For seven years we traveled together, and although it was, admittedly, not always smooth sailing, it gave me great pleasure to see Anthony thrive and mature. He was justly proud of his grandfather, Cesar Chavez, the great labor leader and civil rights hero, but he was quite able to stand on his own legs. In the end, I felt as proud as if I myself were his grandfather when Anthony worked his way to a position with The Education Trust—West that gives a wide scope to the best of his talents: compassion, a bright mind, and a keen sense for fairness.
Without a companion now, my travels took on a new form, but they did not become fewer and they did not become shorter. On the contrary, I was welcomed on a continent still largely new to me—South America. New friends, Alberto and Lizzie Rizzo from Buenos Aires, enthusiastic about gratitude, worked with amazing dedication at sharing the joy of grateful living with hundreds of thousands, just as my friends Peter Kessler, Brigitte Kwizda-Gredler, and Mirjam Luthe-Alves had begun to do in Europe. To my great joy, new websites of the Network for Grateful Living sprang up; now the message went out no longer in English only, but in German and Spanish as well. Now, workshops, seminars, and practice groups developed through the enthusiasm, devotion, and effort of volunteers on three continents.
In Argentina, I felt received and surrounded by such a warm outpouring of maternal energy that I now revere the maternal aspect of the Great Mystery under a new image: even before I was born, my parents had placed me under the protection of the “Magna Mater Austriae,” Our Lady of Maria Zell, and I wore a medal with her image on a chain around my neck; later, my favorite image became that of the Virgin of Guadalupe; now I also love the image of Nuestra Señora de Luján. I entrust myself to her protection when flying back to Argentina, whether to shoot a film in Patagonia, engage in a dialogue with Father Anselm Grün before a thousand readers at the Buenos Aires book fair, or simply to admire the beauty and power of the waterfalls of Iguazú. Yes, in my old age, friends have added the gift of such “pleasure trips” to my schedule. In this new phase of traveling, I let myself be placed on a direct flight and be picked up at the airport of my destination. That way, I can still manage it.
At the same time, I keep making journeys inward to new regions of the double realm. Since the double realm is undivided and indivisibly one, I do not have to leave the “surface” behind to journey into its depths. On the contrary, eternity appears in the midst of time and space—shines forth and throws light on my path. All that lies behind me on this path was necessary to bring me to the place where I am now, and everything that lies ahead can be reached only from this present vantage point. Rilke helps me name what lies before me, waiting to be discovered: “the world’s inner space,” “the open,” “the nameless,” and finally “the inaccessible”—the Mystery. This no-thing is immense and simple. All else, by contrast, seems incomprehensibly multitudinous, an inextricable tangle of connections.
Much more often than before, I think about my ancestors and try to imagine them, far back. A past I’ll never come to know has written the script for my life. My right palm exhibits a contracture that does not bother me, but reminds me that I might have inherited it from Viking ancestors.4 What raids and rapes might lie in my past, or what pogroms, in which my noble Polish ancestors might have massacred my Hasidic Jewish forebears. How did these disparate strands flow together into one person? The word person comes from the Latin, persona, and used to mean “the role, the mask through which an actor’s voice sounded.” What past events might have fashioned the mask my Self is wearing now, and shaped the role I play today? Yes, the metaphor of role-playing seems fitting for this double realm of my I in the river of time and my Self beyond time.
On the first Sunday of each month, the monks at Gut Aich monastery put on a puppet show after the children’s service. One and the same Brother can play two characters: say, the princess, with one hand, and the crocodile with the other. In the same way, the one grand Self can play countless roles as well. When I meet a crocodile, it helps to remember that the One whose hand is inside that monster upholds me from within with her other hand. My Self, which is at home in the Great Self, thus plays the role assigned to me. In playing, Self and I become one; I can distinguish between them but never separate them.
I ask myself what it means to play my role “well.” The answer must be that playing the role well means playing with love—expressing, by the very way we live, a joyful yes to limitless belonging. If the I denies this yes, the Self nevertheless gives it the strength to play on, but the I—it now has become the Ego—is playing its role poorly. Only love knows how to act.
