This fragment from the Catholic canon, pronounced on Ash Wednesday every year is to me profound in its simplicity. In this day and age, of doubtful relativisms, such language is complicated by the light weight response that that is only one way of seeing the world; that there may be life after death or reincarnation. Such retorts are common but seem to me, at least, to miss the point of the statement and its dark realism.
As a child, I heard that statement and it shook my body to its very core. A realisation of fallibility, that in spite of promises of heaven on earth and beyond as offered by other parts of the ritualistic prayers we recited, this one, offered each year along with a ritual crossing of each persons forehead with ash, was shocking in its truthfulness and its realisation on the level of the body. We are alive and have been born into the world, and one day that will come to an end.
Later, of course, I learnt of the physical truth of such a statement. That we do indeed come from dust and will begin to return to that state once we have breathed our last breath; It is a statement that frames our lives whether we are aware of it or not. In fact, one of the points that separate us from the other animals is said to be this awareness of our own death. To be unaware is to be less than human on this count.
We are stardust, the song goes, and physics tells us that we are invariably made of carbon and water, the most commonly occurring elements that substances on this living planet ours. And while these elements are necessary precondition for life as we understand it, it remains a complete mystery as to why this planet has life, and as yet, only minute fragmentary evidence of life elsewhere in the universe has been found.
The search continues day and night and until this day with minimal success. The trouble is, that while we search for something out there we miss the point of it all. What is out there is largely a great expanse of nothing, and even if we examine the molecules closely, we will see this macrosphere of the universe duplicated at the micropseric level, ie, there is a hell of a lot of nothing in the dust that composes our very body and souls.
What we have between this framing of dust is life, a truly miraculous a mysterious living, and even more astonishingly, awareness of ourselves in the space in which we occupy. Humans are the only of the animals to have developed this sense of awareness, ad while sometime we fool ourselves that this is total, in fact, what marks us from other animals is only really a depth of awareness. A sick dog can be observed mourning and perhaps even fearing its fate. It mopes around unsure of its future, of whether it will continue on like other dogs or humans that it cohabitates with. It seems to know that it is on its last legs. in spite of this, something drives it on to live. That is the miracle.
Henri Bergson isolated this process as a force vitale or life force that motivates us and drives us on to death and dust.(Bergson 1911) I am drawn into life from the inanimate state to the animate, a force beyond my control comes from behind me and drives me into the world with a mixture of love and obedience. It can be observed at work in any living thing, any creation from the dust and detritus of the universe, the stardust which has transformed into a tree that never stops becoming a tree again each day, until the sap finally stops flowing and it has run its course. then it will begin to return to its composite elements, to the dryness of its reality, and the water will be free to evaporate and all that is left is dust.
I am no different to that tree except that I am aware of this process
both in myself and in other beings like me to varying degrees. I am born and become inducted into the present, and unwinding and progression of life, a constant moment, that for living things becomes marked by scarring from moments that we carry with us, just as a cut in the bark of a tree will forever remain noticeable, so too, our physical, emotional and spiritual scarring remains with us and we carry these past moments forward into each new present.
I am always already present while alive, full of the past realities and the future possibilities. As a human being I notice this commonality between myself and others of a similar being, ie, other humans. We, too, become conscious of other beings to a greater or lesser extent through our own experience of existence as a living human being. That is the gift and miracle of being a living human. (Merleau-Ponty 2002)
This is a view of what happens in between the dusty reality of our eternal existence. Humans and other motive animals, have a tendency to exacerbate scarring when it occurs which trees, for example, do not. Especially with humans, the emotional and spiritual scarring can also be exacerbated and aggravated long past the time when the original injury occurred. Our ability to reflect and ponder on our past, whether consciously or sub-consciously, can allows us to develop behavioural patterns and habits which serve to prolong the suffering already inflicted, so that the past comes to dominate the present, and the future becomes bleak and meaningless, even though objectively the present may be just wonderful and full of possibilities.
We are always moving towards our dusty, worm-ridden conclusion. Religions and spiritual traditions try to soften the blow with stories of paradise and rebirth. Often this is taken literally, and the possibility of Paradise and redemption is put off until the after-life, rather than grasping the promise of all these traditions, to have it here and now.
Guilt, shame and remorse of our actions towards one another, the products of our day to day actions coming back to haunt us as ghosts of the past, build to such a crescendo, that Dante warns us that without repentance for our unkindly and unloving actions, we are doomed to live out our days in eternity in Hell, hopeless and without ever seeing Paradise as God would want us all to do. It is only through faith in the world, faith in the fact that our life has meaning only when love is passed on trough our actions, that we can escape this eternal damnation.
Even repentance is not enough to reach Paradise. That will only free us onto the slopes of Mount Purgatory, where we can climb one day at a time towards our final redemption and salvation. But at least here, faith and hope are restored, so that the will to move forward is always with us. Only once we have caught sight of the light of Beatrice’s love can we finally have any chance of making it to Paradise, our souls purged from the scarring of our past life. (Dante 1984)
So, what exactly is this eternity that the Catholic tradition refers to? The Lord’s Prayer tells us that Heaven can be on earth and so we must believe this if we believe in Christ at all. He tells us explicitly in the New Testament that this is the only prayer we need. Merleau-Ponty gives us a clue when he describes moment of death as being the only eternal moment in life; that all previous life has been a presence in a series of moments that are perceived variably as past, present and future moments, but that the actual point of death is an eternal present, the last moment of life. (Merleau-Ponty 2002) To die a death in peace and harmony, and to pass to the eternal now, surely this is should be the point and purpose of palliative care and of preparation for death.
My grandmother told me many years before her death, that the only thing she wished for was to die in her sleep. Kenny Roger’s Gambler tells us the same thing when he sings: “The best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep”. Big statement: To be able to simply rest in peace as the sole purpose of life? It is implicitly seen in these statements as the end of a good life, a life freed from the past worries and an impendingly tortuous future, a readiness to meet our maker, to return to creation and be ready for what awaits us there.
To be prepared for this state is to be freed from our past, to have made amends and reconciled with those we had harmed by either our acts or omissions. A recognition of our humility in the face of our creator, an acceptance of our insignificance in the greater scheme of things. We pass from the unified body/spirit and become separated into the physical dust which during life is glued to our very spiritual being, and into the way we are remembered after we are gone. The Visible and Invisible components of our being separated at death, so that we live on in the minds of others and as a pile of dust to be scraped up and put in a vase, or buried for the worms to feed on.
for Anna Louise Searles who has taught me so much about life, love and moving to death…
