For the Joy of the Journey

Dying Well…between now and dead…

George January 16, 2025 Dying Well 1 Comment

…the analytic mind bypasses a broad set of moral, spiritual, and philosophical questions about what it means to be a human, and merely dissects and corrects. However, what if we began with questions about what it means to die well?
_{Kevin Brown}

A question DR. Laura¹ often asks her callers , “..what do you want your life to look like between now and dead?”

Answers to the question define for a responder what it means to die well. Consider a few responses to “How do you want to live the final 10 years of your life? from Quora:

…do whatever I damn well please.

…travel the whole world and meet new aquaintances

…try to be helpful and/or make someone’s day a bit better

…walk in nature every day for at least 2 hours.
live in a beautiful village that has a fresh market two to three times a week.
In the afternoon — around the hour of apero — I’ll have a drink and a cigarette.
read, write and listen to music — A LOT.
be very very slim — like I am now.
do tai chi and stretching exercises in the morning sun.
have a fireplace.
host people on my property — whether it be friends or travellers.

…About the same way I’ve been doing it.
I’m poor, so there is no travel, no vacations, no bucket list for me. I’d keep living my life, day to day, minute by minute. I’d spend time with my sister.

…I am very happy with the way my life is going, I don’t have anything on any “bucket list” to accomplish. I’m retired, living in a paid for home, have adequate retirement income, and I am debt free. 10 more years of what I am doing now would be enough to keep me happy.

…Attend Shows the impersonation of Elvis, Enjoy a beautiful sunset on the beach, accompanied by a Cold Beer, Brass wind music, Good seafood and the Mother of My Sons and Daugther. Thanking God for so many blessings received throughout my life.

…remaining life I want to live for other people who needs any sort of help, by free teaching, looking after who are patients, needy and poor people. To solve the problems by my life experience. Also all types of charity work. My aim is some one should get benefited from my soul.

“NOW” between now and death is the the occasion of an “existential slap”² that awakens us to our mortality.

I propose that “existential slap” initiates “second half” ³ life.

Life’s second half is characterized by:
… a time to discover the meaning of life
… a time to let go of the ego and find a deeper sense of self
…a time to live in the present moment without tension or judgment
…a time to find a deeper purpose for life
…a time to find a more spacious, vibrant sense of self ¹

Dying well is a second half endeavor. Our concern is not so much to have what you love anymore, but to love what you have—right now.

We are a “first-half-of-life culture,” largely concerned about surviving successfully. : establishing an identity, a home, relationships, friends, community, security, and building a proper platform for our only life.

You cannot walk the second journey with first journey tools. You need a whole new tool kit.
Understanding and applying those tools is the task of dying well.

Dying well is meeting death fully human.

Life is learning to die in order to be born again. The creature participates in using their death to become a human being. To be clear, this isn’t a stoical acceptance of death as the cessation and end of life, a materialistic, nihilistic vision of “dying well.” We are describing death as birth-pangs, as moving toward mystical union with God. Again, death is being used as a tool. The soul is perfected and purified as it moves through this world of contingency, full of suffering and tribulation. The soul experiences this life as a birthing, as labor pains in a process of sanctification.
We die to arrive as human beings.
_{Richard Beck}

Answers to “..what do you want your life to look like between now and dead?” reveal how we intend to use of our dying. Do we double down on a materialistic, nihilistic vision like most of the Quora responses?; or, do we seek to be more fully human, moving toward mystical union with God?

Take time to ponder your answers.
I have chosen to pursue the latter — but questions remain…

What are tools for second journey?
What does it mean to be fully human ?
Is seeking to be more fully human, moving toward mystical union with God consistent with prevailing concepts of discipleship? If so, how? If not, Why?

STIIL ON THE JOURNEY.

