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. 

We suffered the excruciating loss of our dearest friend, Joe Matthews, age 92, who silently slipped into eternity while aqua jogging on April 13. We have endured the wake, and Funeral Mass, and two weeks of mourning. During these two weeks, we have had a stream of consciousness depicting the two Joes whom we love dearly. We say two Joe’s, because one Joe is the Joe of memory, who existed in time, in the body. The other Joe is the eternal Joe who exists and always existed, and always will exist in God, in whom we live and move and have our being. But right now, at this moment in time, an image of Joe in his body is haunting me as ‘Ted Lasso’ the American soccer coach who goes to England, and has captivated a worldwide audience because of his charismatic presence as a humble, humorous, forgiving guy in contrast to the egotistic selfish seekers who surround him.

    There has been a surge of interest in the Ted Lasso series on Apple by religious writers. One article is in the National Catholic Reporter (April 27, 2023) by Karen Eifler, “Why religion needs ‘Ted Lasso’ ”  She talks about this humble television show which can help us learn a thing or two about who or what God is. It is full of lessons on Personhood, humility, leadership, forgiveness, and listening to children. Eifler even quotes Pope Francis in Fratelli tutti, “Goodness is never weak but rather, shows its strength by refusing to take revenge. Those who truly forgive do not forget. Instead, they choose to not yield to the same destructive force that caused them so much suffering. They break the vicious circle; they halt the advance of the forces of destruction.” (This is quintessential Franciscan spirituality that Joe talked about all the time.)

Joe Matthews was famous in this part of Florida for making people feel good about themselves: the seniors at “Stretch and Tone” three times a week. The servers and checkout personnel at Publix, BJ’s, Costco, Subway Sandwiches, the Silver Dollar Golf Course and Clubhouse, the Senior Tennis and Pickle Ball Group at Westchase. They and many others were very lucky people who were greeted by name, and with an encouraging quip by Joe Matthews. Sounds a lot like Ted Lasso.

    Then, today, in the New York Times, I find another article on “Ted Lasso” by Tish Harrison Warren, titled: ” A TV Show That Uses Humor to Call Us Back to Humility.”

In this inspiring article, the Reverend Warren continues the salute to the Lasso Show and points out candidly how Lasso models the humility, forgiveness, and, plainly, LOVE that draws so many worldwide to watch, in the midst of the sadness and suffering, and contention in almost every country. When I read this, I was struck by the humility of Joe Matthews that was revealed in his Obituary. Nobody but his family knew that he had spent thirty years running a program for the homeless, especially aids victims, in New York City. The Mayor of New York attended his retirement celebration, he was so honored and loved by the more than 250 people that he supervised. Nobody knew Joe was an accomplished painter, much less that he had run four marathons and 75,000 miles, i.e., around the world three times. Every ounce of Joe’s humility was spent on rewarding others and not himself. And we all are the beneficiaries. 

Back to Ted Lasso in Rev. Warren’s article:

  “Lasso’s great humility, again and again, makes him a wellspring of transformation and redemption. He disarms people. 

As Dostoyevsky sketched out the main character of “The Idiot,” Prince Myshkin, perhaps the most famous holy fool in literature, he wrote: “His way of looking at the world: He forgives everything, sees reasons for everything, does not recognize that any sin is unforgivable.”

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.

Have I made the case for entering eternity with ease (remember: I’m not talking about dying, but rather entering eternity NOW before death)? Have I described how exactly we go into eternity with ease, not to mention entering eternity with joy?

I doubt it. Living a human life, and letting it go joyfully is not a court case to be argued before a black-robed human judge, much less the “judge of the living and the dead” mentioned in the scriptures. Living and dying human is a story told by each of us with each beat of our heart and each breath of our bosom. Yes: diaphragmatic breathing taught by Yoga. I realize that I started this work to help myself (and, of course, possible readers) to face 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. 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. Kübler-Ross’s Five Stages of Death should be renamed The Five Stages of the lifetime process of living and dying. Why didn’t our parents and teachers tell us the real meaning of our night-time prayer:
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep,
And if I die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take?

