I’ve been ordained for over 30 years now, and during that time it’s been my privilege to be with a number of people as they died. Some were frightened not of annihilation, but of absurdity. Death sealed for them the emptiness of a life not fully lived. Death came too soon, before they could make sense of their life, before they could make one last attempt to give it meaning. They became vulnerable to attacks of despair in which their sense of the value of all that had gone before them drained away. The sting of death was not the loss of life, but the loss of meaning.
I face my mortality in the conviction that death is the gateway to the fulfilment of human life, not its extinction. I believe life is a pilgrimage of which the destination is God. The fears that assail me are more about the process of dying rather than the event itself. It’s not the dying that’s the issue: it’s living until I die. Jesus said that he had come that ”˜we might have life, and have it abundantly.’ Abundant living is both his promise and his gift, and I pray for grace to be open to it.
Sadly, we all know of individuals where in old age disease and chemical changes to the brain have effected irreversible changes in their personality, but I have also seen how a person’s true character can emerge in old age.
Excellent – I needed that today.