Facing Death
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| Ireland's Eye from Baldoyle |
Those who live close to nature learn its
mysteries with a certain ease that is always foreign to us city dwellers. That is why I love travelling back to the
county where my father was born and lived for more than half his life. He truly shared in that country wisdom. Likewise, do the simple country people of
Calabria where I have been holidaying for some recent summers. Tribes and more primitive peoples also share
in such simple wisdom. Modern
sophisticated humankind, which works so much from the neo-cortex, has almost forgotten
what it is like to live close to nature and its cycles. Often, alas, we moderns
only meet nature when it interrupts our plans through the natural evils of
tornadoes, snow blizzards, floods and so on.
Indeed, we have learned of late that much of the natural disasters are
caused by man-made pollution to our atmosphere.
Alas, we moderns have done so much learned thinking about the world that
we have quite forgotten that we are part of it, too. We are creatures, albeit self-conscious, but
creatures nonetheless of the world, in which we live, move and have our being.
Be that as it may, what I want to write about
here is the last few hours of my mother’s life.
That frail life is slowly but surely leaking away now at the grand old
age of 96. My brother Pat and I have been called home from holiday to await her
passing from this world. And yet, with
all the knowledge we have gained about what it means to be human, we have never
really bettered the ways of coping and dealing with dying and death than the
many religious traditions of the world have put at our disposal. The community comes around and ritualises the
passing of this person from our presence.
As a philosopher, I would like to believe that I am open enough to allow
all creeds the dignity of their individual beliefs. Dying and death, and indeed how we deal with
them, are not matters of pure science that can rule as to what is the true and
right way to celebrate the meaning of a life that has passed or indeed rule
upon the belief of a life to come. Comforting
ourselves in our lonely grief is quite fittingly the province of faith,
religion and indeed of the imagination, and it is my considered conviction that
both faith and religion belong firmly within the ambit of the intricate mystery
of the imagination. It is not,
therefore, a question of whether the next life exists or not or of whether it
can be proved one way or another. It is simply not a question that falls within
the province of science at all. It is
one that falls within the ambit of the psychology and sociology of religion and
within humanity’s many learnt ways of coping with its crises. These are the factors that such trenchant
atheists like Hitchens, Dawkins and Denneth leave out of the picture. Their arguments are good and valid, but only
good and valid within the narrow parameters of a delimiting and dehumanising
science, in effect within the confines of a sheer scientism.
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| My mother and I about five years ago |
The imagination is a wonderful faculty which
leads us individually and collectively into mysteries which the rational or
cognitive faculties of the mind cannot fathom – great works of music, wonderful
pieces of art, marvellous buildings and bridges and so on. Over 100 years ago the great John Henry
Cardinal Newman pointed out that even scientists had to use their imagination
as well as their cognitive or rational faculties in bringing their discoveries
and inventions into the world. The imagination of a culture is a rich world
that cannot be reduced to the parameters of any science. We meaning-making creatures need our beliefs,
no matter what their standing in a purely cognitive or logical sense. The
brain, and the mind which resides principally though perhaps not entirely
there, and even the soul which some believe lives mysteriously there, too, are
all more than just firings on and off of various neurons. Yes, they may be that, but not just
that. We humans are more. And it is in the quest to find out what the “more”
in us is that all true inquiry lies.
And so, as my mother’s life leaks out, I am in
many ways diminished. The womb that
begot me is no more. That was the human
animal womb. Was there or is there, as
the great psalmist David put it, a womb before the dawn that begot us all? Our questions are legion, our feelings
confused, perhaps numbed. The existentialists
are right. Death makes dust of both our
individual achievements and dreams.
However, it cannot reduce to ashes the memory of the collectivity, the shared
emotions and feelings of the race, the drive to meaning within any culture. In
times like this, all I can do is take refuge in the wisdom of the culture which
begot me. Rest in peace, Mary Quinlan. I hope I will live the remainder of my life
with the courage and determination to see no task left undone as you did! Your
task is finished – a job well done! Consummatus est! I will miss you sorely!
