I have spoken before about 'mundane religious experiences'... experiences common to humanity that, in some way, seem to point to some transcendent force that impinges on the human condition. Some of those experiences are paradoxical. One such paradoxical religious experience is our experience of death.
Death stands before us in each moment. We cannot ever really escape it, it is always with us. We may do things to push away our awareness of death, but in some sense even this pushing away just makes its presence that much sharper. It is there, in every thought, word and breath: someday we will be no more. Every moment testifies to the reality of death, for each and every moment dies before us. Life is a long story of passing away, there is no way really around it.
I've argued many times that this fact of passing away is what presents us with the problem of meaning and significance. For if death is the final word, nothing we do makes any real difference. The Buddhists rightly recognize impermanence as a problem to any project of self-development or any quest for meaning or significance. People instinctively realize this, and so much of life is a reaction to this fact. Again, many lives are the long story of ignoring the power of death. Pleasure gives one a momentary release from its power. So do many of the mundane religious experiences I've spoken of elsewhere: joy, play, humor, and hope. Other people just give in to this power, they in some sense worship death and find some kind of delight in their acceptance of its power.
Others face this reality head-on, and truly struggle with it. Not content to give up either the transcendent experiences that seek to rob death of its power, nor to ignore the power it does contain, they seek some life that holds the truths in tension. The truths of our experience of eternity and our experience of death. Interestingly, they may find that death has its own transcendent message.
A person who faces the reality of death, can find in it a kind of companion. The passing away of life stands there as a kind of divine call. Reflecting on death can drive us to seek depth in the present moment. I try to savor more richly, to take more time, to embrace the present because I KNOW it is passing into death. Death can make life sharper, more zesty, more real, by giving it an edge of substance. This will be gone, and so I must hold onto it as hard as I can. In this way death actually adds to my own quest for meaning by making me seek the most meaning I can in each moment. For truly, this is my only chance to make this moment significant. It passes into death soon.
So we have in death a paradox. Death comes to us as the thief of meaning, and yet it adds to our need to find meaning in the first place. If I was to live forever, if death was no kind of threat, then I would not need any transcendent source of meaning, for my meaning could be found in myself. Indeed without death life might seem meaningless altogether. The fact of death is the horror of life, and threatens all I value. But the experience of death includes in it a kind of divine call: a call to make the most of the moment. Yet if that call is truly divine, then there is some kind of eternity in the world, and my life isn't limited by the boundary of death at all. How do we make sense of this?
It is here that yet again a process theological perspective can help us make sense of the fullest range of our experiences. For process theology accounts God dipolar: God is partly within time, and partly beyond time. Each moment stands for God an opportunity: an opportunity to be more. God takes each experience of value, and adds it to His own experiential stock. The Kingdom of God itself will be larger and enriched by every moment that adds value to the universe. God seeks two things in each moment: the maximization of benefit for all, and the maximization of 'zest', of depth of experience. The deeper and richer the experience, the more of it is retained for God. But only experiences of value are retained at all. Thus each moment wherein the life of the universe is not added to is a moment that is lost to God. It truly passes into oblivion. And every moment not savored, not soaked in, is a moment that at best exists for God as it existed for the experiencer, as a whisp, however positive the experience itself was.
Thus God takes death and turns it into a call. God can speak to us through our experience of death as He speaks to us through so many other experiences. God reminds us in each moment, to soak up that moment, to soak up all life has to offer, and indeed to make the moment mean something, to do the right thing so that the moment is not lost to oblivion but is retained in eternity. We can also make sense of the same God being the source of this experience AND those that kind of laugh in the face of death. For we are simply experience life as God does: in a dipolar way. The transcendent experience of death is a direct encounter with God's temporal pole. The transcendent experiences that defy death are an encounter with the atemporal pole of God. There is eternity, and in the face of that eternity death is nothing but the servant of life. Yet death's power is real, and it is that power that gives God the opportunity to reach out to us and push us to help add to His own life.
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