With the legalization of “medically assistance in dying” (MAID) last year in Canada, I have been asking the question, “are we losing our ability to die naturally?” Let me provide some context to help you understand why I am asking this provocative question. I remember my good friend’s mother death. It happened about 15-20 years ago. She was in the hospital wrestling with some health issues. She had diabetes and was partially blind. But none of these health issues were life-threatening. One Sunday evening, she ask her family to all come to visit her. She began saying goodbye to all of them. The family was very confused for she was being discharged home the very next day. That night, she died a natural death. She never did come home. Clearly, my friend’s mother had no fear of death. Furthermore, she seem to know her death was coming soon. So when the reality of potential death arose, it seems she allowed it to happen. She didn’t fight it but rather surrendered to it. A few years later, I had the very opposite happen in the congregation I was pastoring. A mother in my congregation was dying of terminal cancer and it was very painful. She wanted to die so badly and I remember praying with her many times asking God to take her. But while she got sicker and sicker, frailer and frailer, she could not die. She lost a ton of weight. I didn’t know it was possible for an adult body to weigh so little. As much as she wanted to die, her body would not allow her to die until it finally physically shut down. The family and I both struggled with why she could not die earlier. During my nine years as a part-time pastoral counsellor for Community Care Access Centre of York Region, I provided spiritual care to people who were palliative or had mental health issues. I found myself providing pastoral care in a lot of dying situations. Many of you are probably aware of a common pattern that dying people tend to hang on living until a certain family member comes, often from a distant, and soon after that happens, the person dies. It seems that we do have some control over when we die, that we can prolong it until some sense of emotional closure happens for us. I remember visiting a childless couple in their thirties. He had been unconscious for a couple days in the dying stages of cancer in a hospital bed at home. Suddenly on Halloween day, he woke up and was talkative and some of his nieces and nephews came over that day dressed up in their Halloween costumes. Later that evening he went unconscious again. The following Sunday, three days later, the wife phoned me all anxious trying to understand why her husband had not died yet. She feared that there was still some unfinished business. She remembered that her husband had never been baptized. she wondered if her husband was afraid to die due to that. Personally, I was skeptical about her reasoning but I kept that to myself. I was aware that people hang onto to living during their last days of life for many unknown reasons and so I came over the next day with my baptismal supplies. On Monday morning, I officiated a very un-Mennonite baptism using the prayers in my Mennonite Minister’s handbook. I stayed with the wife for about an hour and then headed home. When I arrived home, I discovered a joyful message from the wife on my phone. Her husband had died just minutes after I left. I remember people joking with me, upon hearing the story, about being Rev. Death. Did the man’s body finally quite working, or was he finally able to surrender to death due to some emotional or spiritual issue resolved? I will never know, but I have sat with that question ever since. Last fall when I attended two different sessions about Medical Assistance In Dying (MAID), this question took on a new urgency for me. Is the point of death simply the body no longer able to physically function, totally a physical decision beyond our control? Or is the point of death more than that? Is the point of death something that would happen sooner if we are able to ultimately surrender into the experience of death? . Clearly, our western culture is in the first camp. Death happens when our body no longer is able to physically function and so the goal of health care is to make it as comfortable as possible for the dying person, and the family and friends who surround them. But some people are finding that this approach to end-of-life care is not enough. The dying process is too long and hard and so a few of them are choosing MAID as a way to hasten their physical death. I find myself in the second camp where it appears we do have some control around how we respond to death. We can surrender to it. One could say death is the “The ultimate surrender”. Or, we can fight death until our body can’t resist it any longer, and we are forced to die. Now, we live in a culture that is fighting death at every turn. Our culture conditions us to fight, fight, fight until there is no physical hope and then we are to let go and surrender to death. But it is not that easy to flip the internal switch to surrender when you have practised fighting all your life. I remember toilet training my children. One of them controlled its bladder until it was no longer possible and a pee accident would occur. As much as Valerie and I encouraged otherwise, my child was not able to let go of control, surrender control of its bladder until an accident happened. Eventually, finally, our child became toilet trained but it was not as simple as flipping the switch from fighting it to surrendering to it. My child had to learn how to surrender to the impulse of peeing. I realize that this is an earthy example, but I think it illustrates the point. If we have been fighting death all of our life, no wonder we find it so hard to let go of control and surrender to the experience of death. When the physically urge to