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.”

There is a kind of magic at work in Ted Lasso’s life. When everyone else seems to be carried along by the powerful riptides of ambition, vanity, fame, jadedness and contempt, it startles us when someone swims upstream against the current. The Catholic social activist Dorothy Day ends her memoir “The Long Loneliness” with one of my favorite lines: “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”In a time when our culture is marked by outrage, division and cynicism, Ted Lasso calls us back to humility. He asks us to lighten up a little, to not take ourselves too seriously. In doing so, he reminds everyone he encounters — including us watching at home — of our shared humanity. We are all, in the end, not winners or losers, successes or failures, pure heroes or villains, but people who long to be known, loved and delighted in. This is the gift of Ted Lasso. He shows us what’s possible when we give up winning — soccer games, power grabs, professional success, culture wars or online fights — and, however foolish it may be, choose to root for the people all around us.     How miraculous that we have been gifted by a real life Ted Lasso who has been our closest friend for years on end. And now Joe Matthews is available to us 24/7 as the eternal Joe, not of memory, but of present presence. Amen.

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. 

[The following is taken in full from a blog post by Tony Equale]

As I begin my meditation on “matter” in search of what Edmund Husserl would call the “essence of the phenomenon,” I immediately realize that the traditional historical deconstructions already performed have amounted to an epoché, a bracketing, that has taken away all the specification and characterization with which my natural wordview had clothed the word “matter.”  First, the top layers of scientistic positivism were peeled away dismissing mechanistic reductionism as, mini­mally, a premature and prejudicial assumption, and acknowledging the validity of conscious experience.  Hence, the first conclusion: the experience of consciousness, despite the erstwhile claims of Daniel Dennett, cannot be dismissed as illusion.  Consciousness is real and its apparent incompatibility with its own material substrate is not sufficient in itself to prove the null hypothesis.

Subsequently, that first reduction revealed a sedimentation ― more layers underneath ― that also had to be held in abeyance.  This second deconstruction bracketed the age-old pre-scientific traditional assumption that the “self” was a substantial “spirit” (soul) able to exist without the matter of the body, and that consciousness was one of its sui generis operations.  It was precisely as spirit, i.e., not-matter, that the apparently immaterial characteristics of con­scious experience could be present alongside a material organism.  That view held that human beings were body and soul.

Effectively now, with both those worldviews suspended, I shouldn’t even use the word “matter” because its ancient traditional con­struc­tion in both cases had made its characteristics a cor­relate of spirit.  For even in the positivist reductionist view, matter was given its exclusively physicalist charac­ter with the distinction of body and soul in the background.  Once spirit was eliminated by the naive materialism of the modern era, the well established traditional inertness of matter was left to explain everything.  It’s no surprise that it could not do so.

Descartes claimed matter could be acted upon but could not act, because he was convinced that alongside dead matter there was also a living immaterial force in the universe.  All degrees of con­scious­ness as well as the ability to initiate activity were explained by that “second sub­stance.”  It was called spirit.  Without it matter was a dead mechanism.

Stripped by this double reduction of its correlative spirit, phenomenologically speaking, the word matter has become free floating and indeter­minate.  It has lost its exclusively mechanistic character.  Without these physical / metaphysical presumptions pre-empting the determination of meaning, the perception of matter is open to the meaning that I, in my first person experi­ence, can discern in it.  I am now free to ask the question: how do I expe­rience matter and what do I mean by it … or perhaps better, highlighting the inten­tion­ality that impels my enquiry: what does the matter I experience mean to me?

Asking the question of meaning emphasizes the restrictions that a phenomenological enquiry imposes.  There can be no question here of resolving the ultimate nature of the object that the phenomenon intends by introspective examination alone.  Phenomenology cannot deter­mine the nature of matter.  Further clarification of “what” matter might be, is the domain of science, where already vetted and purified phenomena are subjected to painstak­ingly thorough and detailed observation, measurement, analysis and mathematical represen­tation.

Erasure     Given the extent of the ignorance that the phenomenological bracketing introduces, If I continue to use the word matter (and I have little choice because as yet there is no other), I realize I have to use it under erasure, as Jacques Derrida would say, because its conventional meaning has been “deconstructed.”  He would represent this by writing it with a strike­through, like this: matter.

