It causes a certain uneasiness when there is so little mention of death in recent ‘holistic' writing.^[1] If an ecological view of life or an evolutionary vision of the cosmos remained silent on this elemental fact of life, we could rightly suspect the influence of some kind of reality-denying fantasy. If, however, we make the effort to reflect on death as an inevitable reality, it is likely that our reflections will be caught between two classic statements on its meaning. One expresses an immemorial sense of tragedy.  Death is an inescapable and all-engulfing fact:  Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt ^[2]– translatable as, ‘there are tears at the heart of things, and all that passes deeply affects our souls'. The other, from John's Gospel, is the statement of Jesus: ‘Unless the grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit' (John 12: 24). Here, too, there is an inevitable sense of diminishment is implied; but it is taken up into an ultimate hope for transformation and communion. Let us delay for a moment in the places where these two visions play.

1. The ‘Tears of Thing''

It requires no special depth of perception to find, easily in others and with difficulty in ourselves, that the most driven forms of consumerism and exploitation arise out of a secret terror. We do not want to die. Material hoarding, endless insurance, addiction to power, to sexual conquest, to work itself, to the frenzied cultivation of health and beauty, are all fairly obvious strategems deployed to keep the mortal enemy at bay. Such efforts inhabit a world of fearful fantasy. The self is packaged in what we so pitifully take as a deathless image. With subterranean cunning, the psyche tries to keep a hold on life as it is, precisely because it neither finds nor trusts a movement in life to something more. The stream of life is going nowhere; there is nothing there to catch us up and bear us on.

Now, these rather common attempts to deny mortality can migrate into a new, perhaps more benign ecological or cosmological form. Nature is so beautiful, such an explosion of life and variety, that nothing ever dies, or is allowed to do so. There is no place for death in the scheme of things. Death is not natural; and hence must be banished from life and concern as the obscene intruder. The cosmos of nature is cosmeticised. 

What I am trying to suggest here is not an exercise of arrogant analysis, as though any of us occupies either an immortal or unambiguously hopeful standpoint. After all, the contemporary imagination is infested with a great variety of images of extinction, and who remains unaffected?^[3] It is difficult to give death its simple due when deadly things have demanded so much of our psychic energies in this past 20^th century. The Shoah, Hiroshima, the horrors of Kampuchea and Rwanda, the still-continuing nuclear threat, the ecological crisis in all its manifestations –the thinning ozone layer,  air pollution, the degeneration of the cities, acid rain, the poisoning of the waters and oceans, the destruction of rain forests, the erosion of the soil –  all have their effect.

Such lethal realities affect feeling, imagination, and our whole taste for life. Add to them the bleak objectification of life achieved through modern technologies of production, control and surveillance, and you have the roots of a sense of life divorced from any pattern of meaning, save that of mere survival. As economic structures break down, we may well feel lost in it all, mere appendages to the machine, blips on the computer screen, engulfed by the system which calls no one by name, and cherishes nothing except itself. We live in a post-catastrophic world, in turn mesmerised and irritated by a haze of media images of the predominantly tragic ‘news'.  Some scientific authorities do nothing to lift the heart to a more comprehensive vision:

man is the chance genetic mutation: to accept such a message is to awaken from a millenniary dream into a total solitude and isolation in the universe quite alien to human self-worth, a world that is deaf to human music, indifferent to human hopes, sufferings and crimes.^[4]

Such a passage is a good expression of the prevailing cultural atheism of our day. In the experience of death, it cashes its cheques. Death is no longer experienced as passing over into God, but as meaningless extinction; the dead end. The promise of life, of love, of beauty, of intelligent exploration and moral responsibility, simply cannot be kept.

