I Am a Candle

“In 1973, anthropologist Ernest Becker published the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death. The book explains how our species has a deep aversion to the brute fact of our mortality. Our death anxiety is so troubling to us that we devise elaborate strategies to distract ourselves and deny our mortality. On an individual level, we stay too busy or too entertained to think about the subject. We take drugs or seek pleasure through sex or sport to make us feel alive and invincible. We portray ourselves as transcendent heroes in the narrative of our lives. On a societal level, we launch massive immortality projects through business, politics, war and religion. Becker came to see the whole of human civilization as a massive defense mechanism against the full realization of our impermanence. Our civilizational death-denial project builds a death-averse rationale that helps both us and civilization: ‘My individual life is meaningless because I will die. But if I tie my life to something that lives longer than me – like my religion, nation, party, or civilization – then my life will have meaning, and I will, in a sense, live on in that transcendent community’.

You can see where this leads. As we feel a sense of doom about ecological overshoot and the possibility of civilizational collapse, we feel personally threatened, which is traumatic enough. But even more traumatic, we feel that our all-encompassing shared immortality project, namely our civilization, is threatened too.” (pg 141)

“We live between two impending dangers, both real, both potential threats to our existence. To our left, we face the frightening gradual accumulation of environmental and social consequences of ecological overshoot. To our right, we face the more sudden social consequences of having our terror management strategies fail, plunging us and our neighbors into our most reactive, most neurotic, and least rational behaviors right at a time when we need cool heads and a collaborative spirit.” (pg 142)

“When our minds are troubled by persistent thoughts of death, we become more rigid in our adherence to the norms of our social in-group and more hostile to outsiders. The more anxious we become about our own death, the more we experience what researchers call ‘collective neuroticism’, and the more likely we are to harm or even kill others.”[i] (pgs 141-2)

“Each religion is unique, but all religions seem to offer resources for terror management. In my own Christian tradition, death is often reduced to a consequence of sin, not as a feature of life.[ii] Then it is minimized as nothing significant, since the eternal life of the soul continues when this mortal life ends. The weight of eternal life makes the few years of this life seem short, and death, insignificant. That’s one way of managing the fear of death: by denying that death is of any significance.” (pg 144)

St Francis of Assisi offers another perspective on death. In his poem/prayer “Canticle of the Sun” he praises all elements of creation and the God who made it. Then he thanks God for “Sister Bodily Death, from whose embrace no mortal can escape”.

Francis places death in the normal rhythms of life. She is our sister, like all of creation, animate or inanimate. Just as we learn to live with the realities of creation, so we might learn to live with the reality of death. As the Preacher long ago said, “there is a time to be born and a time to die”.

McLaren makes three suggestions to help us lose our terror of death. First, remember that “death tells us that our lives matter because they are precious, long enough to be meaningful, but short enough that we can’t take even a single day for granted. Second, learning to accept the reality of death is an essential dimension of maturity and wisdom.” Third, we can see death not only as a defeat, but as an act of giving. “In mortality, I recognize that this privilege is like a turn in a game; my turn will be over some day, and it will be time to give up my space and my share of resources for someone else.” (pgs 144-145)

“The terror of death has haunted our species since we left our handprints in ochre on cave walls…If we are to get through this dangerous time…our denial of death is one thing that must die…sooner or later we must become not only tolerant but truly thankful for Sister Death.” (pg 147)

Jesus himself presents this perspective on death: “unless a grain of wheat falls in the soil and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it brings forth much fruit.” And, “if you try to save your life you will lose it. But if you lose your life for my sake, you will find it.” Jesus showed us the ultimate example of this through his own undeserved and unjust torture and death which is the source of life and reconciliation for the cosmos.

Let us “become more wise….(and) in the calm beyond the storm we will see our remaining moments, days and years for what they have always been: a precious gift, fleeting as morning mist, a fragile flame on a tiny wick in a bit of wax, gloriously impermanent and too magnificent to waste.” (pg 148)

[i] I believe one could make the case that this is exactly what is happening right now in the United States, as the Baby Boomer generation passes from the scene and the demographics show that the white population is losing its majority status and eventually its power. Led by the conservative media (Fox News and conservative talk radio), the Republican Party, white evangelicals and Donald Trump and his sycophants, the “right” has become more rigid in adherence to (social) norms and more hostile to outsiders. That has resulted in a grab for power that has produced extremism, cruelty, exclusion, and harm to immigrants and other minority groups, including, explicitly, members of the LGBTQ community. All in the name of "making us great again".

[ii] McLaren notes that some Christians may want to quote 1 Corinthians 15:25-26, where Paul clearly refers to death as an enemy. McLaren comments that if you read further and follow Paul’s (lengthy and complex) argument, you find that Paul sees death as an essential agent of creation’s transformation. (15:54-58). In fact, death does not make our lives meaningless, it creates the context in which our labors are not in vain (v58).

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