Living into Mystery

A Reflection on the Occasion of the Celebration of the Life and Death of Mary Marvel Adams

April 5, 2014

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Southern Shores, NC

Thomas E Wilson

Lamentations 3:22-26,31-33 (The Lord is good to those who wait for him) Psalm 23

Revelation 21:2-7 (Behold, I make all things new)

We have had two of Mimi’s friends remind us about her as we celebrate her life. Now it is time for me to talk about celebrating her death as the gate to greater life. You would think that after almost 30 years of doing funerals, I would be able to understand life, death, and the afterlife better. Yet, I stand here and tell you that it is all a mystery to me - and I am comfortable with that. 

 

There are two different meanings for the word mystery. The one meaning most people know is used in the sense of a “mystery” novel, in which a puzzle is finally solved on the last page when all clues are revealed and there is a solution and peace at the last. The second meaning of mystery is that awe and wonder which beggars the imagination, where words lose their meaning, where emotions reach their limits - “thaw(ing) and resolve(ing) itself into a dew” - a mystery which is never solved. There is no neat ending, and the last page is the first page of a deeper mystery which we live into by faith. It is the valley of the shadow that the Psalmist was speaking of in the 23^rd Psalm that we read earlier. We live in the mystery, and we do not walk there alone. There is someone setting a table for us and blessing us in the middle of the mystery. Death is the gate we walk through into another mystery.

Death is all around us, but our society tries so hard to ignore it. Voltaire said “One great use of words is to hide our thoughts,” and so we use euphemisms to avoid saying the word “death”, such as “He passed” or “crossed over” or “breathed his last” or “is pushing up daisies”. Monty Python has this wonderful “Dead Parrot” sketch where dozens of euphemisms are used. We are so afraid that we end up making it a practice to whistle as we go past graveyards. We try hard to make the assumption that death is what happens to other people, but the church keeps reminding us, not always successfully, that death is part of life. One Lent, I devoted a five part series to dealing with death, and it was one of the worst-attended Lenten series because people thought it would be depressing. There is an old Latin 8th century song which Archbishop Thomas Cramner translated and used when he wrote the beginning of the Burial Office for the first English Book of Common Prayer in 1549: “In the midst of life, we are in death.”

This is helpful for me because I can accept my death and say, “That is just the way life is; all things die, and while the form of the body is destroyed, the molecules of the body are transformed into a different constellation of structure. The ashes of my body will nourish the earth and out of them new life will grow.” The mystery is not about the physical stuff but about the animating principle which is in, under, around and through all of the senses. That animating principle is what I believe continues as we are walk through the gate. The awareness of death as mystery allows me to enter into the fullness of life as mystery.

The 20^th Century Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote: "Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits." Wittgenstein was an agnostic, but I would suggest that eternal life, abundant life, begins here and now as we pay attention to all that God gives us each day. It is my belief that living joyfully into the mystery of this life, the skills of wonder and awe of that which is greater than ourselves, prepares us for entering into the unknown mystery after death.

There is a prayer attributed to St. Francis of Assisi:

Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
Where there is sadness, joy.

O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console,
To be understood as to understand,
To be loved as to love;
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
It is in dying to self that we are born to eternal life.

Eternal life begins now; the resurrection life begins now. After we are dead, the mystery continues for body and soul. I urge you to live faithfully into the mystery. If you want to honor Mimi, then practice living joyfully in the mystery. There is a poem by Mary Oliver, “When Death Comes” which I shared with Jennifer, Mimi’s daughter. Let me read it to you:

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measles-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

Mimi didn’t just visit life she lived into the mystery fully; in honor of Mimi go and do likewise.