The Rev. Forrest Church of All Soul's Church (NYC) published a post on The Beacon Broadside yesterday, dealing with issues all of us must face as the end of our life approaches. From the post:
Death is central to my definition of religion: religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die. We are not the animal with advanced language or tools as much as we are the
religious animal. Knowing that we must die, we question what life means. The answers we arrive at may not be religious answers, but the questions death forces us to ask are, at heart, religious questions. Where did I come from? Who am I? Where am I going? What is life's purpose? What does all this mean?
All of these questions obviously have special urgency for me now that I have been told I have only months left in my life. Hearing word of my diagnosis of terminal cancer, a longtime parishioner, who has known her full share of death, wrote me of her heartache. "My heart has been broken again," Camille wrote, "and for that I am overwhelmingly thankful; without love this would not be possible." She had it just right. And she and others in my congregation made me think that I needed to write one last book, one that would consolidate my thoughts on love and death. Fighting the most convincing deadline of my life, I none-the-less experienced great joy writing Love & Death. I discovered, in confronting my diagnosis, that death is not life's goal, only life's terminus. The goal is to live in such a way that our lives will prove worth dying for. This is where love comes into the picture. The one thing that can't be taken from us, even by death, is the love we give away before we go.
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