In the previous article, we made the case for unavoidable pain and avoidable suffering. Let’s move on to a different kind of suffering that is unavoidable.

In Richard Rohr’s book “Falling Upward”, he refers to “Necessary Suffering.” In the Center For Action and Contemplation’s latest edition of “Oneing,” Paul Swanson channels Rohr by saying that :

“Necessary Suffering” is found in the context of your unique life, time, and place. You cannot hide from it, no matter how much you try. It’s “necessary” not because it’s needed to sustain the basics of life, but because the conditions require full and open-eyed acknowledgment to engage in life abundantly, without illusionary thinking. Those who embrace this inescapable and necessary suffering drop the games of resistance to painfully learn that  “necessary suffering will always feel like dying.” This dying is the pearl of great price. This dying is when you remove your performative mask and learn to see from the face that was yours before you were born. “

Your ’performative mask’  is your Ego that was formed after you were born. The ‘face that was yours before you were born’ is your soul child that existed in God from all eternity, what we traditionally called your immortal soul. Letting go of all the attachments and addictions that your Ego/False Self have depended upon surely feels like the dying that Rohr refers to. We experience it as suffering. It is the “falling upward” of falling back into our soul child who was “in Him in whom we live, and move, and have our being.” Yes , it feels like dying, and we suffer intensely because our Ego is humiliated, shamed, denied, lost.

Swanson goes on to say: “These lessons don’t come easy. As Fr. Richard writes, “before the truth sets you free, it tends to make you miserable.’  But when you relate to your own necessary suffering with a tender heart, you also learn to touch the suffering of the world with growing compassion. Seeds of interdependence and solidarity are watered. Necessary suffering is the compost of life. It is the place of resurrection.”

But before the resurrection,  we are ‘crossed up’ with the necessary suffering of being a very imperfect human being.  We hear Jesus say : “Anyone who wants to save his life, must lose it. Anyone who loses her life will find it. What gain is there if you win the whole world and lose your very self? What can you offer in exchange for your one life?…………(and further on Jesus says), “Anyone who does not take up his cross and follow in my footsteps is not worthy of me.”

Suffering does not have to involve crucifixion for us. It can just be giving up whining “why me?” It doesn’t have to be a crippling accident, paralysis, blindness, an amputation as suffered by thousands of our brothers and sisters. It can just be the drudgery of exhausting physical, emotional, or mental work. It can be the boredom of routine duty, responsibility, caring service.

Swanson goes on to channel one of my mentors: Carl Jung [1875-1961, chronologically parallel to my maternal grandfather,  from whom I get the name Salvatore]. “Jung said that so much unnecessary suffering comes into the world because people will not accept the “legitimate suffering” that comes from being human. In fact, he said neurotic behavior is usually the result of refusing that legitimate suffering ! Ironically, this refusal of the necessary pain of being human brings to the person ten times more suffering in the long run. It is no surprise that the first and always unwelcome message in male initiation rights is ‘life is hard’. We really are our own worst enemy when we deny this.

Now we can go back to Brenda Shoshanna, (Zen Miracles), where she continues 40 pages later on necessary suffering leading to compassion. It is reassuring to see how Jesus and his followers, Richard Rohr, Carl Jung, and Paul Swanson are all on the same page with Buddha and his followers. Naturally, necessary suffering leads us directly to compassion. This was all exemplified so beautifully by St. Teresa of Calcutta.

On page 52, Shoshanna continues on the theme of necessary suffering as opposed to the avoidable suffering she wrote about on page 15: “Life arises as it arises. It is our demand that it turn out differently, that causes our suffering and the suffering we inflict upon others. We demand that we live forever, never seeing the beauty of aging or older people. We demand that everyone loves us (no matter who), that we make no mistakes, eat only fine food, stay beautiful forever, get what we think is our just due. We go to all lengths to secure these illusions, including putting our true lives at risk. We hide from illness, tragedy, old age and loneliness, abandoning those who are experiencing them. We refuse sorrow and ugliness, not realizing that the ugliness and sorrow are inside of us. Then we wonder why we suffer, trapped in a life without a way out.