Richard Rohr ↩︎

1
…one of the most popular talk show hosts in radio history, Dr. Laura Schlessinger offers no-nonsense advice infused with a strong sense of ethics, accountability, and personal responsibility; she’s been doing it successfully for more than 30 years, reaching millions of listeners weekly.
2
“existential slap” —that moment when a [dying] person first comprehends, on a gut level, that death is close. For many, the realization comes suddenly: “The usual habit of allowing thoughts of death to remain in the background is now impossible,” . “Death can no longer be denied.”¹
3
According to Father Richard Rohr, the second half of life is a time to discover the meaning of life and to live in the present moment. It’s a time to let go of the ego and to find a deeper sense of self.

A Few Thoughts

George January 11, 2025 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

A Better Person

People don’t become better versions of themselves as they acquire intellectual information; they get better as they acquire emotional knowledge — the ability to be made indignant by injustice, outraged by cruelty, to know how to gracefully do things withpeople, not for people.

David Brooks

Antipodists

People who juggle with their feet

Killing CEOs

The murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson on December 4, 2024 ignited a furious and macabre debate: did he deserve it? According to a recent Emerson poll, young voters aged 18-29 are split, 40% saying the killing was acceptable and 40% saying it was not. The other 20% were evidently high at the time, thought the pollster was their DoorDasher, and responded, “I asked for Extra Ranch sauce.”

Shalom Auslander

Sacraments

in the sacraments, we are not asking God to make something to be other than it is but to reveal it to be what it truly is.

This “truth of all things” is the revelation of the world as sacrament. The waters and all that is in the world is a means of communion with God because of His Divine condescension. The world was not created to be a place of an “alternative” existence, one without God. It exists as the means and focal point of our communion. The sacraments revealed to us within the life of the Church do not exist as isolated instances of a divine encounter but as examples and revelations of what God is in the world. “Heaven and earth are full of Thy glory.”

…secularism is the great heresy of our age: it is the denial of the sacramental character of the world. Just as man is created in the image and likeness of God, and thus capable of bearing God’s image, so too, creation has a sacramental and iconic capability. The world is not an impregnable wall that hides us from God. It is the very means by which, and the place in which, God makes Himself known. We were created for communion with God. This takes place here and now, within this world.

Fr Stephen Freeman

The porch

In the eyes of the world, there is no payoff for sitting on the porch.

In the eyes of the true God, the porch is imperative—not every now and then but on a regular basis.

Barbara Taylor Brown

Notions of God

It follows that any notion of God that is static is—since it asserts singular knowledge of God and seeks to limit his being to that knowledge—blasphemous. “God’s truth is life,” as Patrick Kavanagh says, “even the grotesque shapes of its foulest fire.”

Christian Wiman

Organization Values

…espoused values are “the articulated, publicly announced principles and values that the group claims to be trying to achieve…”Mission, vision, and core values statements are examples of espoused values. What is crucial is whether these professed values align with the lived experience of people within the organization.

Edgar Schein

Life in the Church desert

The ironic detachment wears thin. Hold out for something better long enough and eventually that’s just what you are: a holdout. The view from above the fray turns out to be a view from nowhere. My bull sessions began to feel scripted, and the existentially loaded conversations always landed me back at the same spot and with the same question: What to do now? And the same answer was always: I don’t know.

How not to be a schmatic

Dostoevsky

Greatgrands

So thankful !

Beau Allen Johnson
9#13oz 22″

Archie Scott Gabehart 1#7oz 13″

STILL ON THE JOIURNEY

A Few Thoughts – Happy New Year -2025

George January 1, 2025 Notes Anthology 8 Comments

Bumper Stickers

“Bumper stickers used to actually say something about the person,” said Elizabeth Goodspeed, a graphic designer based in Rhode Island. Now, she said, “they don’t tell me anything about the person beyond that they are on the internet.”

I thought it would be fun to create my own bumper sticker for 2025. You are welcome to share your creation…

WORD for 2025 —

logorrhea

noun
log·or·rhea

: excessive and often incoherent talkativeness or wordiness

New Year’s Resolution for 2025 —

Be less logorrheic..