So in the first instance I am aware that the very word, “matter,” can no longer refer to the inert, mechanical thing of the Platonic / Cartesian dyad.  By matter I now mean something universal and utterly neutral ― an experience of “physical stuff” that makes no pretense of describing or defining physical reality beyond what is experienced, and especially not its traditional primary denota­tion: in contrast with and opposed to spirit.  Effectively for me, with reference to this “stuff” that I experience, the words and erstwhile concepts spirit and matter no longer exist.  I am already faced with the need to adjust the imagery associated with each word so that it includes that of the other.  Henceforth both words, spirit and matter will be erased with a strike­through; from now on, each word refers to exactly the same phenomenon which I experience meaningfully but whose “nature” remains to be determined by science.

the experience of matter

What is this experience that we have been calling matter? I have no trouble saying that I know this stuff.  I know it like the back of my hand.  Where and what is it?  It is every­where and everything, inside and outside of me, regardless how alive or how conscious, without exception.  My first encounter with reality is that it is a physical field ― a  totality in which I am immersed like a sponge in the sea.  It is my-world-with-me-in-it whole and undivi­ded.  I am aware that I have / am a body precisely because “I” am a material organism directly and conna­tur­ally in contact with my material matrix which is everything I can see, hear, touch, smell and taste.

This realization that the “I” that is doing the perceiving, and the “world” around me that is per­ceived, which might appear to present a clearly demarcated subject/object (S/O) polarity as the first item of observation, is immediately subordinated and rendered secondary because my initial awkening, like a newborn baby’s cry, is driven by unconscious connatural needs that straddle the S/O divide.  My mindless needs reveal that my “self,” my organism, perceives itself separate and distinct only through and after experiencing its own needs reaching out to the surrounding world for a presumed homogeneous sustenance in the form of food, shelter, emo­tional warmth and existential assurance.  Initially, all such needs are undefined.  I instinc­tive­ly know, however, that my “stuff” and the “stuff” around me are homogeneous: they are assumed to be compat­ible and complementary with me, for I reach out without hesitation or doubt, expecting to find there exactly what I need, and I have done so, apparently with uninter­rupted success, since before the dawn of my own self-awareness. 

The existential anxiety from which I reach out reveals itself as an assump­tion of primordial non-polarity ― as if I were driven to reconnect with an originally prior unity.  The “stuff” in me and  my world is integral; it is the same.  That this assumption is quite unmistakably innate in my organism is itself a discovery ― the result of a learning experience beginning in infancy even before the advent of memory and continuing throughout life.  Even now my felt needs reach out and precede my awareness of them; those needs mindlessly assume they will be met.  I feel hunger first, and then the anticipation of its satisfaction.  Then, in a final step, I know and am able to say: “I am hungry,” and “I am thinking that I will find food in the world.”

It is this spontaneous reaching out that gives detail and meaning to my perceptions; my con­sciousness of an innate first person intentionality reveals itself as an expectation of a perfect correspon­d­ence between my organism and the surrounding physical field.  Concretely realized in the very early nurturing contact with mother and family, I discover I belong intimately and in an effective and satisfying way to the matrix into which I emerged.  Later I come to understand this global complementarity as mediated through separate but coordinated sensory connectors in my biological organism.  I experience light in and through my eyes as my capacity to see; events that vibrate air or water in and through my ability to hear, objects with weight and texture in and through my sense of touch, etc.  This is all part of the field of matter of which I am a part and reveals my body to be a mirror of the external side of the physical field, “the stuff” that surrounds me, matter.

The meaning of my experience of matter.

I can see that “total correspondence with my perceiving organism” accounts for the primordial structure of my most basic first person experience.  I can say without doubt that my interpreta­tion of the meaning of what I contact in the world is totally dependent on what my organism’s physical structure and needs demand from the physical stuff in the world.  That correspon­dence ― between my needs expressed by my organism’s structures and what physically exists in the environment ― determines my continued existence.

One simple need, the need for food, illustrates this interaction perfectly.  The sensory medi­a­tors that interface for the food connection are a clear example of this correspondence.  Identi­fy­ing food depends on my organs of sight which correlate quite narrowly with certain wavelengths of light.  Light will have the par­t­i­cular meaning I assign to it because my eyes make lighted objects intimately familiar to me, so familiar, in fact, that I can see and effectively iden­tify food in the environment.

I know and understand light innately; I cannot define or explain it in any terms other than itself.  If I had different organs of sight, like the fly whose 3,000 to 6,000 simple eyes arrayed within the composite organ on the top of its head, which may resonate with wavelengths of light beyond the red or the violet that constitute my range of vision, I suspect I would “see” some­thing different from what I see now, and it would have a corres­pond­ingly differ­ent meaning for me as I tried to locate and identify food in order to survive as a fly.