“The door to escape is through ordinary moments, through persevering in zazen (sitting meditation), and through giving attention to our daily tasks. As we do this, little by little, our ability to bear reality increases, and our suffering subsides. We become of value to others, as we leave nothing uncared for lying around.

‘Zen is just picking up your coat from the floor and hanging it up’.  -Ancient Zen saying.

“Not only do we pick up our coats from the floor, but we pick up whatever else is lying there, including people who need to be regarded with respect and love. “

I AM SURE THAT Teresa of Calcutta meditated on this many times, along with everything that Jesus says about carrying our crosses in His footsteps. One of the foremost leaders of compassion in the 20^th Century.

Mystic Companions at the Oases of Grief

BY MIRABAI STARR

I’m going to attempt to reframe Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief as stations of transformation, as portals to the sacred. I don’t see any reason to jettison the whole structure of Kubler-Ross’s stages, even though the idea of a linear process for grieving is ridiculous. But there seem to be universal features in that landscape of loss, in that beautiful, terrible wilderness that every one of us finds ourselves in individually and collectively at some point or another—especially right now.

In some ways I feel like I should just end there, because there’s nothing left to say. Everyone I know names grief as the vibrant living characteristic and opening doorway to our liberation right now. I started speaking about grief publicly about 20 years ago, following the sudden death of my 14-year-old daughter Jenny in a car accident that happened to coincide to the day with the release of my very first of a dozen books. And that was a translation of Dark Night of the Soul.

Those two events were exactly aligned. And I began—because how could I help it?—to speak about the connection between the teachings of the mystics, particularly the dark night of the soul, and the most astonishing, shattering and transformational experience I could imagine. This coincided with the rising consciousness around justice. So all three of these things are braided for me, like a challah. But when I began speaking about it, people were like, “Please don’t talk about grief.” I would teach at Omega Institute and there would be six people signed up for my retreats on the spiritual transformational power of grief and loss and the mystics.

Now I feel like there is this reclaiming happening. There’s nowhere to hide from the reality of our personal and collective grief right now. So is there any use in these maps that mystics like KublerRoss offer? Yes.

The five stages, as you probably well know and have probably worked with in your spiritual companionship, are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Each one of those words is unfortunate, as Kubler-Ross admitted herself. They imply some kind of checklist that you get through and at the end of it, you’re OK. Which implies that grief is like the flu, which you endure and get over. And then when you’re done; you move on.

Rather, it is a lifelong journey through the wilderness, with some fires—or oases even I want to say—on the way. So, I’m just going to rename them now as contemplation, rebellion, lament, surrender, and returning. Denial as contemplation; anger as rebellion; bargaining as lament; depression as surrender; and acceptance as returning.

I’ve spent my adult life reclaiming the wisdom of the mystics across the spiritual traditions, as luminaries for our own path as ordinary extraordinary human beings, doing the best we can to turn inward and step up in this world. And I will associate a mystic with each one of these oases.

Contemplation

In the wake of a fresh loss, often there is an impulse that is contemplative, to turn inward and be with what happened or what is happening. That contemplative impulse often results in a thirst for solitude, and people around us might look at us and think that we’re isolating. They might see it as dangerous, as pathological. But in the face of the fire of what’s happening, I think there’s something in that inward-drawing tendency that is healthy and right. People will try to distract us so that we don’t turn inward, but that craving you have for a moment to be with it is holy.

There is a fragrance of the sacred that permeates the shattered landscape of our souls in the face of great loss. It’s when the veils are ripped and we’re stripped of those ordinary protections against the beauty and power of the mystery. When we experience a shattering loss or a profound sorrow, those veils at least temporarily are taken away, and the sacred comes flooding through. I say the angels come rushing into that broken open space.

We’re conditioned to get away from the feeling of the pain that accompanies the loss, but there is also this great inflowing of holy fire. I find that people I sit with don’t want to acknowledge this sacred fragrance out loud, because we’ve been taught that it’s not okay to be anything other than sad when we experience these great losses. Do this resonate with you and with the people that you accompany?

