One of the most pivotal events in my life was the Vatican Council of 1962 to 1966. It led me to join the Movement For a Better World, a community of Priests, Religious, and married and single lay people. It was founded in Rome by Jesuit Father Riccardo Lombardi, to travel all over the world and implement the Decrees of the Council in every country on the planet. We were to model for every parish and every diocese, a Church that was not pyramidal with the hierarchy and clergy at the top, and the people at the bottom, but a round Church that was the true People of God as decreed by Vatican II.
One of the highlights of my career in the Movement For a Better World was a retreat I gave at San Alfonso in Long Branch, NJ, that was attended by a Saint-to-be: Dorothy Day. My other claim to fame: my grandfather came over from Sicily on the same boat with Frank Sinatra’s father. Also, my own Uncle Tony Umana was gunned down by the mafia in his East Boston bakery in June 1929, four months after I was born.
I hope Uncle Tony entered eternity with ease. Which brings us to our main subject: which is: DYING DELIGHTFULLY. When I first wrote this book, I called it “Joyful dying,” until I discovered that the Dalai Lama and Bishop Desmond Tutu had already published a book called “Joyful Dying.” So I changed it to “Entering Eternity With Ease.” Actually, it is a lot easier to ease your way into eternity than to jump for joy at the prospect of dying and losing your life.
Most of us have been obsessed with the thought of death, ever since we were little kids kneeling by our bed and were taught “Now I lay me down to sleep- I pray the Lord my soul to keep-and if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” I will not mention how scared we were of waking up in hell! Especially if we made a Redemptorist Mission !?!?
Of course, nobody ever took it seriously that we would die in our sleep, and most of us lived our daily lives in total denial of death. I found this out 50 years ago when I was studying for my clinical degree in psychotherapy, and training for hospice care. We studied Ernest Becker’s best-seller “The Denial Of Death.” And of course, Kubler-Ross’s 5 stages of accepting death. Actually, if you read Chapter 14, “Me and Kubler-Ross”, you will have the essence of my book. Most people could not live through one day if they really kept in mind all day that they were going to die some day.
We found out in the hospice movement that people with a terminal illness, who know that they are about to die, cannot face the reality of dying. The doctors, the nurses, the immediate family, cannot face the dying that they are seeing. That is why we turned to Sr. Helen Prejean who worked on death row at Louisiana State Prison. She wrote about “Dead Men Walking,” and they made a movie about her starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn. Sr. Helen spent her life with men who knew exactly when they were going to die, so she has been working these many years to do away with the death penalty. She says it is immoral to put a man, even if convicted of murder, under a death sentence, knowing the exact moment when he would be killed by electrocution or whatever the means of execution. Also, of course, too many executions are wrongful because too many mistakes are made in the rush to avenge a wrongful death.
But all of us are under a death sentence, even though we do not know the day or the hour, much worse, it could be at any moment, especially in the age of epidemics, terrorism, mass shootings, earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, and volcanic eruptions. But all of us can prepare for death right now. I don’t think you should make an old-fashioned Redemptorist hellfire and brimstone Mission.
When I was 19 years old, I entered the Novitiate where we had to read St. Alphonsus’ “Preparation For Death”. We had a big painting of our Founder, writing at his desk with a big skull in front of him. St. Alphonsus wrote dozens of books, and was the last saint to be named a Doctor of the Church. But he summed up his lifetime teaching with the simple phrase: “ He who prays will be saved, and he who does not pray will be lost.” 75 years after my novitiate, I am finally starting to understand that prayer, meditation, and contemplation are the secret of entering eternity with ease.
I may not be a ‘dead man walking’ like Sr. Prejean’s Death Rowers in Angola, Louisiana, but I would like to think I am a dead man dancing. Not like the zombies in so many of our movies, but like an old man who has died to his Ego and entered into the infinite eternal presence of God right here and now. The whole idea of my book “Entering Eternity With Ease” is about dying before we die: dying now. In other words: Entering eternity through meditation.
I have often signed my books with this phrase: “ YOU ARE ALREADY DEAD, AND LIVING IN HEAVEN, BUT YOU ARE NOT ENJOYING IT BECAUSE YOU HAVE NOT YET DIED TO YOUR EGO.” What a horrible greeting to give to anyone, but I was really reminding myself that I have to die to my Ego, which was my second book. I learned that, from Thomas Merton, who said that we have to lose our false self or Ego before we can be infused with God’s presence. Merton was referring to St. John of the Cross’s “Dark Night of the Soul” where we lose our self in the darkness of unknowing. The dark night of the soul, and the dark night of the Ego is a deep meditation, a bottomless mindfulness in which I am no longer aware of myself, but of God in a cloud of unknowing. This book is full of exercises and meditations on how to lose your Ego and thus experience God’s timeless infinity. It is an experience of limitless belonging described by Benedictine Brother David Steindahl-Rast.