Individual extinction appears almost insignificant compared to the manifold possibilities of collective death. Though human history has always known its catalogue of natural disasters, famines, earthquakes, plagues –  ‘acts of God' – we now live with the eerie possibility of ‘human acts' producing a planetary suicide.  The possibilities are there: biological warfare, thermonuclear incineration, ecological collapse. The vast intricate eco-system of nature seems to be going through a gigantic spasm, whether of death-throes or of healthy purging might be too soon to say. Science, on which Western culture has so pinned its hopes, has been revealed as not necessarily user-friendly.  It is not necessarily accompanied by values proportioned to the earth-transforming power it wields. In such cultural distress, art appears merely as a cry of pain, religion a naive projection, mysticism nothing but a regression to the infantile ignorance, while scientific exploration becomes a sophisticated journey into the void.

Death has indeed become more deadly.  Little wonder that our minds and hearts recoil in repressive dismay from its presence. Even sexual relationships, where nature is experienced at its most ecstatic and creative, can no longer be trusted. The HIV virus has put an end to that. For its part, evolutionary optimism has to confront the laws of entropy, and the eventual heat-death of the cosmos itself, ‘a scenario that many scientists find profoundly depressing'.^[5]

2. The Denial of Death

So much of modern culture with its glorification of youth and beauty, its obsessive consumerism and its schizoid individualism arises out of a denial of death. Our way of life is marked with the pretence that we are outside the domain of true creaturehood, with its inherent finitude and mortality. As Ernest Becker remarks in his classic reflection entitled The Denial of Death,

The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is the mainspring of human activity ‑ activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying  in some way that it is the final destiny for man.^[6]

Becker acknowledges the enormous influence of Freud in the understanding of psychopathology.  But he is critical, too.  Relying on the insights of Søren Kierkegaard and Otto Rank, he lays bare a certain inconclusiveness in Freud's approach when it touches on the matter of death and the deep terror that it strikes into every human being.  For his part, Becker argues that the fundamental repression or denial in human life is not sex, as Freud had taught, but death.  Whatever therapy might be brought to bear on human problems, it is only freeing us to live with the most radical fear of all: that which has its origin in our mortality. What are we to do with the fact that we are on our way, inescapably, to death?

Melancholic though such a question might sound, it poses deeper questions about the urgent ecological matters and the larger cosmic connections we have been exploring. Are these further examples of the denial of death, or do they contain within them a more healthy acceptance of our connectedness to the whole? As Becker highlights the primordial terror experienced in the human psyche in the face of death, he is inviting us to a radical acceptance of creaturehood. We are immersed in the larger wholeness of nature, connected to it, caught up and carried along by it. The paradox is that only by accepting our limitation and contingency within a larger whole, only by yielding ourselves into the life-process, can we arrive at true freedom and psychic health.

Religious experience, Becker argues, is essentially a ‘creature feeling' in the face of the massive transcendence of creation. It registers a sense of being located as a tiny, vulnerable instance within the overwhelming miracle of Being. At this juncture, religion and psychology find a talking point –  ‘right at the point of the problem of courage'.^[7] Faced with the immensity of the universe and its apparent impassivity in regard to individual fate,

man had to invent and create out of himself the limitations of perception and equanimity to live on this planet.  And so the core of psychodynamics, the formation of the human character, is a study in human self‑limitation and in the terrifying costs of that limitation.  The hostility to psychoanalysis ..will always be a hostility against admitting that man lives by lying to himself about himself and about his world, and that character, to follow Ferenczi and Brown, is a vital lie.^[8]

The larger ecological and cosmic connections can either expose the ‘vital lie' of culture, or, by denying death in their own way, feed it with further self-deception. What new sense of self might such connections offer? How can they be genuinely creative of a deeper, more wonderful participation in the mystery of life? How can they heighten, rather than diminish, a sense of reality and responsibility?  As he contests the evasiveness of modern consciousness in the face of death, Becker summons us to the courageous acceptance of our creatureliness as the only authentic way:

By being or doing we fashion something, an object or ourselves, and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life-force.^[9]