But the spiritual bypass business is a real thing. When we’re confronted by the suffering of the world, our contemplative methodologies for liberation can become traps for removing ourselves from reality. That said, it is super important to have spaces of refuge to renew our hearts. This is hard work, this work of being contemplative activists in this world.

As I describe in Caravan of No Despair, I was trained in mindfulness, in Vipassana, as a teenager in the seventies at Lama Foundation. And I learned that mindfulness was this matter of rigorously cultivating a commitment to being aware in all moments. So, when Jenny died, my mindfulness training tried to kick in. I am going to stay with this. I’m going to stay conscious and present. I’m not going to turn away.

I didn’t call it patriarchal. I didn’t have any words for it, but I knew it was some kind of construct I had inherited that was not only not helpful, but almost monstrous in the wake of the profound experience of losing a child. I shifted it. I made it an act of love and devotion to my daughter: that I would accompany her even on her journey away from me. Because I loved her as her mommy, I wasn’t going to go anywhere. I was going to stay with this experience of shattering traumatic grief and loss as an act of love, of heartfulness.

That changed everything for me. And that is how I accompany the world now in its pain and suffering, in its death, in its crucifixion and resurrection. And Mother Mary, who was a great Jewish grieving mother, taught me as a little Jewish grieving mother how to do that. I will stay with you. I will hold you. It’s the Pieta.

When Julian of Norwich experienced the death of probably half the people she knew in the plague, she had a near death experience. And that’s when she had her showings, the revelations of divine love of Christ the Mother. And Julian’s impulse, once she recovered from her near-death experience, was to enclose herself in an anchor-hold and spend the rest of her life unpacking what she saw when Christ the Mother revealed herself to her and assured her that not only you, Julian, but all of us—all will be well and all will be well. And every kind of thing shall be well, in spite of appearances.

Not a spiritual bypass, but a reality that is bigger than and inclusive of the harrowing pain. As a grieving mother myself, I’m pretty sure that Julian too was a bereaved parent and probably spouse.

Rebellion

Often when we are grappling with great loss there’s an experience that feels like protest. Like, “No. It’s not okay with me. This is not okay. I protest, I rebel.” Kubler-Ross called it anger; for me it’s a passion. It’s a burning. It’s a rekindling of life for us after we’ve turned inward so deeply that we didn’t think we could ever reemerge. It involves deconstruction. Everything we believed crumbles. We die when a loved one dies, or when the injustice is so hot that everything burns. That deconstruction is healthy and needed. There’s also an ability to set boundaries in new ways on this station of the grief journey.

I see Francis of Assisi as the great exemplar of rebellion. Francis gathered his poor brothers and sisters—that’s what they called themselves, the poor little brothers and the poor little sisters—in community, in solidarity with the poor, in an attempt to live a life of voluntary simplicity for the sake of all beings, of the interconnection of all creatures. In his own lifetime, his order burgeoned into something that didn’t resemble anything that he had conceived. The next thing he knew, they were building cathedrals to the Franciscan order. And there was one moment when some church was being built and he climbed up on the roof and he started tearing off the tiles and throwing them to the ground and yelling, bellowing. That’s rebellion. That’s the second station of the journey.

Lament

The third station or portal for transformation I would call lament. She called it bargaining. This is the “if only.” And again, we’re invited to be with it: not to turn away from the monkey mind that’s going to do its thing and tell us the story over and over and over again, but to let it just run its course as the monkey mind will do, running after every banana of thought. If you had only done this and if they had only behaved like that. If we could cut that scene and rewind it and re-shoot it. If we were in control of the universe and our own movie, it would all come out the way we want.

I’m not in control, but I am the star of the movie of me whether I like it or not. There is a powerlessness in this stage, but there is also a fierce empowerment in lamentation.

In some sense, grief is that state of beautiful, terrible grace that pours into our shattered hearts when we experience a great loss.