This childhood prayer pictures the distinct possibility that I may die at any moment in this precarious and perilous human odyssey in which I am engaged from the very start. I had written at the end of Back to Earth (the third book of The Twin Towers Trilogy) that we have to stop denying the impermanence of human life. I was convinced since my years in psychotherapy school that the denial of death goes hand in hand with the denial of life. Do we refuse to fully give ourselves to the joy of being human because we cannot accept the ultimate loss of our human life by dying? So we live in denial of joy and delight because we are in denial about the ultimate end of life in death.

First of all, we have to distinguish between the death of the body, and the death of self-conscious awareness. We can no longer say that we have “immortal souls,” that are “spiritual beings.” We thought that God was a “spiritual being” who existed in his own “spiritual world” called heaven, and we were destined to join him in glory in his other, non-material world, or be punished forever in the devil’s spiritual world of hell. In this book, I have tried to make the case that the next life up above in heaven that we were taught about as children no longer exists in actual physical reality. Heaven and hell, and judgment were metaphors for deeper realities, sacred mysteries that we can only point to in poetry and prayer. So now we are stuck with the mystery of what remains of us after the body dissolves by entropy into other forms of matter. We cannot stand the thought of separation from our body. “Out of sight, out of mind” is a most familiar comment on human relationships. One of the first stages of development of the human child is called “object constancy.” Here is the psychological description of it: “Object constancy is the ability to believe that a relationship is stable and intact, despite the presence of setbacks, conflict, or disagreements.

People who lack object constancy might experience extreme anxiety in relationships of all types not just romantic ones-and may live in constant fear of abandonment.” We know a child has reached object constancy because she can play hide and seek with you. Before that time, when you hide from her, she thinks you do not exist anymore. She does not miss you, or seek you because she does not yet have the capacity to keep you in her mind as a remembered object. But when she starts to remember you when she can no longer see you, she can miss you, mourn you, and weep over the separation.

One of the first things I learned in psychotherapy was separation anxiety. In fact, one professor opined that psychotherapy was all about separation anxiety. He thought that psychotherapy should be 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 with 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 in a course of therapy. 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 I am typing this page?

That is the problem I was faced with when I began writing this book. Entering Eternity With Ease, indeed! We have to learn how to mourn the loss that results from separation. First we have to learn that loss leads to relying on ourselves while we are strengthened by the bitter/sweet memory and mystical presence of the one(s) we have lost. I am looking now at the wall in front of my desk as I write. It is filled with upwards of a hundred photos and death cards of people who loved me and whom I loved who have now entered eternity. Losing them was a huge price to pay. How many times have I said, and had said to me, “I am sorry for your loss?” But these losses have made me what I am today. Every one of these people had an intimate part in creating the person I am today.

The great Ira Progoff of NYU’s Dialogue House taught us how we internalize all the persons with whom we had close relationships. Even though my mother and father and so many others have passed away, I carry an internalized version of them in my heart. And I can talk to them right now. All the things I remember that they did for me, all the truths they told me, in short, the deep, deep concern and love for me I treasure in my memory. Ira Progoff taught us to keep an Intensive Journal, which is a magnified Diary, with daily entries like any Diary, but also has several other sections where we have lengthy dialogues with these internalized loved ones or unloved ones, and work out with them any unfinished business we might have with them. When you get to be 80, much more, 90, you sense you are drawing closer to them, spiritually, and you want to stress how much they mean to you. I quoted above the beautiful poem e.e. cummings wrote, presumably to his wife, but can apply to any loved one: “I carry your heart with me(I carry it in my heart) I am never without it(anywhere i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing, my darling) I fear no fate(for you are my fate, my sweet)I want no world(for beautiful you are my world, my true) and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart I carry your heart with me(I carry it in my heart)”

Only poetry like this can hope to even intimate what I am saying about all the internalized loved ones who have created the magnificent human beings that we are, each of us, whether we realize it or not. Not to mention God (God forbid!) whom we have internalized to such an extent that we have become in a very real sense, godlike. To the non-religious, this may seem like a childish fantasy, but the greatest scholar of the historical Jesus, Dominic Crossan, writes that Jesus has been revered by millions as divine for two thousand years because he somehow internalized God as his Father, or Dad, (in Aramaic, Abba.) As Crossan says, Jesus was not actually divine, but he talked and acted as God would talk and act if God were a human being. In other words, no one in history ever talked or acted more like God as we conceive God to be, than Jesus. The saints of history, whatever their religion or philosophy, all spoke and acted like the compassionate and vulnerable God whom they had internalized through prayer and meditation. Finally, if we live each day in the light of eternity, we too will settle down into a peaceful, joyful experience of delight in both living and dying. Robert Frost has a mellow meditation on mortality in his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”:

