Death and the Spiritual Life: an Invitation into Lent
Today is Ash Wednesday, the start to the season of Lent, and I want to invite you all to our Lenten Storytelling Dinner on Friday evening, March 6th at 6:30p.
Ash Wednesday is a day when the Church asks us to remember, name, and face what the author of Genesis recorded, “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” But inherent to a reflection on death is a reflection on life, and as I’ve been preparing for our Lenten Storytelling Dinner coming up on March 6th, I’ve been reflecting on this paragraph I read from Christian Wiman’s book My Bright Abyss. He writes (and quotes Miguel de Unamuno):
“Remove futurity from experience and you leach meaning from it just as surely as if you cut out a man’s past. ‘Memory is the basis of individual personality.’ Miguel de Unamuno writes, ‘just as tradition is the basis of the collective personality of a people. We live in memory and by memory, and our spiritual life is at bottom simply the effort of our memory to persist, to transform itself into hope, the effort of our past to transform itself into our future.’”
It’s that one line: Our spiritual life is at bottom simply the effort of our memory to persist, to transform itself into hope.
What is the spiritual life, then? What part does death play?
I once heard someone say that one of the biggest predictors of a child’s emotional health and success is their parents’ ability to tell their own story, which is to say that when our memories persist through us they are transformed into hope. Said again, with perhaps and hopefully more clarity: our ability to transcend death (memory, what has passed, what has been lost or left behind) into life (hope, what is and will be), is held in the stories we tell. Of interest for me and for us here is the work of forming those stories, which is, I believe, the effort of the spiritual life.
How we understand the stories of our lives and how we transform memory into hope is a way of life—a deep well within that we have to seek and find. The success (and by success I mean the persistence of/the life of) our cultures, our children, and of our very lives depend on our ability to understand and tell these stories.
One of the things I find most compelling about Christianity and the story of Jesus is an honesty about death. Death is essential to the Christian story—that is, there is an essential acceptance and familiarity with death in the Christian tradition. For starters, Jesus was very clear, from the very beginning of his ministry, that he would die. And when it came time for that to happen he faced it head on—there was no shirking or skirting the issue, no pretending that it wasn’t going to happen—it was just a fact that had to be walked towards. Arguably it was the inevitability of his death that empowered him to live so radically with this life—with and for those outside of power.
But not only was Jesus clear about his death, his life transcended death (which is, of course, the very essence of Christianity). He walked through death and yet the story continued. And this is what makes the difference. In the Christian tradition death is final and forever changes what was, but it’s not the end of the story. Instead, the fact of death simply shifts what life can be.
Here’s where it all connects for me: the work we do to tell that story—the one about the things that have died and the life that continues on—is the work of our spiritual lives. It requires that we face death, accept it, mourn and grieve at whatever has been lost and let the product of that work transform into hope.
All of this runs in stark contrast to so much of our culture that is obsessed with transcending death by prolonging life via personal data—with wearable devices to alert us when we’ve been sitting too long, to tell us how many steps we took in day, how many calories we consumed, our resting heart rate (all of which have a time and place). But so much of this effort is simply a pursuit of immortality whose product is fear.
Instead, the Christian tradition offers a path, typified on a day like today, to face what has died. The effort then of our spiritual lives is to look and let that memory be transcended into hope through us, through the stories we tell.
So, this Lent you are invited to a Lenten Storytelling Dinner on March 6th at 6:30p at the Jewish Center and Garden, Urban Adamah, in West Berkeley—to respond, to listen, and to share, as we engage this idea of the effort of the spiritual life in community. You can also join us on Sunday evenings at 5p where we’ll follow the story of Jesus facing his own death, culminating in Holy Week (April 2-4). RSVP here for the dinner on the 6th.
Yours,
Emily Hansen Curran