Mourning is a conscious act of lamentation, of prayer. A contemplative practice even, to just say: “Yes, I assent, I consent to be present with this great sorrow, with my heart open. I will mourn. I will mourn what I love.” I know it sounds like a cliche and we’ve heard it before, but we grieve in proportion to our love. And we mourn as an act of homage to that love.

This station of lament I see as Miriam and her sisters as they crossed the Red Sea, as it parted to receive the Israelites who were moving from captivity to liberation. Remember Pharaoh had let them go and then changed his authoritarian mind and went after them, sent the army after them. And Pharaoh’s army was drowned.

Midrash tells us that when Miriam, her sisters and the other women who actually led the way through the Red Sea with drums and timbrels singing and dancing got to the other side they fell to their knees and wept for the death of all of the Egyptians. Not only the army, but all the male children Pharaoh’s decree had killed.

Surrender

Lamentation is our birthright. It is absolutely necessary that we allow our hearts to break open on this path of transformation, of turning inward and stepping up, in the fourth station of transformation. What Kubler-Ross called depression, I call surrender. And this is the dark night of the soul. This is that transformational power of dropping into radical unknowing. When the bargaining, the lamentation, the if-only, has run its course and exhausted us. And at last we surrender because there’s nowhere else to go. And that surrender is sacred and it’s infused by total not-knowing.

It’s an annihilation of everything we had believed and it is absolutely necessary on the path of maturing as a human being, according to John of the Cross, who is the mystic for this station. We must enter into radical not-knowing. It’s holy. It’s also the butterfly phase when what Teresa of Avila calls the ugly little plump white silkworm dissolves utterly. This was long before science showed us that is exactly what happens: a complete dissolution of the caterpillar or the worm inside the cocoon to a puddle of imaginal cells. That’s what’s happening here. It’s Jonah languishing, as John of the Cross says, in the belly of the great fish, suspended in the dark. It’s also a time when we allow ourselves to simply be sad, to just fall back into the arms of sorrow and let the great mother—who we can’t even believe in in those moments— hold us. It’s exhaustion, but it’s also rest. It’s Shabbat.

Returning

And finally we have what Kubler-Ross called acceptance, another unfortunate term because acceptance implies that what happened is OK now—that it’s actually OK with me that my daughter was plucked from this world in the beginning of her flowering as a beautiful 14-year-old black girl, fiercely engaged in social and environmental justice, who wanted to be a healer in this world. Not OK with me. It’s 20 years later and not a day goes by when it’s OK with me that Jenny died.

Anyone who claims some kind of ultimate awakening, I just don’t trust it. What I trust is people who tell me that they don’t know. And I know it’s probably no accident that I had just finished translating Dark Night of the Soul when I was plunged into the depths of unknowing. That is the most transformative aspect of my grief journey because it brings me back to beginner’s mind again and again. This is the aspiration, to come back to zero. And living with John of the Cross as a translator taught me that. Translating is like darshan; it’s like sitting at the feet of the masters when you translate a great wisdom being.

If I had anything in my toolbox, it was the willingness to not know. Intimately entwined with that—not that I had a choice—was this capacity for a childlike wonderment, experiencing any given ordinary moment as being utterly permeated with beauty, with holiness. And that has not left me.

I’m not in that space every moment, obviously, but I’m there a lot. And that is a kind of joy. Satcitananda in Hinduism is a state of being awakened to beingness. That bliss, or ananda, is very much present not in spite of the pain but entwined with the pain. And that’s what enables me to be in joyful communion with others. Again, not all the time, but sometimes.

It’s mature and childlike at the same time. That’s a feminine consciousness, if I may. I’m not talking about girl bodies and boy bodies. I’m talking about these energies that live in all of us. And I think that the feminine is very much at home with ambiguity and paradox so that we can be shattered and enjoy at the same time; we can be mature and childlike at the same time. But I think that it has a lot to do with surrender. The root of the word islam, which means surrender, is salaam, which means peace: it’s the peace that comes with surrender. Grief teaches us to radically surrender our illusion of control while we stand in our agency to stand up for others who are suffering. It energizes us ultimately after depleting us utterly.

