Daily Excerpt: An Afternoon's Dictation (Greenebaum) - Dealing with Death and Dying, Chapter Six
Today's book excerpt comes from An Afternoon's Dictation by Steven Greenebaum. This book has been in the Amazon top 100 among interfaith and ecumenical books on many occasions.
PART TWO: DEALING WITH DEATH AND DYING
CHAPTER FIVE
It wasn’t lost on me that the questions that most oppressed
my mind and had me angrily demanding answers from God weren’t answered until
halfway through the revelations that were placed before me. Still, what I
desperately needed at that moment of crisis in my life was some kind of handle
on death and dying. So, what I gravitated to first were the revelations about
these two difficult subjects. I read them, reread them, and lived with them. In
all honesty, being open to it required me to reorient my thinking about God as
well as life and death—which is a lot to unpack! But it did comfort me and help
me to begin to move ahead. Given how spent I felt, this was no small task.
The mind is
not the soul. Nor is the body. Sometimes, the mind decays or the body writhes
with pain before the soul has left it. That is indeed a tragedy. Weep, but do
not despair.
There was indeed a lot to unpack in those few sentences.
Still, I received immediate comfort from “Weep, but do not despair.” As
mentioned previously, my father had tried to teach me from childhood that “real
men” don’t cry. Ever. He wanted me to embrace that showing sadness, like
weeping, was a sign of weakness. Indeed, I can only remember my father crying
once. It was when we buried our beloved family dog in our backyard. Dad shed
one, maybe two tears, but then quickly wiped them away and apologized to my
mother, my sister, and to me for shedding a tear.
My father’s teaching had only partially taken. When faced
with tragedy, I indeed felt great sadness, but I must admit that I also felt
guilty for feeling sad. I tried hard to battle the sadness, to bury it, and in
so doing I think I greatly prolonged it. Now here was what I believed was the
voice of God telling me that it was both okay to weep and that tragedy is real
and should be acknowledged. What a relief! However, this reassuring comfort did
not stand alone. “Weep, but do not despair.” Don’t despair? What did that mean?
It seemed to me I was being told that while sadness was indeed the proper and
very human response to tragedy, even so, I must not give up. I needed to live
my life. No matter what the tragedy, I must not give up. “Weep, but do not despair.”
As I pondered it, I found this both comforting and empowering.
Nor was this the whole of the revelation. It began with, “The
mind is not the soul. Nor is the body. Sometimes, the mind decays or the body
writhes with pain before the soul has left it. That is indeed a tragedy.” Still
sad but no longer despairing, I began to unpack what this might mean. Like many,
if not most of us, I’d heard the word soul
often in my life and almost always as a cliché, or at best a metaphor. “That
person has an old soul.” And, of course, “that person has sold their soul” for
personal gain. Any thinking about what a soul might or might not actually be
was rare, and on those rare occasions, short and not particularly deep. Now, I
needed to come to grips with it as more than just a metaphor. Here it was—straightforward
and unavoidable.
“The mind is not the soul. Nor is the body. Sometimes, the
mind decays or the body writhes with pain before the soul has left it.”
This laid out clearly to me that there is a part of us
that’s neither our mind nor our body. Okay. What then? As I’ve pondered this
and lived with the question, I have come to believe that our soul is a piece of
Cosmic Conscience (more about God as Cosmic Conscience in the next chapters).
For me, our souls are not concerned with eating, or drinking, or exercise, or
touch. Not that these things aren’t important if we want to continue
living and enjoy that life! But they are the concerns of our body. Our souls
are not concerned with when we get up in the morning, what kind of learning we
gain in our lifetimes, whether we should drive when the roads are icy, or when
we should pick up groceries. Not that these things aren’t important if
we are to have any order and make any sense of our lives! But they are the
concerns of our mind.
As I pondered it, I concluded that our soul is concerned
with our conscience, our sense of right and wrong and perhaps most especially,
do we live a “me-centric” or an “us-centric” life? More than that, it became
clear that what is most central to who we are is our soul. And a soul knows no
race, religion, gender, or ethnicity. If we can understand and embrace this, it
shatters all attempts at division that our minds concoct.
Beyond this, if indeed the soul exists as separate from our
mind and body, the question arises: where does it go when it leaves? What
happens to the soul once the mind and body have died?
Oh, that! It’s a good and difficult question! We’ll examine
the answer I’ve come to, after living with it and pondering it for years, in
the next chapter. Still, it’s important to stress that it’s simply (or not so
simply) the answer that the revelations led me
to. It’s one answer. It’s the one I’ve embraced, but is by no means offered
here as the only answer. Other folks may well disagree with me. And the one
thing we know for sure is that there is no way to know for sure!! For me, one
of the great frustrations, indeed, tragedies of our human history is that we
have constantly sought to embrace one “right” answer, one simple answer, to
this hugely difficult question and then shut down any further thought.
Many of us believe that there is life after death. We may
well get into passionate arguments with one another over the nature of that
life after death, but uniting all of this group is the belief that there is some
kind of life. The truth of it is, however, that there is no proof that there is life after death.
Many of us believe that there is no such thing as life after
death. When we die, that’s it. Body, mind, and whatever the soul is as well:
done. Worm food. But the truth of it is, there is no proof of this, either.
There is no proof that there is no
life after death.
I think Shakespeare got it right in his play “Hamlet” when Hamlet describes death as,
“That undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.” It indeed
puzzles the mind. The hard truth is that we don’t know. We can guess. We can
believe. But we don’t know.
For me, our seeming inability to live without knowing is
indeed tragic. Admitting that we don’t know seems somehow to offend our innate
arrogance in how we approach life. We would rather come up with an “answer,”
some answer, any answer and then be willing to divide ourselves bitterly
over whose answer—to something we cannot possibly know—is the one “right”
answer. And from that spew millennia of bigotry, hate, fear, and, much too
often, violence. All this over something we cannot know.
I approached and approach this discussion of death as an
agnostic. I don’t know. When I look at and ponder what was revealed to me, I
can interpret what I heard, and indeed I do interpret it. Moreover, that
interpretation is what I now deeply believe, but at the same moment I want to
acknowledge that another person may interpret those same words differently. For
me, I do not believe the soul ceases to exist when the body and mind have died.
That’s how I interpret what was shared. But if the soul does not cease to
exist, what then?
You cannot
live forever, but you can be with Me forever. Time is your measure, not Mine.
This, too, was comforting. The souls of those beloved people whose lives had been cut short could be with God forever. But with the comfort came the question, what did it mean? Okay, their souls hadn’t just disappeared, simply ceased to exist. But what did it mean to “be” with “Me”? Assuming, as I did, that “Me” was God, what did it mean to be with God? Heaven? Were we talking about heaven? If so, then what did that mean? And if not, then how else might a soul “be” with God?
Book Description:
Indies Today runner-up
Firebird Book Awards honorable mention
Pacific Book Award finalist (runner-up)
American Legacy Book Awards finalist
For more posts about this book and its author, click HERE.
To purchase copies of any MSI Press book at 25% discount,
use code FF25 at MSI Press webstore.
Want to read an MSI Press book and not have to buy for it?
(1) Ask your local library to purchase and shelve it.
(2) Ask us for a review copy; we love to have our books reviewed.
VISIT OUR WEBSITE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT ALL OUR AUTHORS AND TITLES.
(recent releases, sales/discounts, awards, reviews, Amazon top 100 list, author advice, and more -- stay up to date)Check out recent issues.
Interested in publishing with MSI Press LLC?
Check out information on how to submit a proposal.
We help writers become award-winning published authors. One writer at a time. We are a family, not a factory. Do you have a future with us?Turned away by other publishers because you are a first-time author and/or do not have a strong platform yet? If you have a strong manuscript, San Juan Books, our hybrid publishing division, may be able to help.
Planning on self-publishing and don't know where to start? Our author au pair services will mentor you through the process.
Interested in receiving a free copy of this or any MSI Press LLC book in exchange for reviewing a current or forthcoming MSI Press LLC book? Contact editor@msipress.com.
Want an author-signed copy of this book? Purchase the book at 25% discount (use coupon code FF25) and concurrently send a written request to orders@msipress.com.Julia Aziz, signing her book, Lessons of Labor, at an event at Book People in Austin, Texas.
Want to communicate with one of our authors? You can! Find their contact information on our Authors' Pages.Steven Greenebaum, author of award-winning books, An Afternoon's Discussion and One Family: Indivisible, talking to a reader at Barnes & Noble in Gilroy, California.MSI Press is ranked among the top publishers in California.
Check out our rankings -- and more -- HERE.
Comments
Post a Comment