Thus, in effect, Becker recalling us to a lived sense of relationality and to the praise and thankfulness that are at the heart of religious faith. A shared sense of the human condition consequently demands renewed collaboration between science and religion.  Science improperly absorbs all truth into itself.  It is the role of religion to stand for a larger version of truth, enabling human beings to

wait in a condition of openness toward miracle and mystery, in the lived truth of creation, which would make it easier to survive and be redeemed because men would be less driven to undo themselves and would be more like the image which pleases their creator: awe‑filled creatures trying to live in harmony with the rest of creation.  Today we would add ...they would be less likely to poison the rest of creation.^[10] 

To live with a genuinely creaturely consciousness is to relativise the repression and denial at work in human consciousness.  To the degree we accept our puniness in the face of the overwhelming dimensions and majesty of the universe, to the degree we become aware of the unspeakable miracle of even a single living being, and waken to the chaotic depths of the immense, inconclusive drama of creation, we come to a point of healing.

Following Frederick Perls, Becker detects four protective layers structuring the neurotic self.  The first two layers are the mundane, everyday layers of cliché and role. Doubtless, it is some achievement to break out of image of the self communicated to us in the individualism and consumerism of the day.  But

...the third is the stiff one to penetrate: it is the impasse that covers our feelings of being empty and lost, the very feeling we try to banish in building up our character defences.  Under this layer is the fourth and the most baffling one: the ‘death' or fear-of-death layer; this... is the layer of our true and basic animal anxieties, the terror that we carry around in our secret heart. Only when we explode this fourth layer... do we get to the layer of what we might call our ‘authentic self': what we really are without shame, without disguise, without defences against fear.^[11] 

The ‘authentic self' of connectedness to the whole, of ecological care and cosmic hope, is only gained by befriending the mortal character of our existence. The authenticity consists in the healing which comes from regaining the attitude of humility, a sense of radical finiteness proper to creatureliness.^[12]  In fact, the great value of Becker's work lies in its revaluation of humility, in the most original sense of the word.  If the ecological and cosmic connections we have been exploring are to be something more than posturing, the cultivation of humility as a basic attitude to life and creation is a necessity.

‘Humility' derives from the Latin humus, meaning the ‘earth', ‘soil', ‘dirt'.  It indicates an awareness of the existential fact that our life is earthed, grounded, bound up with immense dynamism of nature into whose processes we are each and all immersed.  Hence, the ancient liturgical injunction on Ash Wednesday, as the ashes are traced on the forehead in the sign of the Cross : Memento homo quia pulvus es... : ‘Remember, man, thou art but dust...'. In the moral sense, the virtue of humility is a quality of freedom.  It is shown in a radical decentring of ourselves, in the recognition that all is gift.  As such, it enables human consciousness to deal creatively with the dread of death.  To be humble is to ‘re-member' oneself as a creature, existing within the mystery of the universe. Humility permits death to emerge from its subterranean place of influence, no longer to sap our energies or drive us to the frenzy of illusory immortality-projects.  It is a connective virtue, relating us to the whole, and immersing us in a universe of wondrous creation. 

Out of this trembling acceptance of our mortality can come the wisdom we need. Life remains a question, within an overwhelmingly questionable universe.  Because each of us is a question, what is most clear is that none of us is the centre of that universe.  We have emerged out of a vast cosmic process and are dying back into it.  When we begin to ask about the true centre, the true life‑force of this overwhelming universe, an acceptance of self as mortal and finite begins.  With that, if not precisely adoration, at least a surrender to the unnamed, incomprehensible creative generosity which is at the origin of all can be realised.  Only a de-centred self, conscious of its mortal limitation, can live for a larger mystery.

3. The Grain of Wheat, the Fertile Ground

The Christian taste for life is, as I mentioned above, contained in the words of Jesus: ‘Unless the grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit' (Jn 12: 24). Surrender to, participation in a larger vitality, giving oneself into the ground of the whole mystery, transformation into an ultimate co-existence – all this is implied. To enter into the ‘chaos' of dying is to rise to a new level of being. It is to be drawn into the radiant space of Jesus' resurrection which anticipates the whole of creation transformed by the Spirit.

The following words, taken from a notebook of Dostoievsky, are a significant expression of creation made whole on the personal level:

To love somebody else as one loves oneself, which Christ told us to do  - that is impossible.  We are bound by the force of earthly  personality: the ‘me' stands in the way. Christ, and Christ alone, did it; but he was the eternal ideal, the ideal of the ages, to which one aspires and must aspire, impelled by nature.

Nevertheless, since Christ came to earth as the human ideal in the flesh, it has become clear as daylight what the last and highest stage  of the evolution of the personality must be.  It is this: when our evolving is finished, at the very point where the end is reached, one will find out ..  with all the force of our nature that the highest use one can make of one's personality, of the full flowering of one's self, is to do away with it, to give it wholly to any and everybody, without division or reserve.  And that is sovereign happiness.  Thus, the law of ‘me' is fused with the law of humanity; and the ‘I' and ‘all' (in appearance two opposite extremes), each suppressing itself for the sake of the other, reach the highest peak of their individual development,  each one separately. This is exactly the paradise that Christ offers.   The whole history of humanity, and of each individual man and woman, is simply an evolution towards and an aspiration to, struggle for, and achievement of, this end.^[13]

The basic entropy affecting an individual biological existence is dissipated to allow for a higher realisation of communion. To shut out the mystery of the ‘all' is to feed the dread of death.  A self-enclosed existence is fearfully intent on mere survival. But through union with the death of Christ, an individual life is transformed, drawn into the open circle of ‘life to the full'.

An interesting analogy is put forward by a woman who combines familiarity with scientific exploration and the experience of being a mother.  Danah Zohar, in a chapter on the ‘survival of the self', extends her ‘quantum view of the self'.  She suggests that male consciousness is more akin to the ‘particle' model of the self, while female psychology is more attuned to the ‘wave' aspect.  She writes,

My own experience of the truth of process view came through the experience of pregnancy and early motherhood, but one needn't be a mother, or even a woman, to appreciate the essential connectedness of quantum theory and what it is telling us about ourselves as quantum systems. We all... have a feminine side, a ‘wave aspect', an aspect which surrenders rather than grasps, which ‘gives itself up' to things beyond the nuclear self rather than concentrating on building boundaries around the self. This is the side we must cultivate if we are to transcend isolation and the consequent, and needless, terror of death...  The kind of surrender required to make the most of quantum process is like Christ's saying, ‘whoever will lose his life for my sake will find it' (Mt 16: 25). On a quantum view, he who would find himself a place in eternity must fully wed himself to life's processes now.^[14]

The dynamism of the ‘self-transcending' self has been explored in many ways in previous chapters of this present work.  The dynamics of self-transcendence are inscribed and underwritten, as it were, in the dynamics of the cosmos itself.  There is an upward vector of an ascent from electron, to atoms, to molecules, to proteins, to cells, to organisms, to the complexity of the human brain, and to the cosmic overture of human consciousness. The direction of life is one of transformation in increasingly rich and complex relationships. It suggests a question: Might not death be more hopefully located in such a process?  It would not mean a dissolution so much as the expansion of the self into its fullest relationships. In that way, death would not be an alien intruder, but a relative – ‘Sister Death' as St Francis could pray – within cosmic promise of the fullness of life in God.

In the larger scale of experience, events occur in which we are taken out of ourselves.  We are plunged into the deeper stream of life. A culture affected by the denial of death in the terms described above tends to see life more in terms of a slowly melting block of ice, followed by a final and definitive heat-death. Entropy conquers all, even the universe itself. And yet, life does go on.  There are sudden turns of wonder, surprising insight and unnameable joy.  In ordinary are exhilarated in great loves.  We are humbled before the strange grandeur of moral achievement. In such moments, there is an uncanny ‘more' in the experience of the mystic, the artist, the martyr, the prophet, the great thinker, the scientist.  We are in the presence of eternity in the making, of ‘eternity coming to be as time's own mature fruit'.^[15]

Such instances dramatise what all of us can feel, perhaps more tentatively, as life's true direction. Death is given its place, but not as the destruction of the deepest self. True spirituality is found in dying out of all the limitations of an ego, to yield into the deathless dimensions of the real. The following words speak with special wisdom:

If you surprise the world with your life, the world will surprise you at death.  Don't think of death as extinction; such uninspired speculations are simply too prosaic to be true.  Your dull imagination insults the very grandeur and staggering wonder of the universe...  embrace your death.  It will serve you.^[16]

We have been meditating on death by setting it within a larger meditation on life and cosmic emergence. Death can then be accepted as a humble dying into the ultimate mystery of life.  It is the path into a great transformation in the unfolding mystery of the universe.