Radical surrender and activism are completely intertwined for me. I am an activist, daughter of activists. My parents were both classic New York Jewish liberal progressives—anti-war activists in the Vietnam era. I grew up with this model of activism as: don’t just sit there, do something. What I have come to learn in the necessary deconstruction of what was handed to me is that when I think I’m capable of coming up with solutions to the brokenness of this world, I’m screwed. I can’t do it. And I’m going to burn out and I’m going to hate myself for failing. Does this sound familiar?

But when I come from a place of humility and childlike wonderment, knowing that I don’t know, but allowing myself to feel the brokenness of the world with every fiber of my mother heart—and we all have that mother heart, people of all genders— then I’m bearing loving witness and I can’t help but stand up and find a way to alleviate suffering wherever I encounter it. But again, coming back again and again to the holy ground of not knowing. It’s not passive, it’s vibrant and alive and infused with the energy of compassion and passion.

Acceptance is just as problematic as depression as a term. How about we reclaim it and reframe it as returning—teshuva is the word in Hebrew.

Turning and returning is a continuous process; it’s not a result. It’s a commitment to being present. In Buddhism, the first step of the eightfold path is right views: being with what is. Richard Rohr calls it forgiving reality. That’s this station, this opening on the path of transformation through grief. Not grief as a place to get past, but grief as an invitation for continuous transformation, personal and communal.

This is a place of integration and it’s a circular staircase. So we come back again and again, each time more deeply and fully integrating what has happened to us, what is happening in the world. Showing up again and again for what is with love, with the willingness for our hearts to be shattered, and also broken open. It’s the place that the mystics call the place of union.

I love Julian of Norwich’s term: oneing. The place of continuous oneing. And the mystic for this station, in my heart today anyway, is Mother Mary, who said yes. Who said yes anyway. Who said, Hineni, in Hebrew: Here I am.

I know that I am going to bear the unbearable, and I say, Yes. Not because I’m a martyr but because this is the nature of this fleeting human condition and I want to stay here. Like the bodhisattva, not as a white knuckled promise of perfectionism and purification and all of those patriarchal constructs, but as an act of love, of heartfulness. I’m going to stay right here until all my friends are liberated. (Some versions of the bodhisattva vow say, until every last blade of grass is liberated.)

We bear the unbearable. That’s the title of a book from contemporary psychologist and traumatic grief specialist and Zen Buddhist Joanne Cacciatore, and that is what we do. And so we companion each other. We bear witness to each other as they and we bear the unbearable. There is no fixing. In fact, doesn’t it piss you off when people try to fix you when you’re suffering?

I appreciate a good solution here and there, but when I’m in grief, I just need to let myself down into the arms of mother darkness and rest in her. And I want people to just sit beside me and offer me sips of water and chocolate and wine. Not a lot of wine, just a little bit of wine. A lot of chocolate. No, a lot of water. So, we companion each other quietly, respectfully. I would venture to say, reverentially. We accompany each other with great reverence as spiritual companions who endure the unendurable.

Oh, but when your spiritual companions themselves say, “I can’t do this anymore,” what do you do? I don’t know. I just say, “I know.” And sometimes I burst into tears. “I know, honey, I know.”

It is hard to believe that Joe Matthews has left us physically, 6 weeks ago this week. How many times have we gone over in our heads that unspeakable moment of Joe’s “passing “? For me, it was Thursday, April 13, around 6:00 PM. The phone rang, and, I thought, it must be Joe reminding me as he always did, that we would be playing golf on the morrow, and what would be the three main topics of our discussions? And this would take at least a half-hour of jollying and crazying in the midst of world-shaking pronouncements on the meaning of reality.

Instead, I heard Carol’s voice simply saying in monotone, “Joe is dead.” I can’t remember any other details: What did I say? What did Carol say? What does that mean: “Joe is dead? Joe died?” I lost consciousness in a way I cannot explain. I began to scream in a broken whine “Joe dead! Joe died! Joe what?” I swear there is a part of ourselves that goes away for a while. Does it die and go into the unconscious world where Joe went? I don’t know. But something in me died when Joe died. That is all I can say.

