LOVE IS EQUAL TO DEATH
Does the fact of death make a nonsense of the whole of life? In a few seconds everything’s gone. Nothing’s left. No part of my life on earth remains. Even my thinking about this will be gone. Does this render life null and void? Does this turn my naive belief that life is sufficient into a laughing-stock?
Of course life has meaning and value and no one goes about thinking that the answer to this question is yes. But there it is – it won’t go away. This question makes itself into the most important in the world and has to be faced.
Death retains its immediacy. Every weekend for a long time I suffered what I called a ‘Saturday-doom’. A feeling of doom or a sense of dread which almost incapacitated me. I realized it had to do with my father’s death when I was a boy. He died quite suddenly on a Sunday. The Saturday was the last full day I knew him. This translated into a deep sense of foreboding. It attacked my own adulthood. The only way I could deal with it was to say a prayer for help on a Thursday night and to be attentive all weekend.
The question of death making a nonsense of life first struck me when I was seven years old. I remember running from the dinner table in tears when my sister mentioned that a friend’s grandmother had been cremated. My father came to comfort me – the same father whose own death affected me so much a few years later. He talked about Heaven and how everything we love will be there. But the force of death remained with me.
Now I feel I have to face it, to look at it full-on. To go right down into it, as it were. The results are interesting. Quite the opposite of making a nonsense of life the fact of death now deepens my hold on existence. It brings the whole inner being into view. Ultimately this is because the inner self is rooted in the Being of Love. And there is no greater fact than this – that Love is equal to Death.
Best wishes, today,
Landar
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