In these simple snowy images, Frost paints a picture of a snowy, darkening day that reminds him of his future last day, as the dirt piles up in his grave like snow “filling up” the woods. He looks forward to that day, but knows he has many tasks to complete before that final day. Another author, Mary Pipher, writes of death and snow:
I love the world but I cannot stay. Death is democratic and we will all participate in its enactment. I will miss the beauty all around me. I have taken so much pleasure in the natural world, in people and books, in music and art, in cups of coffee and lolling cats. If I knew that I had a month left to live, I wouldn’t spend my time much differently than I do now.
All of my life I have loved snow. When I was a girl in the 1950s, snow fell often in the long winters of western Nebraska. I remember one winter when, after the streets were plowed, mountains of snow 10 feet tall stood in the middle of the streets. As a young mother, my favorite days were snow days when our family could stay home and play board games. I would make soup and popcorn. I relished taking my children outside to do the things that I had done in the snow as a girl. I loved falling asleep with my family safe on a blizzardy night when the streets were impassable and a blanket of peace covered our town.
Now, snow has become a profoundly spiritual experience. When it snows, I sit by my window and watch it fall. I go deep into its purity and softness. Snow falls inside and outside of me. It settles my brain and calms my body. I hope death feels like watching the snow grow thicker and thicker. Doctors call dying of a morphine overdose being ‘snowed.’ I would not mind that at all. I would like to disappear in a whiteout.

May all of us unique snowflakes find a quiet wood filling up with snow on our last day, after we have exhausted our many miles to go. We are each a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

Once more we hear John Keats:

A Thing of beauty is a joy forever;

It’s loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness;

 but still will 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. As Teilhard de Chardin so powerfully sings (in Christianity and Evolution):
“If, as a result of some interior revolution, I were to lose in
succession my faith in Christ, my faith in a personal God,
and my faith in spirit, I feel that I should continue to believe
invincibly in the world. The world ( it’s value, its infallibility, and its goodness)- that, when all is said and done, is the first, the last, and the only thing in which I believe. It is by this faith that I live, and it is to this faith, I feel, that at the moment of death, rising above all doubts, I shall surrender myself.” We will go where Elijah went, Buddha went, where Jesus went, where Mohammed went, where all the delightfully dying went, back to earth, back to the humus from which all humans come. Amen. So be it. Così sia.

Epilogue
“Remember man, that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return”. This has been used for a thousand years on Ash Wednesday to open up 40 days of spiritual practice around Death and Resurrection. Now I read it as “Remember earthlings that you come from earth and are going back to earth.” Was it worth it, then, just to live, and then to die? Once upon a time, somewhere in the vast universe, really everywhere and nowhere at all, is the Spirit-Self, that we may call a kind of Anonymous God, A Divine Nemo, a Godly No One. This Unknown God, this Spirit-Self contains us all. The Spirit-Self is the transcendent power of matter. It is me; it is all of us who ever were or ever will be. Spirit has no matter, no parts, it is undivided, limitless, and infinite. It is One, it is True, it is Good, it is Beautiful. We, the Spirit-Self of living matter are here, we are now, we always were and always will be. We evolved as the Consciousness of the material universe. There is no past, no future, only now. We are all dead, and we are all very much alive. We have a love for Being which is ourselves, and also a Being For Love. In fact, we ARE Love, and because we are Love, we are a thing of beauty forever. Some of us are huge fans of Jesus because he convinces us that we are already 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, but that he went back to earth where he came from. “He who believes in me, already has eternal life”; “I have risen and am still with you.” 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. The rest of us will not have millions of believers and followers who will follow us down the centuries. That is why it is so important to grasp the significance of the “eternal NOW.” Eternity 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.