But I do remember calling Fred Weigel to tell him that Joe Matthews died. Fred said he couldn’t talk to me because he was in an Enneagram group. I swear I had no idea what an enneagram group was. (Actually, I have attended the enneagram group in person and by ZOOM on the 2^nd Thursday of every month for the past ten years.) Fred simply said,” I can’t talk to you now, I’ll talk to you later.”

I was so out of myself that I honestly did not know that I was supposed to be on ZOOM with the Enneagram Group. Maybe a day later, I remembered what an Enneagram Group was.

This is what they mean when they describe the sudden and unexpected death of a loved one. There can be a temporary nervous breakdown. At 94 years old, I have been told dozens of times that someone I was very close to had died. Sometimes I was even present at their bedside when they died. But they had been ill for several months, several years. They had cancer, or aids, or several strokes, or Alzheimer’s, and we had months to get ready for their passing away.

But Joe’s death was the first time anybody so close departed this life without a moment’s preparation, without a thought they might actually die. Never, never, in my wildest fantasies or dreams did I ever imagine Joe could die.

Joe and I talked about dying for several years, on a weekly basis. In fact, I wrote a book about dying while discussing it with him every week for four months. I was forever mentioning Ernest Becker and his Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Denial of Death.” We knew all about everyone else in the U.S. denying death, but we ourselves lived each day in the habitual denial of death. For sure, we knew, theoretically, that we were mortal because mortal comes from the Latin word for death: mors, mortis. But like everyone else in the U.S., we were both in denial of our own deaths. As Becker writes, human beings could not survive for even one day if they constantly lived with the actual consciousness that they are going to die someday.

As Redemptorist students, we spent years preparing for death. Our founder, St. Alphonsus Liguori, was the last saint to be named a Doctor of the Church, mostly because of his teachings on moral theology and avoiding sin and his famous book “The Preparation For Death.” We all had a picture of St. Al in his room writing away at his desk with a skull snarking in front of him. When we became priests, we traveled the planet giving Missions and Retreats in various languages on preparing for death. We talked for hours about our own deaths, but we never thought that the other one of us would die. Definitely NOT in the blinking of an eye. We never imagined that after a trillion breaths in and out that a moment would come when one of us would breathe out one last time, and there would be no “Goodbye”, no “Adios”, not even a “See ya later” or an “Hasta luego”. O my God !

Joe loved to talk about the Rogation Days, or Ember Days, which took place four times a year in the Seminary. We would go out in the morning darkness before Mass, carrying lit candles, and we would chant the Litany of the Saints. “From earthquakes- Deliver Us O Lord. From the spirit of fornication, Deliver Us O Lord. Then Joe’s favorite: “From sudden and unprepared death, Deliver Us O Lord.” Four times a year, two confessors from a distant Redemptorist House would show up and hear our confessions so we would,….you guessed it…. Be “Prepared for death.”

Well, on April 13, 2023, our Joe eased his way into eternity in his pool, where he had aqua jogged almost daily for 23 years. Were all those Litanies of the Saints we chanted, ringing in his ears, like the meditation gong that I hear every morning on my Thomas Merton Podcast? We used to kid about the radio show: “Only the Shadow Knows!”. Now, “Only Joe knows.” And all of us whom he has left behind only know that this life will never be the same without Joe Matthews.

From Sal:

Skip, thank you for pointing out my slip from glory to grace. Isn’t this astounding? How could anyone deny that Joe is not just listening, but actively putting in his two cents plus?

I reread and am astounded, especially since “Al’s well that ends well.”

“A life lived for the greater glory of god, indeed. Everybody who was lucky enough to have run into Joe, or rather, have been run into by Joe, somehow knows, that is what Joe was all about. Amen.”

I didn’t have the heart to go back to Silver Dollar golf, but I forced myself to last Friday. Of course, Joe would have been ecstatic about the round of golf bob grant and i had, (with Joe in our hearts and in our heads). Bob hit some of the best drives in memory, and each time he would lament, “Too bad Joe didn’t see that to compliment me on what an astounding, incredible, life-changing drive that was.”

