Читать книгу Before We Say Goodbye: Preparing for a Good Death - Ray Simpson - Страница 13

In 1997 John O’Donohue wrote a book entitled Anam Cara which became a bestseller. Anam cara is the Gaelic for ‘soul friend’. The soul friend of his book is not a person, it is death. O’Donohue writes:

Death is the great wound in the universe, the root of all fear and negativity. Friendship with our death would enable us to celebrate the eternity of the soul which death cannot touch… ¹

Continually to transfigure the faces of your own death ensures that at the end of your life your physical death will be no stranger, robbing you against your will of the life that you have had. You will know its face intimately. Since you have overcome your fear, your death will be a meeting with a lifelong friend from the deepest side of your nature.

Death can be understood as the final horizon. Beyond there, the deepest well of your identity awaits you. In that well, you will behold the beauty and light of your eternal face.

Benjamin Franklin understood death in this way:

A man is not completely born until he is dead … We are spirits. That bodies should be lent us, while they afford us pleasure, assist us in acquiring knowledge, or in doing good to our fellow creatures, is a kind and benevolent act of God. When they become unfit for these purposes, and afford us pain instead of pleasure, instead of an aid become an encumbrance, and answer none of the intentions for which they were given, it is equally kind and benevolent that a way is provided by which we may get rid of them. Death is that way. ²

A great nineteenth-century Russian spiritual director, Ivanov Macarios, wrote to a widow:

I thank you having revealed to me the sadness of your griefstricken heart; a great radiance comes over me when I share with others their sorrow. Complete, perfect, detailed compassion is the only answer I can give to your tender love of me that has led you, at such a time, to seek me out in my distant, humble hermitage.³

Claire Evans was dying, leaving behind a husband and an 11-year-old son. I recall her saying something like this to me: ‘I don’t know exactly what is coming next. But throughout my life I have listened to a voice deep inside me, and whenever I have followed this voice I have found that there is a response which makes me believe that the world is, at heart, a friend.’

Practise making a friend of death in every way you can, especially by listening to the voice deep inside you.