So, have I made the case for “Entering eternity with ease?” Remember, I’m not talking about dying, but rather entering eternity NOW before death. In Chapter 15 I talk about the mystical experience of eternal life. It is my hope that you will devote some time, if only 15 minutes, each day, sitting in silence, letting yourself feel deep inside, St. Paul’s famous words to the Greek philosophers: “to the unknown God in whom we live and move and have our being.” While we are sitting in silence, we are facing our death as a daily, constant reality. Gradually, I am coming to see that maturity consists in the ability to face the reality of death as a natural part of life. I am coming to see that death is not just one final act at the end of our bodily lives, but a lifetime reality. As soon as psychologically possible, we need to accept death as a lifetime process that we participate in actively every day.
I said earlier that when we were kids we were taught to pray “If I die before I wake,”. That childhood prayer needs to grow up into the realization that I may die at any moment in this precarious and perilous human odyssey in which we have been engaged since birth. We cannot stand the thought of separation from our body. We cannot imagine how we can go on living without our body.
One of the first things I learned in practicing psychotherapy was separation anxiety. In fact, one professor thought that psychotherapy should consist of a course on separation anxiety, and that the relationship between the therapist and the client should be mostly about modeling the actual separation, in real-time, of the client from the therapist. He hated the tendency on the part of some therapists of allowing a dependency to take place between them and their clients. He insisted on dealing with the dependency and the separation as soon as possible.
If you apply this psychological insight to life and death, you see right away that we humans are born with a dependency on our bodily existence that is infinitely tenacious. How can we possibly let go of this bodily existence with which we are now relating to each other. How can we go on without seeing, without hearing, without smelling, without touching, ANYTHING? How can we be pure awareness without thought or feeling? That is the problem I faced in writing this book. Entering eternity with ease, indeed. Joyful dying…WHAT ???
In the last chapter of my book I remind all that on Ash Wednesday we are crossed on our foreheads with ashes. “Remember man,(do they now say, woman, too?)remember that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return.” Now I read it as “Remember earthlings that you came from earth and you are going back to earth.”
Was it worth it, then, just to live on this earth, and then to die? The letters of St. John say that God, who is love, made you in his own image and likeness, so you, too, are love. You have to believe that You are a thing of beauty and a joy forever. All the scriptures, all the poets, tell us that love is forever. John Keats says it so well:
A thing of beauty is a joy forever.
Its loveliness increases: it will never
Pass into nothingness; but will still keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health and quiet breathing
Therefore on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth.
Our loveliness increases so that we will never pass into nothingness. Each new day we are wreathing a flowery band to bind us to the earth. (By the way, that is what religion means, a re-binding to our source: re-ligament in Latin.)
So we are rebound to the earth by death. In dying we go where Jesus went, where Buddha went, where the Mother of Jesus went, where our mothers went, and our fathers, and all our deceased loved ones went, back to earth, back to the humus from which we humans come.
We are huge fans of Jesus because he convinces us that if we believe in Him, we already are living in eternal life. It is very exhilarating that the latest theologians like Bishop John Shelby Spong are now saying that the Resurrection of Jesus means not that Jesus went to heaven up in space somewhere, but that he went to heaven back to earth where he originally came from, like all of us. “He who believes in me, already has eternal life.”; “I have risen and am still with you.””I have gone before you into Galilee.” That is what I had written on my mother’s grave.” No other religion claims that we can have eternal life right now, just as Jesus has eternal life right now through his resurrected presence” among those who love him.
It is so important to grasp the meaning of the “Eternal NOW”. That is what St Thomas Aquinas, the angelical theologian, called God: “The Eternal NOW.” For each of us, too, God is NOW. Eternity always was and always will be. Eternity is not a lot of time, before and after. Eternity is out of time, beyond time, beyond the material, beyond the moving parts of cosmic explosions. Eternity is now and forever at the same time, without a beginning and without an end. And each of has always existed in God from all eternity unto eternity, and when we are aware of the presence of God in us, and of our presence in God, we are all One. Isn’t this what St. Paul meant when he said” In God we live and move, and have our being.” And also when he said, when we are all one in Christ, and Christ is one in God, then God will be all in all.”
I was very fortunate to have as my Poetry professor, Father John Duffy, who wrote “ A Prayer For Sleep”:
God, through whom we sleep or wake
Here’s my soul for Thee to take
Lift me in divine release
Out of time and back to peace.
Fold me in Perhaps and Seem.
Make me once again the dream
Dreamed before I came to be
The thing I am, this loved-by-thee.
Duffy senses that both sleep, and finally, death, “Lifts us in divine release out of time and back to sleep. We go back in time and explode in one big bang into eternity as we intimate the childhood prayer of laying down to sleep. We go back to childhood omnipotence and intimations of immortality. We die to live forever. With St. Francis, we know that “it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”
I look forward to going home to Mother earth with the rest of my loved ones. Yes, Tom Wolfe, “You can go home again, FOREVER. The earliest followers of the Crucified Jesus would sing in their liturgies: Maranatha. Amen. Come Lord Jesus.
Now that I am letting go of my false self, human Ego, where do WE go from here? Nowhere. We are already here. In fact, WE ARE…..FOREVER.
Welcome to eternity. As my Sicilian-American paesano, Frank Sinatra, from New Jersey, wrote on his grave: THE BEST IS YET TO COME. But I am writing now: THE BEST IS ALREADY HERE.
Isn’t that delightful? And I’m not even dead yet.
Sal Umana 