Then when we got to the hardest hole on all the courses, the monster number one handicap hole with an “s’, that is two dog’s legs. We have only parred it twice in the past ten years. This year bob grant got off three huge drives that got us to within ten yards of the green. (We have never gotten on in three to my memory). Bob was exhausted and let me go up for the chip and putt. I took out my sand wedge, slowly lofted it up the hill to the green and sunk it for a birdie. ( First time ever on that hole.) Can’t imagine what Joe would have said, or rather, shouted.

All I could do all morning was miss joe asking every conceivable question from “Do you think Trump will end up in jail” to “Will Biden’s son end up in jail?” to “Will Sal Umana end up in jail? (just kiddin’) “

The guys in the pro shop were all lined-up and in mourning, and we had to describe Joe’s untimely death over and over again.

But then, after golf, when we sat down for lunch, Allison, Rose, and Samantha all had to give us huge hugs, and it was heartrending to see how much they missed joe. 

Today I went to my hall of fame in front of this computer, and couldn’t find a spot on the wall for Joe’s memorial picture and the eight photos from the Sammy’s. So I had to remove the picture from Time magazine showing Robin Williams doing a mime holding up the San Francisco golden bridge. I put Joe in Robin’s place. I need Joe a lot more than Robin Williams right now.

From Skip:

Indeed, Sal, I believe this is Joe interjecting his thoughts into yours.  Joe would never admit to being the manifestation of glory, however, he would certainly gratefully say that he was graced with God’s blessings and favor.

I know Joe only from our one corporal work of mercy — visiting the sick — and his prolific postings on the AECR.  What I always found incongruous about that very successful, very knowledgeable, very perceptive guy were his frequent comments of self-doubt, of not being holy enough, of not being good enough.  And this coming from a guy whose entire life — personal and professional — was nothing but corporal works of mercy.  So, my question for his Friday golf partner, Sal, is this: was Joe genuine in questioning himself and perhaps attempting to gain reassurance of this goodness and holiness, or was that a contrived cloak of humility?

I figure you know Joe.

From Sal

Meditation— Is God Love?

 Robin Oickle recently posted this question on FaceBook, adding that many would say so. She went on to say, 

     “Love is an emotion. Is God an emotion? Presence is so much more than an emotion.”

      I responded,  “I’ve come to realize that love is so much more than emotion. Love, when honest, is truth.  Based on that, I believe the meaning of life is a relationship, first and foremost with God and then with one another. Love is the life in the kingdom within. The sharing we do here is a hint of that kingdom.”

       Robin replied, “I so agree.”

       I should also have added, after God, “with self.”

       Here’s my thinking.  Love is energy and so is God. And both are eternal. And so are we — not our bodies as they are, but our spirit-self. Teilhard de Chardin sees creation as a constant in God’s timelessness. He believes God’s energy is evolution happening. That “Let there be…,” the Word,  reverberates in the eternal Now.  If matter and energy are indestructible, that Word, in the beginning, created us as well.

     In the human concept and framework of time, our Befores and Afters seem to work directly against the eternal Now.  They diminish the present and the presence that Robin mentioned in her post.  But isn’t presence about relationship? And isn’t relationship about love, i,e., about God?

     Jesus said, “Love one another as I have loved you.” And St. Augustine wrote, “Love and do what you will.”  If we love as Jesus loved, are we not living the life of God within us? True, we are human and we all too often miss the mark. But when we do God’s will, we live lives of love. Isn’t that the challenge that comes with the “Let there be…” of every life?

Joe Matthews was not keen on  “Entering Into Eternity,” much less did he believe you could enter eternity with ease, the way I wrote about it. Joe suffered great anxiety about the prospect of dying a difficult death.

     For two years, he prayed every week at Church for his running friend, Dr. Lou Cooper, who was dying of cancer. Then, right after Joe returned from Lou’s funeral in Manhattan, we went through another two years or so of the Covid 19 pandemic, and Joe was deathly afraid of any contact that could compromise his very vulnerable immune system.