2025 Refrigerator Magnet

“Spirituality is an emotion. Religion is an obligation. Spirituality soothes. Religion mobilizes. Spirituality is satisfied with itself. Religion is dissatisfied with the world.” Rabbi David Wolpe

Daily prayer for 2025

…when my prayer is finished, do not let me think that my worship is ended and spend the rest of the day forgetting You. Rather, from those quiet moments, let light and joy and power pour out and remain with me through every hour of every day,

adapted from “A Diary of Private Prayer – John Baille”

First Prayer of 2025 —

Kind and loving Father,
Protect and bless Archie Scott Gabehart with life abundant.
Be with Gabby and Kyle as they walk through this shadowy valley.
In Jesus name…

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

A Few Thoughts

George December 27, 2024 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

“Robin Givhan examined former President Jimmy Carter’s approach to his remaining days: “Hospice care is not a matter of giving up. It’s a decision to shift our efforts from shoring up a body on the verge of the end to providing solace to a soul that’s on the cusp of forever.””

Sweatpants

“David Mack explained the endurance of sweatpants beyond their pandemic-lockdown, Zoom-meeting ubiquity: “We are now demanding from our pants attributes we are also seeking in others and in ourselves. We want them to be forgiving and reassuring. We want them to nurture us. We want them to say: ‘I was there, too. I experienced it. I came out on the other side more carefree and less rigid. And I learned about the importance of ventilation in the process.””

Social Media

Last week, a cable news pundit struggled to understand the new media landscape. So he sought advice from his teenage son.

He asked the youngster to name the most influential people in the world today.
Can you guess the names he picked?
Here’s what happened:
I’m thinking to myself he’s going to say Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Jay-Z.
He says Kai Cenat, Adin Ross, Jynxzi, and Sketch. I don’t know who he is talking about.
I said ‘What platforms are you on?’
He said ‘I’m on Twitch, Kick, and Rumble.’
I said ‘That sounds like you need to go to the hospital.
What are these platforms? I’m telling you guys, the mainstream has become fringe, and the fringe has become mainstream….
There are people out there that are getting 14 million streams. And we are on cable news getting one or two million.
This is the new reality. The future of media has arrived—but people above a certain age won’t even recognize the names.
Check out the list below of the most watched streamers in the US and Canada.

Jynxzi? Zackrawrr? Summit1g?

A few days ago, I’d have told you these are passwords, not people.

“You can’t earn God’s love with good behavior and lofty thoughts, because he’s already given it to you as the lavish gift that you don’t deserve. “I prayed for wonders instead of happiness, Lord,” Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “and you gave them to me.””

Wonder and Awe

Wonder and awe are the emotions we feel when we are in the presence of a vast something just beyond the rim of our understanding.

David Brooks

Sacred Moments

Every day we pass by sacred moments. Each of these moments is the pearl of great price. Our days are filled with fields of hidden treasure. And yet, we hurry past, lost within ourselves. Trapped in nostalgia or regret about yesterday. Fretful or planning for tomorrow. We’re never present to the moment and, therefore, miss the sacred encounter.

Richard Beck

Archie Scott Gabehart

Speaking of sacred moments, Archie’s arrival has filled the days around Christmas with sacred moments. Anxious and precious is each moment as Kyle and Gabby love on him in the NICU. He is a fighter.

‘m not close enough to God to be angry. God is not close enough to me for me to be angry.
Christian Wimans

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

A Few Thoughts

George December 21, 2024 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

Christian Wiman

I made a new acquaintance this past week. We were introduced via a No Small Endeavor podcast. I expect we will become good friends. Consider these citations from the interview. You might decide to become his friend also.