Such hopeful expressions may sounds too much like simple optimism, ultimately repressive of the true deadliness of death. Such a possibility points to a complex problem. It can be expressed as a question: How can hope find a psychological focus that is neither depressive nor schizophrenic? If it is morbid to constrict the whole hopeful direction of life to a meditation on death, it would be just as evasive to repress the piercing tragedy at the heart of our existence.  The mystery of death demands that we hold together both the negative and the positive dimensions of our experience.  Yet these extremes never simply meet.  There is no all-knowing comprehensive standpoint, no deathless theoretical vision.  How then, can they be best held in hopeful realistic tension?

In that transformation of consciousness we call Christian hope, we find a symbol which can allow both meanings to exist and illumine each another.  It is the crucifixion and death of Christ himself.^[17]  The meditation of the Christian is not fixated on a skull, but on the cross of Jesus. In it deepest meaning, it is a theophany.  The all-creative mystery reveals itself as compassionate love.  The death of Jesus was indeed deadly.  It came as failure, isolation, condemnation, torture.  The ways of divine love became familiar with our problem of evil.

But the love that gave itself to the end (John 13:1) was not defeated by the power of evil.[18]  For the death of the crucified Jesus embodies the ultimate form of life.  He surrenders himself to the Father for the life of the world.  Jesus' unreserved dedication to the realm of true life, ‘the Reign of God', meant for him solidarity with the defeated and the lost. It was concentrated in a final point of self-offering.  Precisely at that God is self-revealed as a love stronger than death, as the creative mystery that holds in being and fulfils all the best energies of life. Thus, the transformation of the Risen One, the ‘white hole' in the world of death.

True, this is no resuscitation to our present biological life, no relocation in the time and space of this world, no cure for death. Only a transformation of our whole embodied existence can answer the hopes written into a life.  Through his rising from the tomb, the entropy, the limiting individuality of biological life, is definitively overcome.  In him a new creation is anticipated, and he is given to Christian faith as ‘the way, and the truth, and the life' (John 14:6).  In all four Gospel narratives, the empty tomb is the historical marker of the cosmic transformation that has begun in Christ. That emptiness and darkness highlight the ultimate transformation that is anticipated.  It will be not emptiness, but life to the full; not final darkness but eternal light: ‘So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!' (2 Cor 5:17).

Hope, nonetheless remains hope. It is never immune to the inconclusiveness of the pilgrim's path.  Hope lives always in the ‘in-between' of what is, and what is yet to be. It must wait on the mystery of complete transformation. For even the New Testament writer soberly concedes, ‘As it is, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him' (Heb 2: 8f).  Yet for all the sobriety of Christian hope, the great fact remains. In Christ, the universe has been changed. It has been radically ‘Christened'. Death too is changed. Christ did not die out of the world, but into it, to become its innermost coherence and dynamism. In his death and resurrection, the mystery of the incarnation is complete. For the Christian, to yield into the reality of such a death, to surrender to the transforming power of such a resurrection, is to be newly embodied in the future form of cosmos. The struggle and dying we now know is moving in a good direction.^[19]        

The last enemy to be destroyed is death... When all things are subjected to him, the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things under him, that God may be all in all (1Cor 15: 26-28).

