How Shall We Then Die?

I have come to the end of Parker J. Palmer’s wonderful book On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity and Getting Old.

The last chapter asks “How shall we then die?”

He’s not a fan of the “pie in the sky” perspective: “Theologies that portray heaven as a gated community in the sky don’t speak to my condition. Among other things, an eternity spent exclusively among members of my own tribe sounds more hellish than heavenly.”

Now that Palmer is older, he is less certain of what he knows and more certain that there is much he doesn’t know.

But of two things he is certain: “When we die, our bodies return to the earth, and earth knows how to turn death into new life.”

“When my own small life ends in some version of wind and fire, my body will be transformed by the same alchemy that keeps making all things new… It matters not to me whether I am resurrected in a loon calling from the lake, a sun-glazed pine, a wildflower on the forest floor, the stuff that fertilizes those trees and flowers, or the Northern Lights and the stars that lie beyond them. It’s all good and it’s all gold, a vast web of life in which body and spirit are one.”

“I won’t be glad to say goodbye to life, to challenges that help me grow, to gifts freely given, or to everyone and everything I love. But I’ll be glad to play a bit part in making new life possible for others. That’s a prospect that makes life worth dying for.”

The final word comes from Julian of Norwich: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

I’m not as old as Palmer, but having just celebrated another birthday, I find this, for many reasons, comforting and hopeful.