Recent unexpected deaths have me thinking of mortality, and it occurs to me that all faiths, all the world’s religions, as well as atheists—anyone, in fact, who considers their own demise—face a question I almost never hear asked: After I die, what do I do?
Well, I won’t do anything, is one assumption. As a Catholic, I was taught that I would no longer be burdened with a free will, that my time would be spent in rapturous joy praising God, wanting nothing else, needing nothing else, an utter transcendence of everything I’ve experienced in life. My limited understanding of other religious traditions is that what comes after death is some similar experience: What you “do” after death, however glorious, is not something you choose.
For those who don’t accept this scenario, death is most likely a transition into nothingness.
But this means that, for all of us, what we do after death is as absurd a question to ask as it appears to be, that either there is nothing that can be done, or what can be done is utterly irrelevant to our former experience of living in a universe of choices, experiencing personal growth.
So what struck me as unexpected deaths occurred this week is that in our religious belief or non-belief we have arguably very similar expectations of what happens when we die. What follows is an unending period of stasis. That, however blessed, there is a quality of nothingness in what we should expect of an after-life, just as there is a quality of transcendence in believing death utterly ends our existence, simply because we’ve left life behind for all eternity.
Regardless, what we leave behind when we die rests in the living hearts of those who were touched by us in life, as well as anything we’ve left behind that represents us. It seems to me that all persons regardless of their beliefs have this in common.
I find strength in this, that regardless what we believe, death unites us as an overarching, shared passage. And in that passage we transcend all things we know.
If I’m wrong about any of this, the unanswered and largely unaddressed question necessarily remains: After I die, what do I do?
Welcome
This blog is less than an experiment, and it isn't about anything.
It's about about-ness—the thing of the thing, not the thing itself.
Hence "meta"—what one thinks about what one thinks about.
And what one thinks about what one thinks about what one thinks about.
And so on.
Wednesday, February 21, 2018
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