecoming, and there is no need to be afraid.”
The same location as for the conversation on aging—a city center office in Dublin. Death follows naturally from old age. For John, it was not to be feared. It would be “a very beautiful meeting between you and yourself” and there would be “a great fiesta time ahead.”
COMING HOME
Death is the unseen companion, the unknown companion who walks every step of the journey with us. It came out of the womb with us and has been with us till now and is here with us today. Part of the art of living, creative living, is to transfigure the different difficulties that you have, the negative things in your life. As you begin to transfigure them, what you are ultimately transfiguring is the presence of your own death. And then when death comes to you at the end, it won’t be a monster expelling you against your will from the shelter of your familiarity. In many ways, death could become the truest image of your own life and your own self. Maybe at death, there is a very beautiful meeting between you and yourself, and then you go together into the invisible kingdom where there is no more darkness, suffering, separation or sadness, and where you are one with all those that you love in the seen world and in the unseen world. Death in that sense is a time of great homecoming, and there is no need to be afraid.
If you could interview a baby in the womb, a baby that was about to be born, and the baby asked you what is going to happen to it and you said, “You are going to go through a very dark channel. You are going to be pushed out. You are going to arrive into a vacant world of open air and light. The cord that connects you to your mother is going to be cut. You are going to be on your own forevermore, and regardless of how close you come to another, you will never belong in the way you have been able to belong here.” The baby would have no choice but to conclude that it was going to die! Maybe death is that way too. As it seems that we die from inside the womb of the world, we are born into a new world where space and time and all the separation and all the difficulties no longer assail us. We are coming home! My father, Lord have mercy on him, used always say, “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, what the Lord has prepared for those who love him.” So there is a great fiesta time ahead, and we would want to be practicing if we haven’t been any good at it in this world. We would want to be practicing, even against our will, a certain little bit of happiness, because we could be really deluged with pleasure in the next life.
THE ETERNAL WORLD
Death is actually a rebirth. At our first birth, we came out of the darkness of the unknown. Then came our life here, before we return at death into the unknown. Samuel Beckett captured this wonderfully in a very short little play, Breath. It begins with a birth cry. Breathing follows and then the death-sigh. The soul is freed into a world where there is no more darkness and indeed no more space and time as we knew it in this world. So where does the soul go? Meister Eckhart had a simple answer to that. It goes nowhere. The eternal world is not some faraway galaxy that we haven’t discovered yet. The eternal world is here. The dead are here with us, invisible to us, but we can sense their presence. They are looking out for us.
For us time is linear, but for the dead it is more a circle of eternity. John Moriarty, the wonderful Kerry philosopher, says that time is eternity living dangerously. That is his magic sentence and it is so true. The Celtic people did not divide time from eternity. They were fite fuaite, woven into each other. Eternity is not an extension of time, but it is pure presence, pure belonging. When you are in the eternal, you are outside of nothing. You are within everything, enjoying the fullest participation. There is no more separation. It is what the contemplative medieval scholars called the Beatific Vision, where the eye with which you see God is God’s eye seeing you. You are embraced in the purest circle of love. You are everywhere and you are nowhere, but you are in complete presence.
THE END OR THE BEGINNING?
Death is going to come. No one has been able to stop it yet! The Connemara people say, Ní féidir dul i bhfolach ar an mbás—you cannot hide from death. We fear it because we do not know how, when or where it will come, but come it will. Yet we still have great freedom about the way we approach it. We should not think negatively or destructively about it, but rather see the possibilities that are in it. Of course there is a lonesomeness in it. Of course there is fright in it, going into the unknown, but we have been given wonderful shelters about the belonging that is in it. It is not a dark end but the beginning of a path of new brightness. If we can learn not to fear death, we have literally nothing to fear.
Entering Death
I pray that you will have the blessing
Of being consoled and sure about your death.
May you know in your soul
There is no need to be afraid.
When your time comes, may you have
Every blessing and strength you need.
May there be a beautiful welcome for you
In the home you are going to.
You are not going somewhere strange,
Merely back to the home you have never left.
May you live with compassion
And transfigure everything
Negative within and about you.
When you come to die,
May it be after a long life.
May you be tranquil
Among those who care for you.
May your going be sheltered
And your welcome assured.
May your soul smile
In the embrace
Of your Anam Cara.
From To Bless the Space Between Us
POSTSCRIPT
In a revealing interview published in Dublin’s Sunday Tribune on Christmas Day 2005, John spoke with Suzanne Power about death.