Warnings only tell us about one side of death
/The Boston Herald
March 18, 2001
The warnings are posted on every piece of gym equipment, at the bottom of a long list of carefully written instructions. They are in clear, dark print and are easy to read: "Attention users: Failure to comply could result in serious injury or even death."
Nothing new here. We live in a world full of warnings. Warning: the following program contains explicit language. Warning: Do not exceed recommended dosage. Warning: For external use only. Not to be swallowed. Eye irritant. Keep out of reach of children. Do not use near fire, flame or pilot light. This product contains ingredients which may cause cancer.
Cautions abound. School zone. Detour. Wrong way. You forget to put on a seat belt and a chime sounds. You approach a railroad crossing and if a train is coming, a whistle blows and a steel gate comes down. With so many warnings, so many words and well-intentioned signs and gate makers conspiring to keep us safe, you would think that we'd all live in good health on this earth forever.
The warnings on the gym equipment have been there a long time. But I didn't notice them until last week. What struck me was the pairing of injury and death, not just in the printed warning, "Failure to comply could result in serious injury or death," but throughout our culture, where death is seen not as an inevitability, the end of every life, but as the ultimate injury, which can be avoided.
And here it is, the big dichotomy, isn't it? Death as the Grim Reaper, the thief in the night, something we must always fight against and something which, if we fight hard enough, we can and should conquer. And death as companion and reward, part of a circle, a going back to, “Death, where is thy sting?”
We are conditioned by all we see, hear, read and are exposed to every day into believing that death is an aberration, that life is the natural state and that all we have to do to be guaranteed this life is to follow the rules. There they are, posted all over the place. Just follow the yellow brick road.
But then in the churches we attend once a week for a single hour, there is this other death. "I am the resurrection and the life, sayeth the Lord; he that believes in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever lives and believes in me shall never die."
In the Catholic liturgy for the burial of the dead, the word celebration is used. "We come to celebrate the life and death of" the dead person, the priest says. It's jarring when you hear it. What is there to celebrate? There is only loss. An empty place at a table. A human being gone. But gone where?
A child asks questions: "Where did Nana go” “If I let my balloon float up to the sky, will Nana get it?" Adults ask questions, too, but the answers don't always come. "At the age of 4, I knew that God was everywhere," wrote renowned columnist Jim Bishop. Then, "When I was 21, my superior intellect told me that God was a fake."
Then Bishop got married and had a child and his faith slowly came back: "I saw the miracle of birth and it turned my wandering mind around." But he had to work at his faith. "Faith does not come as quickly as these words," he wrote. "It starts. It stops. It floods and recedes." Faith has a hard time surviving in the world. How can the quiet, understated "Man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets," compete with 24 hours a day of "You only live once and you can live longer and healthier with exercise, natural herbs, unnatural hormones, Reiki, feng shui, massage therapy"?
It can't.
The soul to grow needs to be nourished and exercised, too. "Our culture looks upon death as the end," says a friend who is a Catholic priest. "But our religion looks upon death as just the end of our beginning."
Every Ash Wednesday, Christians all over the world wear smudges on their foreheads, not as a warning that death comers to all, but as a reminder that the human body is temporary, and that no matter how we take care of it, it’s the too often neglected soul that lives forever.