…when you’re facing death, there’s not much left to lose, and that opens up possibilities for intimacy, letting go of our masks or letting go of our pretense or whatever it might be.
Richard Wilbur has a poem where he looks at a stream, describes it through seven stanzas beautifully, and then he says,
‘joy’s trick is to supply dry lips with what can cool and slake, leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache nothing can satisfy.’
I’ve been to so many different churches and always something happens that, that I just disagree with so profoundly or often there’s a mismatch between the urgency with which I feel in my own interior communion with, and wrestling with God, and the banality of the spaces in which this is supposedly being expressed.
And so, I’m often bored out of my skull at church, you know, and if I’m not bored, I’m often I just disagree so profoundly with what’s being said. And I also feel that most churches don’t allow for a space for how wild God could be, you know? I mean, Annie Dillard has that famous paragraph about saying that people should be wearing crash helmets in church, and, you know, lashing themselves to the pews.
I’m not close enough to God to be angry. God is not close enough to me for me to be angry.
‘Reading Pascal in Quarantine’
I love only those who seek with lamentation.
I love only those whose lives events some timeless entire.
To weep is to see.
To be is to bow.
I love only those who know a whole new naivete.
His book “My Bright Abyss“” is on my reading list.

David Brooks

I also had a conversation with my friend David Brooks this week. Well, actually I read his latest NYT article “The Shock of Faith: It’s Nothing Like I Thought It Would Be” . I really did feel like we had a conversation. Here are some excerpts to whet your appetite. Maybe David could be your friend also.

When I was an agnostic, I thought faith was primarily about belief. Being religious was about having a settled conviction that God existed and knowing that the stories in the Bible were true. I looked for books and arguments that would convince me that God was either real or not real.
When faith finally tiptoed into my life it didn’t come through information or persuasion but, at least at first, through numinous experiences. These are the scattered moments of awe and wonder that wash over most of us unexpectedly from time to time. Looking back over the decades, I remember rare transcendent moments at the foot of a mountain in New England at dawn, at Chartres Cathedral in France, looking at images of the distant universe or of a baby in the womb. In those moments, you have a sense that you are in the presence of something overwhelming, mysterious. Time is suspended or at least blurs. One is enveloped by an enormous bliss.
At least for me, these experiences didn’t answer questions or settle anything; on the contrary, they opened up vaster mysteries. They revealed wider dimensions of existence than I had ever imagined and aroused a desire to be opened up still further. Wonder and awe are the emotions we feel when we are in the presence of a vast something just beyond the rim of our understanding.
In his book “My Bright Abyss,” the poet Christian Wiman writes, “Religion is not made of these moments; religion is the means of making these moments part of your life rather than merely radical intrusions so foreign and perhaps even fearsome that you can’t even acknowledge their existence afterward.”
It hit me with the force of joy. Happiness is what we experience as we celebrate the achievements of the self — winning a prize. Joy is what we feel when we are encompassed by a presence that transcends the self. We create happiness but are seized by joy — in my case by the sensation that I had just been overwhelmed by a set of values of intoxicating spiritual beauty. Psychologists have a name for my state on that mountaintop: moral elevation. I wanted to laugh, run about, hug somebody. I was too inhibited to do any of that, of course, but I did find some happy music to listen to during my smiling walk down the mountain.
I’ve had to keep reminding myself that faith is more like falling in love than it is like finding the answer to a complicated question. Given my overly intellectual nature, I’ve had to get my brain to take a step back. I’ve had to accept the fact that when you assent to faith, you’re assenting to putting your heart at the center of your life. The best moments are giddily romantic — when you are astounded at the great blessing of God’s love and overcome by the desire to do the things that will delight him. It’s a reminder that we’re rarely changed by learning information, but we are acquiring new loves.
When religion is seen as belief, the believer lives on a continuum between belief and doubt. But when religion is seen as a longing, the believer lives on the continuum between intensity and apathy. That’s the continuum I live on these days. I’ve gone whole months when God may or may not have been walking beside me, but I can’t bring myself to care. Other desires, chiefly the desire for achievement and prowess, crowd out the higher desire for contact with the divine.

OK I admit there are more than a few thoughts today, but it is important to share conversations you’ve had with good friends.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY