Can you name all four of your grandparents? What about your great-grandparents? What about your grandmother’s maiden name? How quickly we are forgotten. How quickly our life, that we think is so important, is erased from the memory of the living after we are gone.
“Remember that you are dust and unto dust you shall return”
Well now, there is a pleasant thought.
Lately I have been riding along with somebody who is learning how to drive. We have been going to a lot of cemeteries to practice. Cemeteries are a good place to practice driving when you’re first starting. There are lots of winding roads and turns to make, and you don’t have to worry about killing anybody because they are already dead. So we’ve been spending hours just driving around and around different cemeteries.
I’m surprised at how peaceful and reflective I find that experience. One of the places we’ve been going is Forest Home cemetery which is one of the biggest and most historic of the cemeteries in the city, and there is much there to reflect on. Lots of famous people and lots of not so famous people. Some people have very simple obscure headstones that you would be hard pressed to find even if you knew what you were looking for. Others have great big monuments to themselves that look like pyramids, like a king was buried there or something. I confess it’s hard to look at these large crypts that must have cost a gazillion dollars and not think, “Well, somebody sure thought highly of himself”. I know, I have to get better about not judging people. I’m working on it. You see graves of people who lived long lives and you see graves of infants who lived only a few days. You might see a series of graves of people who all died the same year and you wonder what was going on that that time – famine, war, flu epidemic. You see people buried off on a hillside by themselves and you see entire families buried together. Husbands and wives who share the same plot.
The thing that I always come back to in the midst of my ponderings is that everybody in the graveyard is the same. They are all dead. The rich, the poor, the young, the old, the smart, the dumb, the accomplished, the disciplined, the lazy, The people who followed the rules and the rebels who broke them, the risk takers and the people who played it safe — all share the same fate. We all go back to the earth from which we came. And for reasons I can’t fully understand, I find a lot of peace in that.
When I was a kid taking swimming lessons I once dove into the pool and lost my trunks much to my great horror and to my swim classmates’ great amusement. They were all sitting on the side of the pool waiting for their turn to dive. So, they all saw. Everything. I thought I would die of embarrassment. I thought the rest of my life was ruined. My mom said something to the effect of, “in a hundred years nobody will even remember”. Gee, Thanks mom. I didn’t find a lot of comfort in that then, but I often use that phrase to comfort myself when I feel similarly today. In a hundred years nobody will even remember. There is some sadness in being forgotten, but it has its advantages. For one, it takes the pressure off. When you realize that things are not nearly as important in the big picture as they appear in the moment, there is a certain liberation in that which allows you to let go and be the best you can be. When I ponder death, I come away feeling a little more relaxed about life. It’s all just one big board game and at the end of the night all the pieces just get shoved back into the box from which they came and put back on the shelf.
As Shakespeare said in Macbeth, “Life is a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.” Some people I suppose would find that depressing, and catch me on a bad day, I probably would too. But most times when I reflect on our temporary existence, I come away feeling more freedom to live the life I was meant to live it.
One of my favorite books is “The Alchemist”. You can usually find this book listed among any search of “top 10 spiritual books”. The alchemists is about a shepherd boy who has a dream about a hidden treasure. As he goes off in search of his treasure, he is instructed by omens and wise people he meets along the way. He travels around the world and back only to find the treasure underneath the same tree where he fell asleep and dreamed about it. The main and recurring theme of the book is that the boy must constantly choose to either follow his calling or abandon it in exchange for the promise of safety and security. And isn’t that the choice we all constantly face – to follow our vocation, our passion, which is no less than the voice of God himself, or to play it safe and take the path of least resistance. One of the things the boy learns is that there really is only one option. Choosing the safe path does not guarantee safety, but choosing to deny one’s calling in favor of safety leads to a slow death where you die from the inside out because our vocation is the essence of life itself and to deny it is to deny one’s own life force.
This theme is a deeply spiritual theme that has been around a long time and is core to many religious teachings. The Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, the main text of the Hindu faith is about this very thing from what I understand. The Bhagavad Gita is an allegorical conversation between the soul and God. The main and recurring theme of which, like in the Alchemist, is the importance of following your Dharma – the thing that you were put on this earth to do. Of all the acts of betrayal, to deny your own Dharma, your own calling, is the worst because you deny the very essence of life within you.
Or as Jesus said, “what good is it for a man to gain the whole world if only to lose himself in the process”.
But following ones calling, daily, is no easy thing. God rarely shows us the whole path, but usually just gives us enough light to take the next step. To follow ones calling daily requires a daily leap of faith and an act of courage. I’ve felt butterflies in my stomach whenever I’ve made the small leaps of faith and I’ve felt outright dread when I’ve made the larger ones. But one of the pleasant surprises of my life is that whenever I’ve made a leap of faith in the service of what I knew to be my innermost calling, I’ve landed squarely on my feet in a richer and fuller expression of life every time. And because of that, it becomes a little easier to do each time.
The temptation to play it safe is always a strong one though. And one of the things that helps me get over it is the thought of all the headstones I’ve seen. The people who took leaps of faith and the people who played it safe – both ended up the same in the end. Playing it safe doesn’t save you – it just takes the essence of life from you while you are still alive.
And so one of the things Ash Wednesday calls us to reflect on is our own mortality. Why? Only with our death in mind, do we really know how to live our lives. We begin our spiritual journey with our ultimate end in mind. After all, if you don’t know where you are going, any path will get you there. In light of the fact that I will one day die, how do I want to live?
Remember that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return.
ryanwriting 