The mystic/poet, Father John Duffy, CSSR, writes in “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 peace.” 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. “It is in dying that we are born to eternal life” as Francis of Assisi prays. Jesus went back to the earth where he came from, not back to a heaven he never came from. “He has gone before you into Galilee.” Galilee is where Jesus came from: from the earth of Nazareth, and it is to the same earth that we shall all return- where we came from. It is my consummate joy to be named Umana which means Human in Italian and in Spanish. Human, of course, comes from humus which means “soil.” We humans are all of the soil. “Remember humans that you are soil, and unto soil you shall return.” Humus also means “earth”, so we are earthlings, children of Mother Earth, or “Gaia” as the Greeks called the Goddess Earth. I can’t wait to go home to Mother earth. Yes, Tom Wolfe, you can go home again, FOR EVER. The earliest followers of the crucified Jesus would sing in their liturgies: Maranatha, Amen, Come Lord Jesus.

Now that I no longer exist as an Ego, where do WE go from here? Nowhere. We are already here. In fact, WE ARE. FOREVER.

Welcome to Eternity.

If I have another book to write, it will be either on this side of the grave or the other.

As my Sicilian-American paesano Sinatra wrote on his grave: The best is yet to come, I write THE BEST IS ALREADY HERE.

Isn’t that delightful? And I’m not even dead yet.

The death card says: Don’t Weep For Me

And now for my homily:

Barabara Rotundo’s Wake

When I first heard how ill Barbara was, I prayed that she would enter eternity with ease. That’s the name of the book I wrote during the worst part of the covid pandemic.

I will be 94 next month and when you become this old you think about dying a lot.

First thing you think- where do you go when you die? You don’t go anywhere-you stay where you are- here. Here is everywhere and anywhere all at once. Why doesn’t anybody come back from the dead? Because they didn’t go anywhere. They are still HERE!

We say in the prayer “I believe”, that Jesus rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven-but we still talk to him all the time. So heaven must be here.  So Barbara is still here, too. She didn’t go anywhere.  So, Mario, you can talk to Barbara any time you want. You don’t have to go home to talk to her anymore. She is always here, wherever you are. She didn’t go anywhere. She just entered eternity with ease. She is where God is, in God’s time-forever-the eternal now.

Barbara is resting in peace- in place, forever. Amen.

When I was trying to qualify for postgraduate studies in Clinical Social Work, I had to take an exam called the MAT’s, or Miller Analogy Tests.  It scared the hell out of every applicant, and we had to prepare with grueling prep tests.  An analogy goes like this: A is to B, what C is to D.  But it’s the relationship of A to B that is compared to the relationship of C to D.   For example: “Black is to White, as On is to Off. “ 

The MAT test leaves out the first comparison:  “Black is to White, as On is to Off,  and asks “Black is to ……., as On is to Off“   But every analogy is different. Some are opposites, some are different categories.    Some are similes.  Imagine an hour of those, one after another, non-stop. You had to score above the 90th Percentile to be accepted into school. Okay, I scored 96 and the rest is history. 

Now I am making a new analogy that asks one of the main questions in my book, Entering Eternity With Ease.   ” Life is to death what eternity is to time.”   Or better, death is to life what time is to eternity.   Is this even an analogy?  Whatever it is, there is a life and death relationship between life and death, and there is an eternal relationship between eternity and time. This is a paradox, an analogy, a simile, and a metaphor, all wrapped up in a mystery.  It can only be accessed by mysticism and mindfulness.

I am fond of saying that spirituality is the practice of meditation that awakens us to our eternal presence in this material universe. Mindfulness is to meditation what a child is to its mother. It is through meditation that mindfulness grows strong enough to live in us every waking moment outside of meditation. We live mindfully when we eat with gratitude towards all the human beings and animals, and even inanimate objects that contributed to our food, some with their own lives. We live mindfully when we work with our minds, with our bodies, with conscious awareness. We live mindfully when we enjoy entertainment, the media. We live mindfully when we read, and study, or zoom or text, or talk on any device.

But what happened to our analogy? Is death to life what time is to eternity? Do we sense this?  Is our life eternal, with no beginning and no end? And death is some kind of transition in life which we have never understood?  Is time some transition in eternity which we have never understood? As we live each moment mindfully, but regularly charged with pauses of meditation, do we experience the eternal NOW in our depths, deep within our being- awareness? Do we understand that the millions of random thoughts that invade our brains are not our own thoughts, but invaders of our clean awareness?  This is an example of what I mean by meditation.