Death — Blog — Gabrielle Earnshaw

I recently attended an online meeting of the Empty Bell community. It is an inter-faith contemplative group, founded by Robert Jonas, a close friend of Henri Nouwen. For this gathering, Jonas had invited Mirabai Bush to speak about her book Walking Each Other Home: Conversations on Loving and Dying (2018). The book was co-written with Ram Dass, the late American spiritual teacher known for incorporating Hinduism, Buddhism, and Muslim and Jewish mysticism — into his teachings.

Mirabai explained the origins of the book: “Ram Dass was dying. We decided to intentionally set aside time to tell each other what we knew about death. Not what we thought we knew, but what we knew.”

Mirabai gave a brief reflection on the topic of love. We were then given an opportunity to ask questions. But love was not what people wanted to talk about. Instead, we seemed to resonate more with the themes of death and fear. The first questioner, Peggy, wanted help with her fear of dying alone.

It called to mind an insight I had the day before about Henri Nouwen. I was re-reading his book Here and Now. In it, he recalls that as a child he asked his parents repeatedly if they loved him. I have always imagined little Harrie (as he was then known) standing in his crib, gripping the rails with little red fists, crying, “Do you love me?”

It is such a poignant image and one that I have shared in many talks to illustrate Henri’s life-long struggle with crippling insecurity and neediness. But as I reread the text, I realised that another question followed the first: “Am I going to die?”

I had never really noticed this second question before and was perplexed by the young Henri’s logic. If he wasn’t loved did he think he was going to die?

My attention returned to our meeting. Mirabai was suggesting that when we feel anxious or sad, we could develop a practice of saying: “I am not the heaviness I feel. I am loving awareness. I am not the sadness in my heart, I am loving awareness.”

David, a Zen practitioner, asked a follow up question: “Is there a difference between ‘awareness’ and ‘loving awareness’? I thought: “Perhaps this was Henri’s question - Is there existence without love?”

Another participant, Margaret, offered, “When I was first taught meditation in the Vipassana tradition, I was taught to focus on the breath and become true attentiveness. What I found as I did this with more and more focus, is that love would just bubble up.” As she spoke she demonstrated what she meant by drawing her arms up in an arc, simulating a fountain. “But no one was talking about that,” she continued “So, I found myself drawn back to my Christian roots where the reality of love is a central theme.”

Mirabai replied, “In the Burmese tradition that I was taught, we spent a few days meditating on the breath, then a few days on the body and then we moved to a loving kindness meditation in which we practised loving kindness to ourselves, to others we love and to others we do not love.”

The conversation tacked: what does it mean to feel loved? The Zen practitioner answered, “For me it means a feeling of home, a feeling of not needing anything, a feeling of completeness. And when I experience cessation of neediness, I become aware of the state of love and this is why awareness and loving awareness are the same thing in my experience.”

I was reminded of another talk on love by a Muslim teacher from the Philippines. He said that in the Muslim creation story, God so loved God-self that God created human beings to love God too. This struck me because in our culture we seem to have a difficult time with self-love. Thich Nhat Hhan went so far as to say that the main difference between Westerners and Easterners is our wobbly sense of self-worth.

I think about my own life, and about how important other human beings are to my sense of feeling loved. When love is absent I fall into a vulnerable state of fear. Like Henri, my (il)logic is that without others to validate me I’ll disappear. I’ll die. Similarly a friend of mine, recently divorced, has night terrors of disintegrating into a million particles by her sense of aloneness. “It feels like no one will ever find me again,” she shares.

Fortunately, Henri Nouwen matured and his insight about the connection between love and death offers me and my friend an alternate way of holding our fear. It is to turn to loving presence of God.

As a child he understandably looked to his parents for protection, then as an adolescent he turned to Jesus, later as an adult to his vast network of friendships, but finally, after many losses, he turned to God. God who he called by many names including God-with-us, God-in-us, God-the-source-of-all-love.

I like to think that at the time of his death, when he was moving from life to beyond life, into the love he spoke so passionately about and wanted to share with others, he remembered his own words: “If you only know one thing know this: You are the Beloved.”

I wonder about my own ability to do this. How much more interested am I in human love to support my self-worth? But human love is fickle, and often disappointing. God’s love is that fountain that Margaret illustrated with her gesture in our meeting. It is unconditional and ever flowing. It is where we all come from and to where we all return.

The meeting was drawing to a close. Mirabai gave us this final wisdom to ponder, particularly in the context of preparing for our own deaths. She asked: “How much are you willing to be with what arises? “A lot”, I thought to myself, “if I know I am loved.”