I may see things differently from a fly, but what I share with it is my need to survive in a world where patterns of light synchronize with my body’s needs.  My visual apparatus, like the fly’s, determines how I am going to interact with the lighted world other than myself, and what the result of that interaction will be.  It is clearly the specific homogeneity between my self and the objects of perception that allows this to happen.  The meaning of the experience of matter is limited by the organismic sensory connectors  ― my senses ― that interface my needs to the world.

This is true of all aspects of the physical world. I do not have eyes in the back of my head, so I cannot see what is behind me; I cannot walk on water like the skimming beetles whose foot parts are like outriggers; I cannot fly through the air for I have no wings. But I do what I can do because of the specific sameness of my body with what I encounter.  Clearly my species’ body, its structure and range of activities constitutes the specific meaning I impose upon the world, for my world can help me survive only to the degree that my human body corresponds to my world.  All I know of the world is what my body matches and tries to grasp and incorporate for its own survival.

The conatus sese conservandi

From my side of the relationship, the world l live in is exclusively made of matter and  it means everything to me, for it is by it that I, made of matter, survive.  For me surviving, being-here, is to die for. Why?  I don’t know.  I don’t have a rational answer to that question.  It’s not a choice, and I can’t help it.  I want to be here just because I want to be here; the desire is built into me;  I CANNOT NOT WANT it.  And it’s not a mere preference activated in serenity.  It is a passionate violent thirst, a hungry craving that will not be dismissed.  It is organic bedrock.  I’m inclined to say that insofar as I am totally matter and this implacable urge is innate, I assume that it is matter that “needs” to be here and my wanting simply reflects the ground that I am made of. 

Thus the first person experience of my “self” in my “lived world” provides me with a confirmation of what my “natural” worldview has claimed all along.  The word and concept “matter” has become indeterminate enough (through epoché) to discern the essential features of the experience; and for me everything I have is matter, and everything I don’t have ― every­thing I need and reach out for ― is matter.  Without making any claims for its ontological status, phenome­no­logically speaking matter for me is the transcendent and universal condition of my first person experience of being-here.  If there is something other than (different from or more than) matter in this universe, limited as I am to my “lived world,” initially I have no way of knowing it.  The meaning of matter for me, is identified with my survival.  Therefore it is fundamentally existential ― I experience it as inescapably connected to my being-here.

“Matter,” the physical reality around me that impacts my body’s survival, is either the direct and originating energy source of being-here itself, or it is the thoroughly commensurate and transparent first-display (or vicarious agent) of some unknown wellspring which is the unper­ceived source of the the energy of being-here.  If that second possibility should be true (and in any case, it is science that has to determine that), then it means matter is the primordial emanate of the foundational energy of the cosmos.

NOTE: This hypothetical question has had many historical antecedents.  In one of them, the Christian worldview, following the Trinitarian innovations taken at the start of Christianity’s Roman Imperial phase in the fourth century, the primordial emanation ― the analog to Plato’s Demiourgos (“Craftsman”) of the Timaeus ― was called the “Son of God” and identified as Jesus of Nazareth.  Those who would pursue the effort to assimilate a materialist worldview to the traditional Christian imagery, would perhaps be inclined to see matter as the logos, the first-born Son of God, the creative agent playing the role of “Wisdom” of Proverbs 8, Philo’s equivalent of Plato’s Demiourgos, and the Stoics’ logos / fire / energy in which “we live and move and have our being.” The analogy is reinforced by the scientifically confirmed creative role of autonomous material energy.

That means matter is my only (necessary and sufficient) connection to being-here as far as I can see.  It is the matrix in which I live and move and have my being.  There is nothing else that plays that role.  If I want to survive, I must interact suc­cess­fully with the material reality that is my matrix.  If I fail at that endeavor I will die.  The matter of my body will cease to cohere as an organic entity.  But it is not my body that controls what successful means.  It is my lived world.  If I do not find out what, in the lived world, really, factually, objectively, unerringly corresponds to the matter of my body and can sustain its being-here, I will die.  Being-here, that is my ulti­mate, absolute and unsuppressible desideratum, the one and only proper object of my conatus, the exclusive and permanent guarantor/guardian of my self identity, depends totally on that submissive correspondence on my part.  I am subjectively constrained to hew objectively to the outside world.