“Only through love is anything beautiful! Only through love is anything good!”5 But what if the Self—to retain the metaphor—takes off the hand puppet? What if the mask crumbles into dust? Is everything over, everything at an end? I would say that it is indeed at an end, but it is not over. I do not want to speak of a “life after death.” If dying means that my time is at an end, then it makes no sense to speak of something “after.” But even now, everything I experience has a dimension that transcends time and space. T. S. Eliot calls the Now “the moment in and out of time”6—it is in time and yet beyond time. In this double realm of the Now, time and eternity are one. Therefore, in eternity I cannot lose even the smallest detail of all that I hold dear in time. “All is always now,” says T. S. Eliot—speaking a truth that cannot be denied. For, what is not now is not; it was or will be, and so, it has only a shadow reality in the past or future. But in the Now, time is gathered into eternity—and I have a share in this process. Rilke sees in this gathering activity our task in life, storing up our experiences: “We are the bees of the invisible, passionately gathering the nectar of the visible and storing it in the great golden honeycomb of the invisible.”7
If this is so, need I feel anxious about dying? Well, I do feel anxiety. I admit it, but I do not need to fear. Anxiety and fear, though often confused, are not the same. We must clearly distinguish the two. Anxiety is unavoidable in life, but fear is optional. We are free to choose between fear and courage. Anxiety belongs to the life process, but fear is life-denying and destructive. The words anxious, anguish, and anxiety come from the Latin word angustia, meaning “narrowness, tightness.” Our chest starts feeling tight when we get anxious; that’s natural. It’s natural also that we feel anxiety when life leads us through a narrow passage. But every tight spot challenges us to choose between fear and courage. Fear makes us refuse to go on, we buckle like a stubborn mule at a narrow gate and get stuck in anxiety. Courage doesn’t rid us of anxiety, but trust in life gives us courage to pass through the tight spot. After all, we had to pass through a very narrow passage to be born into this world. Every time life makes us face another narrow spot, it offers us the opportunity for a new birth. I prove that to myself. I look back at the bottlenecks in my life—the tight spots—and see quite clearly: the more pressing the anxiety, the more wonderful the surprises that resulted from passing through. Reminding myself of that again and again gives me trust in life and even courage to die.
What also helps me when I think of dying is the role model of people whose death I have witnessed. Here, I recall two Brothers from Mount Saviour. The first is Brother Christopher, who oversaw the work of building the monastery. Though he was only forty, he had severe heart problems, and on this day, he was the reader during our midday meal. As server, I stood next to him when he began the reading: “But that same night the word of the LORD came to Nathan: Go and tell my servant David: Thus says the LORD: Are you the one to build me a house to live in?” Six verses later, he came to the passage: “Moreover the LORD declares to you that the LORD will make you a house” (2 Sam 7:4–5, 11; emphasis added). At that point, he quietly laid his head on the book and was dead.
A second encouraging example is the death of our Father James Kelly (we had to use his last name, as we had two Brothers named James). He went into the chapel one last time on the evening of Holy Saturday, saw how everything was set up for ou
r Easter celebration, and whispered with the enthusiasm that was so typical of him: “I cannot wait for tomorrow!” Then he went to bed. In the morning, he was supposed to be cantor for the Exsultet, but it seems that he really could not wait and was now singing it in heaven.
About a week before my mother’s death—she is already quite weak—Vanja Palmers, whom she loves like a son, comes to visit her from Switzerland. He tells her that today, on St. Martin’s Day, there is a tradition at Sursee in Switzerland that children can earn pieces of cheese for pulling the most outrageous face. Though we do not set out cheese as our prize, we nevertheless all try to make more outrageous faces than the others. My mother, on her death bed, outdoes us all.
In his famous poem “Sailing to Byzantium,” William Butler Yeats compares an old man to a decrepit scarecrow:
…unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress.”8
I try to do that whenever something about my “mortal dress” has once again gone to tatters, and gratefully applaud all my limbs and organs that are still working. In that way, the things I can be grateful for increase every day. “My cup overflows” (Ps 23:5).
Daily this becomes clearer to me: gratitude is a celebration of love. Just as love is the lived yes of joyful mutual belonging, gratitude celebrates life with a joyful yes at every knot of the great network in which everything is connected to everything. As we live this yes with ever more conviction, love ripens ever more abundantly in the autumn sun of life. I now see it as my main task to simply allow this to happen, since “we do not die from death, but from fully ripened love.”9
Dialogue
JK: Brother David, you began your description of the most recent decade of your life by relating an encounter you had with a gorilla in a zoo. That led you to reflect on the idea that we are essentially all living in a double realm: the I and the self, the profane and the holy, time and eternity. The question is how to unify these double realms, or rather how you, yourself, can manage to exist in these double realms without suffering from a kind of inner split.
DSR: There is just one double realm, not many. The antitheses you mentioned are different aspects of the one double realm. It is important to stress the oneness of the double realm. And those opposites do not polarize life; they are poles of an indivisible whole. Rilke coined the beautiful phrase “double realm”10 to describe this wholeness we must never mentally divide.
JK: So, the practice consists of repeatedly putting oneself into or reimmersing oneself in what one might call this ontological realm, if I understand you correctly? That reminds me of the ontological difference between Being and beings.
DSR: We can avoid polarization by looking at one pole and already seeing the other pole within it. So, for example, I look at time and experience eternity in the Now that takes me beyond time. I look at a star and see a flower in the meadow of the night sky; I look at the flower and see the star in it. The entire cosmos is a double realm—the inner cosmos, too. I look at suffering and see in it the earthly face of love.
JK: You write that you are aware of oneness only if you live in the present moment, in the Now, in the double realm of time and eternity. When you hang on to the past or get entangled in fantasies of the future, your experience of time makes you anxious. It makes you aware of the shortness of life. That, in turn, can spark fear, fear of death. What is it that causes your anxiety?
