Even in God’s majesty as bridegroom on the other side of death, beyond the light of the stars, the deep humility also present in Charity presents itself. If we cannot recognize the Good, we cannot recognize Love when we meet Him beyond the liminal, the threshold of death into eternity.
Death is a part of life. Ugh—over-used, and logically incorrect from the perspective of the soul facing it. Life is wholeness, and one’s actual death is certainly not an element of that. Rather, death is either a warped conqueror or a a discipline—in all the senses of “discipline”: that pattern of life coming from training in a “way”; the fruit of self-control that comes from being a disciple of the Lord; a punishment as an attempt to course-correct in light of the Good. In another sense, though, for those of us still on earthly pilgrimage, death is a part of our lives, in a second-hand fashion. It is a discipline for us as we watch those around us go beyond that liminal space and disappear, disintegrate physically as that which gave their matter form and meaning departs (as anyone who has been around death directly experiences). We watch in the death-walkers the discipline—or the conquering—the former brings inspiration, the latter demoralization.
In the last three years, mainly perhaps because of the endless wars and genocides or the means ostensibly taken to combat a widespread disease scare, death is looming large in so many lives: the greatest, hardest discipline of all, the sudden death of so many young and middle-aged people (cardiac issues, strange turbo cancers, strokes, and the stealthy, encroaching issues like compromised immune systems, clotting, the inability of the young to fight off normal infections; the broken ability to heal normally assumed for the young). Therefore, death is in our faces as discipline for us still living, a warning of sorts, a reminder that each day could be our, or another’s, final day. We traditionally and especially, though, watch those who are, in a sense, the spiritual and moral “roofs” of our lives, those who have helped shrink and clarify the complexity and ineffable depths of life into bite-sized pieces, and as we grow, those who introduce us to the modern chiaroscuro confusion of ethics, those who play the role of Socrates coming down into the Cave and carefully helping us ascend into the blinding light of reality—these souls, our Elders, our parents, priests, spiritual directors, religious (nuns and monks), our teachers, are also meant to help us see disorder and death in the light of the sun, the Good, in the light of the Trinity: God the Creator, Christ the expression of God, He whom we can most imitate, the Holy Spirit expressing the Love of the Trinity.
If our Elders know the love and Truth of Christ, and they live it, they help “moralize” us as described above. As Aristotle said in the Poetics, we are imitative creatures: We learn most powerfully the intrinsic lessons, which is why Pope Paul VI said about education that “modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses.” This has proven true in my own experience: Each teacher at some point is non-plussed at the fact that former students often don’t remember what you taught them, but who you were for them.
My Uncle Raef was one of those Elders for me, into my late twenties and early thirties. He was a tall, Scandinavian-type; he reminded me of a giraffe with his lanky walk, especially when I was a child: it was the same feeling an adult would have if looking up that far. However, it was his soul I connected with—he was welcoming, and oh so funny, in an edgy sort of way that I especially loved. He would play pranks at the oddest times, maybe most especially when we were supposed to be serious, like pushing me into small snorts of laughter as we sat around the family table praying over the Thanksgiving meal; he had a certain jocular irreverence that I found refreshing, coming myself from a family of more serious, project-oriented people. He was not an intellectual, though I was—and so the “roof” he placed for me was actually a new look at the walls, the view outside of the garden; he got me out of my head and into my belly—the part that hurts when you laugh too hard. He was also a good dad-figure to me in my awkward, floundering, late teens and early twenties: he called my beloved but burdened Dad to explain why I needed to leave school (I had something like a nervous breakdown, at the least a serious identity crisis, which he was able to recognize when no one else did); he and my aunt took me in off and on for almost ten years as I struggled to find my way through college and through life while my own parents dealt with my sister’s more serious issues. Somehow, I felt that this was a person who lived a good life, a moral life, but yet understood failure, the misfit that I was, to the point that he was able to see it as just a means to grow. He gave me hope.