die, to ultimately surrender, becomes present. It goes against our conditioned nature. This begs the question, what would help us surrender to the experience of death more easily when that time in our life comes? I think we need to rethink our beliefs around the process of dying and death. Is death truly our enemy? Do we need to fear death? Within the Christian tradition, the Bible teaches us to not set our mind on the things of the flesh that can be seen for our outer physical nature is wasting away and thus temporary. This is what our western culture focuses almost all of its attention on, and why we have such strong fears and anxieties around dying and death. Rather, the Bible teaches us to set our mind on the things of the Spirit that cannot be seen and yet they can be experienced, the treasure within our clay pots, our inner nature that is been renewed each day and thus is eternal (Rom 8:5-11; 2 Cor 4:7-5:7). What does it mean to set our minds on the things of the Spirit? Lets play with this for a moment. For you to experience love in your heart, what has to happen to your mind? Does thinking about love cause you to experience love? It might but often thinking by itself does not bring love into your experience. Your soul must open up, surrender control one could say, and in doing so, we begin to experience love flowing within us toward others, toward ourselves, toward God. What about the spirit of compassion? Does thinking about compassion cause you to feel compassion toward someone or yourself? It might, but often it doesn’t. For you to feel compassion, your soul must open up, surrender control, and allow yourself to experience the pain and suffering someone is encountering. In doing so, we begin to experience compassion flowing within us. This pattern that I am trying to illustrate is true for every fruit or aspect of God’s spirit. We rarely can think our way to experiencing any of the expressions of God’s spirit. These qualities of God’s spirit only arise in our experience when we are able to move to a place of surrender, letting go of control. I want you to contemplate all the experiences in your life that bring you joy, peace, love, even the sense of God’s presence in your life. Think of all the moments in your life when you totally surrendered to the moment: watching a sunset, playing your musical instrument, creating art, playing in your garden or at the arena or ball park, conversations with a friend or even a stranger, those moments of intimacy, those moments when you stretch yourself to try something new, those times when you did an act of compassion or took a step of faith or took a stand of justice around something that was wrong. The list goes on. All of those times were moments when your mind was set on God’s spirit, not in a place of control but rather in a place of surrender, and as a result, you experienced peace, life, and joy. All of those moments were moments of surrender, times when you let go of control, and experience God’s spirit freely without your ego getting in the way due to fear or anxiety or anger or hate. There is actually a theological word for what I am describing: kenosis, the ability to empty of one’s mind or ego so that we can experience God’s spirit. Something special happens every time we practice kenosis and let go of control and surrender ourselves to the present moment. We experience a tiny death, the death of our restrictive ego for a moment. In that moment, our mind is set free to experience the activities of God’s spirit and the reign of God’s Kingdom in our lives. In those moments of surrender, we experience little deaths that make it possible for us to experience that part of us that is united with God’s spirit, that internal treasure that is eternal, imperishable, that cannot die.
Furthermore, in those moments, we also discover what it means for the reign of God and God’s heavenly kingdom to be here on earth. Those experiences are foretastes of heaven. What would happen if we made it a spiritual practice to live in a place of surrender and the present moment as much as we can, every day as much as we are able, like Jesus did? Just as those moments of experiencing God’s spirit and kingdom here on earth give us a foretaste of what Heaven is like beyond this physical world we live in, those little surrenders that make these moments possible also provide a foretaste of how we will experience our physical death when it happens. It will be one big surrender, into the full experience of God’s spirit and kingdom that will never end. It will be ultimately a profound experience of joy…love…truth…Presence…that will be eternal. Paramahansa Yogananda, a religious writer understands death in this way: “From joy people are born; for joy they live; in joy they melt at death. Death is an ecstasy, for it removes the burden of the body and frees the soul of all pain springing from body identification. It is the cessation of pain and sorrow.” When we learn to practice little deaths within our everyday lives, it begins to change how we anticipate our final death. Death becomes not so scary for we have already experienced many little deaths along the way in our lives. Questions to Ponder: 1. Reflect on your experiences of death of loved ones. How much was their death driven by the physical shutdown of the body? How much was their death shaped by personal surrender of the person dying? 2. Reflect on your experiences of Being or God's spirit: compassion, joy, strength, presence, value, inner support, power to be yourself, intimacy, peace/calmness. How are these experiences different then when your ego is in control? How are these experiences shaped by the surrender or dying of your ego? 3. What do these little experiences of ego deaths teach you about the experience of physical death?
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