DSR: There are two things that make me personally anxious when I think of dying. First, there is the fact that we do not know what awaits us in death. We simply do not know. We are walking toward something that is not only unknown to us, but completely and utterly unimaginable. How can a caterpillar in a cocoon imagine what it is like to flutter from flower to flower as a butterfly? We too are walking toward something completely new. But things that are new and unknown make us anxious. Second, we know that dying is often connected to illness, suffering, and pain. That alone is enough to make me anxious when I picture it. Added to that, there is the prospect that today, sooner or later, one turns into nothing more than a case or a number in a hospital. This depersonalization makes me anxious as well. But quite apart from aging and dying, life is always scary in some way or another. What we need is courage.
JK: And what gives you courage, in this context?
DSR: In three syllables: trust in life. When I hit a tight spot, when my life’s path gets narrow and I get anxious, trust in life becomes essential. My fear bristles against the anxiety—I puts out my bristles—and gets stuck in the anxiety. But my trust lets itself be carried forward and through. I know that I can trust life’s power to carry me through like a swimmer trusting the buoyancy of water.
JK: You say that you do not want to speak of a life after death. Is there really that much room for misunderstanding?
DSR: Unfortunately, my refusal can easily be misunderstood; it may sound as though I were saying that death is simply the end. That is not at all what I want to say. What I mean is this: with death, my time is up, and when there is no more time, the word after has no meaning. I die when my time has run out, so how can I talk about something after? Time ends with death. My life ends on the level of time and space—I do not want to trivialize that. I want to confront it honestly; when I die, my space/time ends. But that does not mean that everything is over. Not at all! Even now, in the midst of time and space—in experiencing the Now—I can become aware of a dimension that is beyond time and space, and hence, death can make no difference to it.
Admittedly, I cannot avoid one difficulty: a person could say, “I have experience only through my senses, which are in time and space; I can think only with my brain, but when my brain turns to dust, what then?” In response, I can only say that here and now my senses and my thinking bring me to the border of something that is unbounded by space and time, is beyond space and time. And I belong to this dimension of my being—the Lasting—as much as I belong to time and space. That is exactly the double realm in which I live. This experience gives me trust and faith in something lasting, even when my bodily reality ends. Even now, I can touch a lasting reality. In the Now, I approach the Lasting. I need to be open to that, must feel my way into the Now, and learn to be at home there.
JK: No small number of Christians have trouble with the problem of a corporeal resurrection, because they think of it primarily as the resuscitation of a body. But we can see that the body disintegrates, reenters the big cycle of nature. That is the most obvious thing and needs no proof. But Christianity nevertheless claims a corporeal resurrection. What might that mean?
DSR: In order to answer your question, we must make sure we agree on what we mean when we say “resurrection.” Most people think of it quite literally as the rising up again of someone who has died, a coming back. But that’s the wrong direction. Correctly understood, resurrection does not mean coming back to this perishable life, but going forward into life in fullness, into life that lasts, into the Great Mystery. C. S. Lewis’s novel The Great Divorce describes this movement “forward” beautifully.11 The blessed in heaven ride toward an eternal sunrise, calling out to each other: “Higher up and deeper in!” The use of this image is well justified by early Christian tradition. It goes back—and maybe C. S. Lewis knew this—to the Cappadocian Fathers, who thought of resurrection-life as a dynamic journey of discovery into the Mystery of God.12 Resurrection means that our “life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col 3:3)—hidden in the Great Mystery. When we try to understand “resurrection of the flesh,” we ought to pay attention to the fact that “eternal life” is a reality with which we are familiar even now; our life is both visible amid time and space and hidden in the Now that transcends time and space. In the double realm, all my experiences partake of a visible and an invisible reality. So, when the visible ends, the invisible perdures—as it does even now, when we remember the past.
JK: But memory is a phenomenon of time.
DSR: Memory is a phenomenon in tim
e, but only a reductionist would insist that memory is only in time. Yes, there are things such as neural constellations, records of some kind that are accessed when we remember; that can be shown experimentally. But there is more to memory. Remembering is more than recording plus reproducing. Any tape recorder can accomplish that. Human memory belongs to the double realm and partakes of the world’s “outer” as well as “the world’s inner space,” as Rilke calls it. He turns that insight into the poetic image that we are the “bees of the invisible.” All life long, we are harvesting our experiences into the “great golden hive of the invisible”13—into the world’s inner space. There, nothing can ever be lost. And what I have stored there is my unique contribution. We are so different from each other that no two people can look at, let’s say, a rose and see the same thing. With my unique sensibility, I enrich the interior world. I enrich it over the course of my entire life, not just with my pleasant experiences, but with all my pain and my tears as well. Everything is worthy to last.
JK: We hope that suffering, too, will be transformed. So, let me ask again in a different way. Is transience transformed as well?
DSR: It is being transformed even now. Now or never. The fifteenth-century mystic poet, Kabir, asks, “If you as a living being do not break your chains, shall spirits do so when you are dead?” He bluntly insists that to expect “eternal blessedness, simply because one is being eaten by worms,” is wishful thinking. What you find now you will have found then, what you neglect now you will have neglected then. You must receive and embrace the Great Guest here and now.
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