He also loved being with people; he loved people. I did not. I had been bullied by schoolmates when young; therefore, I almost personified the “outsider” archetype: snarky, suspicious, angry, warped in my thinking and moral life. He waded into the swamp that I was, talked to me, and heard me. During the long drives up to my grandparents’ home and back, he and my aunt and I would have a level of communion that was deeply healing for me—like my students vis à vis me as a teacher, I don’t remember what they said, but who they were. Together, they had an incredible ability “to get” all parts of a person: my uncle the social and emotional, and my aunt the intellectual and spiritual. Together, they brought me back to faith in Christ, back to sanity: further, though, his witness in my life was powerful enough that some of the what he said has remained with me, for example: “Always assume that people like you, until you know they don’t.” He said that this was the secret of his (impressive) social success: in fact, I would characterize him as charismatic; everyone liked him a lot.
He became a different kind of model for me, though, in my late twenties. It came out slowly, in horrible drips and drabs. He had been having affairs almost all the way through his marriage; I knew, from living with them for so long, that there were tensions here and there; my younger cousin lived in intuitive fear that someday they would divorce. However, I just happened to be most with them during a time when Raef was trying to be the husband and Elder he was meant to be: he had joined the Promise Keepers movement and seemed to gain, for a time, the happiness of the just man to which Socrates alludes in the Republic: a man committed to order, to harmony, to goodness, even, in his case, in a thirty-years’ marriage facing the temptations of younger women who flattered him. But this promise keeping didn’t last, as I came to understand later; I had since married and moved on, and most importantly, I had found the Church, the fullness of the Faith. The Eucharist became the “roof” on my world, leading me into the light, a light I could bask in, take in. Heartbroken, I saw the demolition of their family from afar.
Even from that distance, I saw clearly how unhappy he had been, but as Cicero warns in On Duties, when a man disassociates what seems expedient from what is moral, he is not actually acting in true self-interest. Raef seemed to disassociate the moral, the true, from his own actions by making my aunt, in his mind, a bully. She wasn’t always the easiest person to be with, certainly, but she was, and is, fundamentally honest and committed to the Good; she is, essentially, delightful, funny, and loyal. I began to see things I barely noticed earlier in a new light: The roof he had been was violently peeled away, and I saw the mess more clearly. When living with them, I had seen how careful she was to tiptoe around him and to meekly ask when he might get home, or did he have time for her? I heard his joking about her figure or age in a new light, a light that fell on a deep, moral ugliness. Who was this person?
Over the next few years, I began to see a man so deeply unhappy that he was willing to stop seeing by a moral light; I also understood that he had been warped in the sixties, when he was learning from his own “elders”: movements introduced by professors and elders in a “Christian” community that were actually in alignment with “free love” like spouse-swapping “to help” invigorate one’s own marriage. Later I learned, as I went through the hard discipline of becoming an Elder, that my aunt had refused to go along with any of this nonsense, which created a spiritual, philosophical, and physical abyss between them—one that had, apparently, for all the Promise Keepers in the world, not healed fully, but which, for him, seemed to have festered deep underneath the surface. She was always, perhaps, a discipline for him, because she became, through suffering and her own repentance, a just person.
Had he ever tried to live by the light? I believe so; he certainly kept wading in to lend a hand and love to those in need. However, on this, the day of his passing from this life, as I look back, I wonder—cautiously as one must in the realm of another’s soul—if he was perhaps a very fragile, weak soul who could not live in that hard gaze of love, a gaze fusing justice and mercy that almost feels like anger, as CS Lewis said: the two-edged sword of bare charity, the ultimate fusion of love, mercy, and justice that demands even beyond every last drop of courage and commitment we possess, a charity that requires the supernatural to sustain us, else we “collapse on the way,” as Christ said about the five thousand for whom He provided bread. My poor uncle, I wonder, was your spiritual life, your friendship with God, not internal enough, to the point that, as a middle-aged man, you could not face a future without satisfaction in your marriage; as an old man, without the ability to be active socially? Did you not have an abiding friendship with God, one that succored you in the loneliness? Was loneliness in the deepest realms your real state all along? Did I know you at all? Did I wade in and hear you as you did once for me?