Our mortal existence is poised over an abyss of life. The empty tomb, a sign of the creative power of the Spirit, has a cosmic significance.^[20] It  suggests the full-bodied reality of resurrection, and seeds our history with questions and wonder.  Some will ask, What great transformation is afoot?  Others will doubt, and resign themselves to a closed, weary, dismal ways of the world as they know it. Still, the empty tomb, so soberly recorded in each of the four Gospels, offers no salvation in mere emptiness. It functions as a factor within the awakening of faith. A new consciousness of life unfolds.  It moves first from the empty tomb, discovered as a puzzling fact.  It awakens to cosmic surprise over what had happened, for Jesus appears as newly and wonderfully alive: ‘Do not be afraid.  I am the first and the last, and the living one.  I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever' (Rev 1:17-18).  Then faith returns to the tomb as an emblem of the new creation.  From there it expands into the limitless horizons of a transformation of all things in Christ. Such faith is not primarily looking back at a death, but facing forward into the promise of life, in a universe transformed.

A marvellous epilogue to this reflection is provided by Karl Rahner.  We catch a great theologian pondering the cosmic significance of the Christian mystery:

Christ is already at the heart and centre of all the poor things of this earth, which we cannot do without because the earth is our mother. He is present in the blind hope of all creatures who, without knowing it, are striving to participate in the glorification of his body. He is present in the history of the earth whose blind course he steers with unearthly accuracy through all victories and all defeats onwards to the day predestined for it, to the day on which his glory will break out of its depths to transform all things. He is present in all the tears and in every death as the hidden joy and the life which conquers by seeming to die...  He is there as the innermost essence of all things, and the most secret law of a movement which still triumphs and imposes its authority even though every kind of order seems to be breaking up. He is there as the light of day and the air are with us, which we do not notice; as the secret law of movement which we do not comprehend because that part of the movement which we ourselves experience is too brief for us to infer from it the pattern of the movement as a whole. But he is there, the heart of this earthly movement and the secret seal of its eternal validity. He is risen. ^[21] 

[1]. A significant exception is LaChance, Greenspirit..., 99-124.

[2]. Virgil, Aeneid, I, 462.

[3]. See the profound analysis of Robert Jay Lifton, The Future of Immortality (New York: Basic Books, 1987).

[4].  Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity (New York: Knopf) 172-3.

[5]. Paul Davies, God and the New Physics (London: Penguin,1983) 204.

[6]. Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: The Free Press, 1973)  ix.

[7]. Becker, The Denial…,  50.

[8]. Becker, The Denial…, 51.

[9]. Becker, The Denial…, 285.

10. Becker, The Denial…,  282.

[11]. Becker, The Denial…, 57.

[12]. Becker, The Denial…, 58. See Andras Angyal, Neurosis and Treatment: a Holistic Theory (New York: Wiley, 1965) 260.

[13]. Quoted by Yves Congar, The Wide World My Parish (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1961) 60-61.

[14]. Danah Zohar, The Quantum Self (London: Bloomsbury,1990) 134f.

[15]. See Peter C. Phan, Eternity in Time. A Study of Karl Rahner's Eschatology (London: Associated University Press, 1988). 55. Also, 53-58; 207-210.

[16]. Brian Swimme, The Universe is a Green Dragon.  A Cosmic Creation Story (Santa Fe:  Bear and Co., 1984) 117.

[17]. Gustave Martelet, L'au-delà retrouvé. Christologie des fins dernières (Paris: Desclée, 1975) 33-98. See also Brendan Byrne, Lazarus. A Contemporary Reading of John 11 :1-46, (Sydney: St Paul Publications, 1991).

[18] See Anthony J. Kelly and Francis F. Moloney, Experiencing God in the Gospel of John (New York: Paulist Press, 2003)270-286.

[19]. For elaboration of this point, see Denis Edwards, Jesus and the Cosmos (New York: Paulist Press, 1991) 103-132.

[20]. See John Polkinghorne, Science and Creation. The Search for Understanding (London:  SPCK, 1988) 64-68. See also, Tony Kelly, Touching on the Infinite. Explorations in Christian Hope (Melbourne: Collins Dove, 1991) 112-116.

[21]. Karl Rahner, `Hidden Victory, Theological Investigations VII, tr. David Bourke (London:  Darton, Longman and Todd, 1971) 157f