    But I was writing my book on joyful dying, and Joe had a hard time listening to me. Especially when I got to the Chapter on “Me and Kubhler-Ross.”  Of course, Joe knew all about the five stages of dying, because he spent the 80’s in Manhattan dealing with the homeless, dying, AIDS patients who filled that blessed island with “Angels in America.” When I finished that chapter, I printed out a copy so we could discuss it. Joe knew that I had worked with the homeless in Manhattan at the Holy Name Center For Homeless Men on the Bowery.

     I had spent two summers at the Holy Name Center For Homeless Men.  When asked what they were doing in New York they would say that they began in some town or city, far far away, and kept walking and bumming their way through every town or city they came to, but when they finally reached New York it was so big that they never found a way out of it. This is a metaphor for depression. It is so seemingly endless that we never seem to find a way out of it.

    Joe Matthews could never seem to find a way out of his anxiety and depression about death. I think this was due to the traumatic experience he suffered during World War II, when he was a teenage boy and was given the terrible news that his two brothers had been suddenly killed in action. I know that when I received a telegram at about the same age, that my Uncle Johnny was killed in action, it rocked me in a way that still hurts after 80 years. Since I was a little boy I loved Uncle Johhny, and I looked just like him. I could not imagine how Joe was affected by the sudden loss of two brothers. He often spoke of his third brother, Richard, who was swiftly sent home from the front when the Army found out that his two brothers had died. And Richard then went on to become a Trappist monk.

    Richard lived out his trauma as a contemplative in constant prayer, in the presence of his deceased brothers in God.  Joe lived out his trauma trying to spread hope of life everlasting as a priest and as a supervisor of shelters for dying aids patients. That’s where Kubhler-Ross came in. As the wonderful play and TV series “Angels In America” portrayed, the dying aids victims learned to accept a life of peace after death.

    I am convinced that Joe turned all of his depression and anxiety about dying into a marvelous spirit of love and acceptance of every single human being that he encountered. He made people feel their own value by addressing them by name and teasing them with the latest joke that he could come up with. He made people feel peace. He made people feel hope, and I am sure he made people feel loved. 

    There are hundreds of lucky individuals throughout Hillsborough County whom Joe knew by name who are happier and more at peace today because Joe Matthews regularly kidded them. And I am one of them.

One of my friend Joe’s favorite programs was “Morning Joe with Joe Scarborough” on MSNBC. He recorded it every day and listened to it off and on. So instead of “Morning Joe”, I am entitling this ” Mourning Joe”, and like “Morning Joe ” it will have many episodes.

    After recounting the trauma that I went through, along with Joe’s wife and family, and friends, when we suffered the tragic, unexpected, sudden death of Joe, peacefully aqua-jogging in his pool, a friend sent me this beautiful meditation on mourning from Tara Brach:

 “In the Lakota tradition, a person who is grieving is considered most waken, most holy.

There is a sense that when someone is struck by sudden loss, he or she stands on the threshold of the Spirit World.

“You might recall what it’s like to be with someone who has grieved deeply. The person has no layer of protection, nothing left to defend. The mystery is looking out through the person’s eyes. For the time being he or she has accepted the reality of loss and has stopped clinging to the past, or grasping at the future.

 “In the groundless openness of sorrow, there is a wholeness of presence and a deep natural wisdom.”

    Our American Indian brothers have a special insight into grief. They sense that when one has a sudden, unexpected loss, one suddenly leaves this present outward consciousness, and mysteriously, even mystically, enters into a deeper, inner consciousness. Is it in pursuit of the spirit of the lost loved one?

    This morning, I heard that the German mystic, Meister Eckhardt, of the thirteenth century, says something along the same lines as the Lakota. He says that the experience of death, whether of a loved one, or even, mystically, our own death, is an experience so deep within ourselves that we mystically become one with God. He says it is a joy that death cannot destroy.

    This is the joy, in the midst of pain, loss, grief, and sorrow, that I pray we all will know: the joy of life that death cannot destroy. May this be true of my friend Joe’s death, and true of our own death which we don’t have to die to experience. We can have it now if we listen to the silence within us.