No, I did not, even when I could have, as a fellow model and elder. You had been an integral Elder who betrayed, for me as a young person, the Good. Your failures demoralized me, and I don’t mean in the impoverished, lazy connotation we mean in modern life. I mean in the full sense of the word, what Cicero meant: de-moral-ized: you made it harder to believe in the moral as the highest good, the best self-interest. You were not a profile in moral courage; rather, by using your good quality of accepting failures instead to excuse yourself, you profiled slivers of narcissism—and I lost trust, respect, and ultimately, friendship with you, and I thought, love.
This last, though, is the only thing that lasts. On this day of your passing, I find that the love and concern for your soul wells up. Solon, the great wise man of Athens, tells the great, doomed King Croesus that a man cannot be called happy or unhappy until the end of his life is known. If doomed, even the happy times cannot truly be called “happy,” for the means become part of the end; the reality is the opposite from “the ends justify the means.” The end is all; it is the whole of which the means are the part; from the the end the means take their ultimate meaning. Also, Solon, like Socrates and Cicero, meant by “happy” the “just” man, one who lives by true self-interest, which is determined by our final end, our telos, our highest purpose. Micah 6:8 articulates this end simply: “What is good and what it is the Lord requires of you: to act justly, to love faithfulness, and to walk humbly with your God.” Jesus, as the Incarnate Word, or Expression of God, says it even more succinctly: “Follow Me.” This is hard, hard, even for those who are committed to being just. Only those confirmed in the Good over a lifetime of loving God, loving Justice and Mercy and Charity above the self, beyond the self, find it easier and easier, lighter and lighter.
How on earth does one do this without the Sacraments? My family, including my uncle, is almost entirely at least rooted in various Protestant forms; I am likely the first Catholic in my direct line in nearly five hundred years, since the first Moravians and English splintered away from the fullness of the Faith, dispersing into a desert without the Bread of God. Christ says, echoing His words about the crowd “collapsing on the way,” says about the Eucharist, “If you do not eat My Body and drink My Blood, you have no life in you.” The Church is the Ark containing the Sacraments, these fusions of grace and incarnation that give us the power, the courage, the love, to stand in the powerful and clear Light of Charity that would otherwise burn us as it purifies as is its very nature to do. Love desires the greatest fullness of good for the other; it cannot do otherwise and still be love. The Sacraments are the essential mercies of God for a soul that must, in the end, face the Face of Charity alone and naked—not because God is fundamentally punitive, but because He wants to be united with us, as Love by nature desires unity with the beloved, the bride. Even in God’s majesty as bridegroom on the other side of death, beyond the light of the stars, the deep humility also present in Charity presents itself. A marriage must be voluntary on both sides to be a union of love, because love must be given freely to be love. Here is where the discipline, the commitment to the Good as also inextricably unified with Love, counts: Have we learned what Love is? If we cannot recognize the Good, we cannot recognize Love when we meet Him beyond the liminal, the threshold of death into eternity. We will run from that Light in all its glory because we would be, by habit, people who aim to “secure secrecy and not the right.”
My dear Uncle Raef, I think, for my own small part in your life, I failed you. I didn’t love you enough to wade in, as you once did for me. It is true that I didn’t know you, in the deepest parts of your soul—I didn’t try, perhaps because you so deeply disappointed me. I lost faith—but now, in your death, I realize that this in a failure of love on my part. As you have faced your own death, I must now pray for you as for myself, one who has failed Charity; in this, we are brother and sister, no longer youth and elder. I see you now, perhaps, as Dante saw himself in “that savage forest, dense and difficult” in the midst of valley hills, “shoulders clothed already by the rays… which serve to lead men straight along all roads… with the same stars that had escorted it when Divine Love first moved those things of beauty.” May it be for you, as I hope it will be for me, that the gentle light of the stars will be God’s love speaking to you, calling you as they guide a beleaguered ship to harbor, where you may, by His mercy, know Charity as He is: your greatest good and mine.
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The featured image is “The Shooting Stars” (circa and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