This can be said to provide an inescapable and undeniable bridge from my first person (interior) experi­ence of matter to an external world that does not depend upon my perceptions for its reality.  Death is the final and ever-present, ever-active arbiter of the correspondence between my organism and the rest of the physical field, my subject and its objects, in which I live and move and have my being.

An imaginary world? An imaginary “self.”

The imagery that when I die I “go somewhere where there is no matter” (traditional and still common in our culture) must also be reduced out of the equation, for it is not compatible with what I experience.  Being a material organism, I do not know what experience I could possibly have in a world where there was no matter.  My survival or its equivalent (my body’s “meaning” to my intending self) depends totally upon the accuracy of the correspondence between the matter of my body and the matter of the world I live in.  Matter is what I am and therefore this material world is where I belong.  I can’t go anywhere else.  My very organism arose symbioti­cally.  My body was formed over eons of geologic time by living matter interacting with earth’s material environment.  We are like lock and key, hand and glove.  There is nowhere else I could go.  If there is another world where I can live as this material organism which I am, it must be made of the selfsame matter and in the same proportions.

Correlatively, one of the assumptions I have to suspend is that my own inner sense of my “self,” which feels to be totally mental and quite separate from my body because it can observe bodily functions and feelings as if they were “other,” is actually “other” than my body.  It is not.  A thorough and repeated examination of this “sense of self” in many and varied circumstances reveals that its very function is body-dependent.  In the various stages and levels of sleep, for instance, I see the imaginary nature of my sense of self with great clarity.  I dream, my identity morphs serially through various “selves,” often from exchanging places with antagonists, who perceive themselves undergoing experiences that upon awakening turn out never to have occurred and the “selves” that authored them equally unreal.  In conditions of illness or intense stress I expe­ri­­ence myself with my ability to judge reality impaired, even at times to the point of tem­p­orarily losing self-focus and becoming confused about my self-identity.  I see tragic situa­tions where serious damage to brain, spinal cord, horm­onal distribution result in signifi­cantly altered or even absent affective, cognitive and identity perceptions that could only be ex­plained by my “sense of self” being dependent on bodily functions.  Finally when the body dies, the self is no longer experienced by others as being-here.  Whether that is an accurate indicator that I, too, will not continue to experience “my self” remains unknown.  No one has ever re­turned to resolve the issue one way or the other.  Since the body no longer inter­faces with the material universe, my own conjecture is that my “experience” also ceases.  This suggests that my “self” was a function (an action or product) of the living body all along.  The living organism had produced a set of images to stand for a profound but inexpressible self-awareness, and then callsed those images its “self.”  It’s a narrative generated to characterize a lifetime of the events and choices of a particular biological organism. 

There is no ”self” apart from the biological organism.  My “self” is something I do, not what I am.  When I die and can no longer do anything, my carefully elaborated “self,” my story, disappears.

There is no “intelligence” apart from the body.  Intelligent awareness pervades the entire body.  This militates against the traditional imagery of a “soul” as a separable entity, made of some­thing different from what makes up the body and performing exclusively mental operations.  My experience challenges that.  For example, my ability to accurately “sense” the speed, dist­ance, weight, density and tactile properties of a moving object ― like a baseball ― that is clearly “other than” my own moving body, indicates that my ability to navigate within my lived-world is resident and functioning in all parts of my body in a coordinated fashion and not just in my mind.  The encounter between “me” (my moving body) and the baseball is precise and “meaningful” without any recollection of a “thought process” guiding the whole procedure.  I am able to achieve the desired result, “catching” the ball, without consciously thinking.  So, just as my “mind” and “body” are one thing, my “sense of self” is not an indication that the “self” is limited to the brain nor, as traditionally believed, that it is due to  the exis­tence of something other than the material body, like a spiritual soul traditionally identified with the mind.

Matter is existence

The utter transcendent universality of matter in our universe ― that everything that exists is matter ― raises the suspicion that “being,” which Plato and the dualists claimed was comprised principally of a kind of invisible stuff along with matter called “spirit,” is really only the one thing I encounter everywhere and in everything ― matter, spirit.

Even within Plato’s lifetime, Aristotle saw clearly that there is no evidence for the independent existence of immaterial ideas as “forms” or “essences,” and that fundamental matter (without form) was not a “thing” but a metaphor for the reality of an apparently infinite “potential” in the physical field of the universe.  Matter, for Aristotle, was a kind of energy.

