death – Page 3 – Karl Möller

15/03/2013

Two types of losses

At the beginning of Lent I decided to subscribe to the Lent Daily Reflections by the World Community for Christian Meditation. I am glad that I did, because they have contained many inspiring thoughts alongside some gentle, wholesome counsel.

Today’s reflection (Friday of Lent Week 4) talks about the anguish of loss, making the helpful distinction between two types of losses. One is described as the deliverance from an addiction or a compulsive delusion, which, while very much experienced as a loss at the time, in the end leads to freedom and a life lived with renewed vigour. The second type, on the other hand, is a ‘genuine death experience that drags us into a vortex of surrendering to something vaster than we can control’.

Experience of the second type, which they describe as ‘major surgery with a strong anaesthetic that puts us out’, can take a long time to heal and integrate and can change your life forever. It probably will!

11/03/2013

Best Reads 2013. V: Anne Carson, Antigonick

This is Anne Carson’s translation (and adaptation) of Sophocles’ play Antigone. Following on from Nox, an epitaph written on the occasion of her brother’s death, Carson here revisits the theme of mourning a lost brother, for the heroine of Sophocles’ play is condemned to nothing less than a living death in a sealed cave, all because she wished to bury her dead brother.

Antigonick is a powerfully compelling work, beautifully executed while at the same time, in typical Anne Carson fashion, bordering on the incomprehensible. The text is presented in handwriting (apparently Carson’s own), in capital letters and with hardly any punctuation. It is interlaced with rather surreal illustrations by Bianca Stone, printed on transparent vellum that overlays the text. It is not always clear how the illustrations relate to the text, but they contribute significantly to the beauty and appeal of the book as well as to its overall impact by heightening the absurdity of the world that Carson’s rereading presents.

Anne Carson, Antigonick — Illustration by Bianca Stone

Not an easy read this, but a fascinating one. Like Nox, it left me intrigued and deeply touched by Carson’s creative and harrowing ways of mourning her brother’s death.

06/03/2013

Best Reads 2013. III: Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality

The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, says Frances Young in Brokenness and Blessing, is the kind of book she would have liked to have written herself. Published by Oxford University Press, this is a well-informed exploration of desert spirituality. But it offers more than that. Talking about ‘the permeable boundaries between critical scholarship and lived experience’, Belden Lane also reflects on his own experience of spending time in wilderness places; and he gives a very personal account of his journey alongside his dying mother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s and cancer as well as his attempt to come to terms with his father’s somewhat mysterious death earlier on in his life.

The book is in three parts, which reflect the traditional three stages of the spiritual life: Purgation: Emptiness in a Geography of Abandonment; Illumination: Waiting in a Silence Beyond Language; and Union: Love as the Fruit of Indifference. These three stages, notes Lane, are symbolised by the desert, the mountain and the cloud.

There are chapters on:

spirituality and the environment,
wild terrain and the spiritual life,
prayer without language in the mystical tradition,
the symbolism of Mounts Sinai and Tabor in the Christian tradition,
the landscape and theology of early Christian monasticism,
the desert Christians’ counter-cultural spirituality of attentiveness, indifference and love.

And, to give you another list, which is the only way I can even begin to do justice to the book’s richness without giving an extensively long account, Lane offers insightful thoughts on:

abandonment of control (and the desert as teacher of renunciation and abandonment),
letting go and the emptying of self,
loving that which cannot be understood,
the power of compassion as the fruit of indifference (the notion of indifference might require some explanation, but you have to read Lane for that),
a new harmony with the land,
learning to pay attention,
the transformation of desire into love,
meeting love in the most unlikely places,
the power of silence to connect and heal,
liturgy and the reaffirmation of ordinariness.

Woven into the fabric of the book are interludes, called ‘mythic landscapes’, in which Lane takes his personal account of the journey with his dying mother as well as his repeated experiences of wilderness places as the starting point for further reflections on issues such as a spirituality of brokenness, the gift of nothingness in a desert landscape, the unexpected gifts of grief, and a spirituality of desire.

Having had some recent desert experiences myself, I have found this a rich and rewarding read.

20/02/2013

Best Reads 2013. II: Connie Palmen, I. M.: Ischa Meijer. In Margine. In Memoriam

In February 1991 Dutch author Connie Palmen is interviewed by the well-known talk show host and journalist Ischa Meijer. It is a meeting that changes the course of their lives, and what ensues is a relationship that is not easily matched for intensity. In this stunning and admirably honest autobiographical work Palmen reflects on their love and brokenness. And she gives us insights into the working habits and practices of two writers, whose approaches to their work couldn’t have been more different but who nonetheless profited immensely from what was an intensely symbiotic relationship.

This is also a book about travel, especially in North America, which Palmen and Meijer both adored, and it is a heart-rending and very honest account of loss and grief, because in 1995 Meijer dies from a sudden heart attack. Palmen devotes only the last forty pages to her struggle to come to terms with her loss and grief, but these are poignant pages indeed. My quotes from Palmen’s reflections come from this final part of her book:

Und inmitten dieses lautlosen Tumults lernte ich meinen Gott kennen, der in mir geboren wurde und der, so versicherte Er mir selbst, schon immer dagewesen war. Er verband mich mit allen Zeiten und allen Menschen, tot oder lebendig.

(And in the midst of this soundless tumult I got to know my God, who was born within me and who, so he ensured me himself, had always been there. He connected me with all times and all people, dead or alive.)

Sucht ist eine Freundschaft ohne Freund. Du suchst, was in unmittelbarer Nähe und greifbar ist. Eine Zigarette ist ein Halt, ein Halt, der verbrennt. Der größte Vorzug einer Schachtel Marlboro ist, daß sie dich nicht betrügen kann, dich nicht verlassen kann, daß sie niemals aufhören wird, dich zu lieben, und natürlich, daß sie nicht sterben kann. Das ist die Essenz einer Sucht, glaube ich. Du umgehst die Risiken, die du bei einer Liebe oder Freundschaft notgedrungen eingehst, weil du sonst keine Liebe und keine Freundschaft hättest.

(Addiction is a friendship without a friend. You search for something that is close and tangible. A cigarette is a foothold, a foothold that is consumed by fire. The biggest advantage of a box of Marlboro is that it cannot betray you, cannot leave you, that it will never stop loving you and, of course, that it cannot die. That is the essence of an addiction, I believe. You avoid the risks that you inevitably run in the case of love or friendship, because otherwise you wouldn’t have love or friendship.)

Ich mache die Trauer zur Vollzeitbeschäftigung.

(I am turning grief into a full-time occupation.)

Ich denke wie verrückt, aber es nützt mir nichts.

(I am thinking like mad, but it is to no avail.)

Gutes, Amüsantes und Schönes läßt mich leiden, weil ich es allein sehen muß, es nicht mit ihm teilen und dadurch verdoppeln kann, weil er nicht mehr genießen kann, was ich genieße.

(Good, amusing and beautiful things make me suffer, because I have to see them on my own, can’t share them with him, thus redoubling them, because he can’t enjoy anymore what I am enjoying.)

16/02/2013

Brief but insightful spiritual reflections on the book of Jonah

Paul Murray’s book on the prophet Jonah, A Journey with Jonah: The Spirituality of Bewilderment, is a short one. Actually, it’s a very short one. Discounting the text of the book of Jonah itself and the illustrations, it runs to no more than 49 small pages. A pretty lightweight book then? Short, yes, but no, lightweight it isn’t. Although Murray, an Irish Dominican, obviously cannot give us an in-depth explanation of the text in those 49 pages, he has nonetheless written some quite remarkable reflections on this fascinating Old Testament text.

Murray is well-informed, and he manages, again rather surprisingly, given the limited space, to engage with an astonishing variety of perspectives, including modern scholarly treatments (Phyllis Trible, A. R. Ceresko, James Limburg, Yvonne Sherwood, André LaCocque, Jack Sasson, Hans Walter Wolff), works from the long history of Christian and Jewish engagement with this text (Jerome, Augustine, Methodius, Columban, Martin Luther, Rabbi Eliezer, the Zoar), poets, novelists and dramatists (Herman Melville, Francis Quarles, Wolf Mankowitz, Hart Crane, Robert Frost), philosophers and psychologists (George Steiner, Erich Fromm, Carl Gustav Jung, Martin Buber), mystics (John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Thomas Merton), the list goes on ….

More importantly, in his brief comments on the lesson of the wild storm, the lesson of the great whale (before anyone objects, Murray is well aware that the Hebrew text doesn’t mention a whale) and the lesson of the wondrous plant, Murray has given us some equally brief but nonetheless insightful spiritual reflections on fear, terror and courage; compassion, love and responsibility; suffering and bewilderment; failure and breakdown; death and resurrection; anger, resentment and bigotry ….

The following quotes may give a flavour of Murray’s writing:

… the moment of actual failure and breakdown – the experience of bewilderment in our lives – can be the moment of breakthrough, the moment when God’s grace finally shakes down all our defences. And then, to our amazement, from out of the belly of failure, from out of the death of false dreams and false ideals, and even from the jaws of a living hell, we can begin to experience the grace of resurrection.

… sometimes, it is only in the midst of the ‘tempest’, in the heart of a storm of circumstances which we can’t control, that we come finally to realise something of the wonderful mystery of God, and realise also how far beyond anything we can imagine or hope for are his plans both for ourselves and for the entire world.

Here’s something else that Murray has done for me. Having come across numerous references to John of the Cross’s reflections on the ‘dark night of the soul’ in recent months, Murray’s quotes from this text have finally persuaded me that I must go and read it!