Our tent last week on Governor's Island with One World Trade Center across the water.

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

October 25, 2022

On Dying and Not Being Here

I talked with a friend who is dying. She wanted some spiritual guidance, some direction. Her concerns: the uncertainty of what’s coming physically, but also the uncertainty of what’s coming metaphysically. She shared with me that she knows and appreciates the New Testament Book of Romans. That prompted my talking with her about Romans 10: hearing. We need to hear the Promise, and this daily, because it fades for all of us. 

She said she can’t imagine “not being here,” meaning, not being alive. I think I know what she means. How can we understand living not as living the only kind of living we know? But just now listen to that. Listen to that phrase: the only kind of living we know. Is that true? Do we know only one way of living? While that is true, that we live this only physical, tangible, emotional, intellectual life we now have, don’t we also know another kind or dimension of living while we live this living we know so well? While we live the only life we know we can have spoken into this life other things. One thing, not to be taken as a given, as if it’s ubiquitous and just lies around waiting to be discovered: the love, the unconditional promise that transforms our life with wholeness. You can say it this way:  You Do Enough, You Have Enough, You Are Enough.  We have, daily, conditional promises that saturate our souls with insufficiency and insolvency :“if you do enough, have enough, and are enough then I will pay attention to you.” But this unconditional promise puts to rest, destroys, all the “if” and “then.”

And because every day is either filled with utter silence that makes us wonder (and worry) or these conditions (“if….then”) are stated that imprison us in inadequacy, while living now we need to know and hear that promise (You Do Enough, You Have Enough, You Are Enough) and we get it, we receive it, in Christ Jesus. We have that unconditional promise “while we are here” and we will have that “when we are not here.” It is the unconditional promise that gives us life no matter the physicality. And so we can imagine at least that foundational piece of “not being here,” that foundational piece that is perhaps the fundamental reality: We are always, across all time and space, in Christ Jesus.