At the same time, what Plato was calling pre-existent forms (to which he assigned a kind of parallel substance, called spirit) are really only our a posteriori concepts ― generic ideas drawn after-the-fact from the examination of a multitude of similar singular examples.  The concept “horse,” for example, does not reside as an independent spiritual “entity” somewhere, as Plato thought, ready to be utilized by a divine Craftsman who will insert a carbon copy of the “idea” of horse into a heap of formless matter in order to create an individual horse.  There is no “formless matter.” There is only matter in its multitude of forms.  Prior to formed matter there is only the infinite potential of material energy able to take on new and unexpected forms forged by the insistence of the living conatus to be-nere.

“Matter” before it is “formed” is pure potential: an unidentifiable energy; it doesn’t exist as an entity, a thing.  And the concept horse is our human distillation of a multitude of experiences of individ­ual horses.  It Is an idea, but it is our idea, a temporary configuration of the electric and chemical interactions of neurons in the human brain which we use to interface accurately between the subject and object of experi­ence.  There is nothing “substantial” about ideas.  The human organism exists as an entity, but its ideas do not; they are only temporary mental states.  Ideas are not entities.  They are not “things.” They are real, but temporary and do not exist on their own.  In Aristotle’s terms, they are not “substances” they are “accidents.”  They are something we do. And if we stop doing them, like the “self” they stop being-there.

Even DNA as a template that encodes the processes for making horses and “communicates”  them to the molecules that are used for building horses, is itself an a posteriori development of matter, and is totally explainable as the result of matter’s incremental deep-time evolutionary adaptations.  Equine DNA is not an idea or a rational plan; it only becomes an idea in our human minds after we have encountered it in the real world and conceptualize (make an abstract representa­tion of) it.  What brought the first horse into existence was not an idea, it was the insistence on being-here that drove its ancestors evolving a mutating DNA that eventuated in that of the present day horse.  All this appies to human beings mutatis mutandi.

The obvious plausibility of Aristotle’s rejection of Plato’s theory immediately entails another. If Plato’s concept of the human form, what has come to be known as the “soul,” was imagined to have a spiritual composition by being a form, an essence which defined and gave purpose to man, then, since ideas are not entities that exist apart from the brains that think them, “ideas” cannot ground the alleged self-subsistent substantiality of the “soul” which Plato imagined pre-existing its entrance into the human body at birth and surviving its decomposition at death.  The very reason for assuming the self-subsistent character of the soul ― that ideas are substantial entities ― has disappeared.

We have to realize there is no direct evidence of the continued existence of the disembodied “soul” after death, so the only source of “knowledge” for claiming such a phenomenon is the reasoning process by which Plato assimilated the human essence or form to an idea; in his view ideas were self-subsistent and resided in a World of Ideas, hence the “soul” which produced ideas was self-subsistent and came from and would return to its true home in that other world.

The fact that Plato’s theory was debunked within his lifetime by his own chosen successor did not in the least deter the Mediterranean world, in large measure, from embracing the notion of the soul as a disembodied spirit that survives the decomposition of the body at death.  The added anomaly that the fledgling Christian movement of the early second century rejected Plato’s theory as contrary to Christian beliefs, similarly, did nothing to prevent the Roman Catholic Church, even before its absorption into the Imperial State machinery, from embracing it as the linchpin of its religious practice: the fulcrum around which all its doctrines and rituals turned.  For “salvation” came to mean only one thing: that the disembodied individual human soul would not suffer the eternal torment it deserved as punishment for its sins and the sin of its primaeval ancestor.

I believe that the concurrence in ancient times between the far-from-proven belief in the immortal, immaterial, separable “soul” and the cultural, moral, social and political benefits of its universal internalization by the variegated populations of the Empire, impelled both Rome and then its Sacred Consort to embrace, promote and dogmatize that belief.  From a philosoph­i­cal / theological theory, it became an indisputed cultural meme, eternal truth.  We are the inheritors of that culture and religion.  We can try to subject it to epoché for our thought ex­peri­ments, but once the roaring of intellect has stopped, in the quiet of night, it will come creeping back.

On Januray 22 the Vietnamese Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hahn, died in Hue.

He was a friend of Martin Luther King, Jr. and he came to the U.S. in 1965 after a Buddhist monk in Vietnam burned himself to death protesting the war in Vietnam. It was that sacrificial suffering that turned King against the war. 

It was Tich’s teaching that there is no birth and no death, according to the heart of Buddhist teaching that made the monk’s immolation a sacrifice like Christ’s, and not a simple suicide. Tich taught that our awareness of life is eternal, had no beginning and has no end. Thus he can end with:  

This body is not me. I am not limited by this body. I am life without boundaries. I have never been born,   and I have never died.

Here is the direct quote from Thich Nhat Hahn:

“The Buddha has a very different understanding of our existence. It is the understanding that birth and death are notions. They are not real. The fact that we think they are true makes a powerful illusion that causes our suffering. The Buddha taught that there is no birth; there is no death; there is no coming; there is no going; there is no same; there is no different; there is no permanent self; there is no annihilation. We only think there is. When we understand that we cannot be destroyed, we are liberated from fear. It is a great relief. We can enjoy life and appreciate it in a new way.”

This body is not me. I am not limited by this body. I am life without boundaries. I have never been born, And I have never died.

After writing Christmas letters for almost a half century, I am compelled to continue communicating with anyone who will listen, that Christmas is the greatest proof of the existence of God that we have in this world. Last week we attended a live stage play of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” It was maybe the 25^th time I watched “A Christmas Carol” since I was in the fifth grade at Oliver Hazzard Perry School in South Boston, MA at the age of 9, in1938

At 9 I had gotten over a long time ago my belief in the existence of Santa Claus. I was too young to question the existence of God at that time, and watching “A Christmas Carol” being played by my fifth grade classmates, I somehow knew that only someone as powerful as God could turn a miserly Scrooge into a giver of Christmas gooses. The ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future were wonderful stand-ins for the God behind Bethlehem.

 And now in this year of climate collapse, and millions of infections and deaths from covid, thousands of gun wounds and deaths, drought and fires, and earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and the “Divided States of America”, where is that God who turned over Scrooge’s hardened heart?

 “Silent night, Holy night, All is calm, all is bright” and the streets and homes, and stores and skyscrapers are lit with the multicolored energy of the universe. Why?

Only you can look for the answer to that question.

I found one answer last week during a zoom meditation on famous paintings of the Nativity. The one that struck me was on the Annunciation by Roscoe Tanner (1898), from the Phila. Museum of Art. It showed Mary as a 16 year old sitting up in bed while the angel, as a blinding pillar of light, appears to her. “ Thou shalt conceive.” What is Mary thinking?

I like to think Mary is a Jewish girl of deep faith who has experienced God in her own heart, and now hears that God chooses to take flesh in her and bring Peace to Men of Good Will.   Men (and women) of Good Will, please listen.

Merry Christmas and a Happier New Year than this one.

The conservative columnist, Ross Douthat, wrote a magnificent article in the New York Times Sunday Review, “How to Think Your Way Into Religious Belief,” in which he answered the atheist Daniel Dennett’s book, “Breaking the Spell”. Douthat argues against Dennett’s statement that religion prevents believers from seeing the world clearly. Douthat masterfully replies that maybe atheism prevents non-believers from seeing the world clearly. I love the very long article Douthat writes in which he gives a two thousand year argument for the existence of God. But I had to reply to Ross Douthat as follows:

I am a 92 year old priest/ psychotherapist who admires Ross Douthat’s constant and consistent scholarship.  But at my age, I no longer try to use intellectual arguments about God, faith, or religion. I have painfully traveled the continuum from theism to atheism, to pantheism, to pan-entheism. Panentheism means finding your bodily center in the Ground of Being, as described by Paul Tillich. Or as Tillich himself says: “finding the God above the God of theism” . Or in a material way I would say we need to find the God BELOW the God of theism.

I have never been able to give an intellectual argument for the existence of God.  I have only found God in my heart and especially in my guts through experience, especially the experience of grace. Back in the 40’s,  the holocaust survivor Franz Werfel’s “Song of Bernadette” began with “For those who believe in God, no explanation is necessary, and for those who do not believe in God, no explanation is possible.”  I would say now “for those who have experienced grace and love inside themselves, no explanation of God is necessary, and for those who haven’t, no explanation is possible.”  Many have  experienced grace or love, but never stopped long enough to feel it or become aware of it.

As the song says: “You’re nobody until somebody loves You,  so go and find somebody to love.” Maybe even an animal. I know my dog is more in  touch with unconditional Love than many people. He’s an enthusiast. I remember the English author Monsignor Knox saying that enthusiasm comes from “en-theos”, being in God. There you have it. Being in God/ Love/Grace, instead of talking about Him/Her/It.