Going Hence....

Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither....

Shakespeare, King Lear, V.ii

This blog is about journeys, including the last journey.  Shakespeare knew this journey somehow too intimately.

One of the things that distinguishes Shakespeare among even today's writers is his nuanced use of ambiguity.  He allows us to peel back layers of meaning that exist, often, within a single line.  His ambiguity in the word "their" in this quote from Lear shows Shakespeare's intimacy with the problem: that we must endure both coming into the world and leaving it.  Look:

Does he mean "Men must endure their [own] going hence"?

Or

Does he mean that we who live "must endure their [our loved ones'] going hence"?

Yes -- both meanings, I believe.  And it's an arduous thing to endure for both the one who departs and for the one who remains.

The character who delivers the line is Edgar, who leads Gloucester towards what he supposes will be his death.  Edgar asks his ward, "What, in ill thoughts again?  Men must endure/Their going hence, even as their coming hither:/Ripeness is all: come on."

And the dual meanings here are multiplied: we not only endure our own and others' going hence, just as we endured coming into this world, but we must also endure the people "coming hither" into our world who will offer only malfeasance (as so many characters do in Lear ); these persons are mere travesties of the attributes that make a human to be [link] (in the most positive sense).  The presence of such people is all but impossible to endure once it's clear to us just what they are and what harm their presence brings.

My nephew, Michael, came into this world as one of the happiest beings I have seen, and he was ever so.  I have seen him delight at simple things encountered in this world, and I have known him to be as innocent a soul as I'd ever met.

Beaming Boy

He was a delight to play with in his infancy and toddlerhood, and growing older he has distinguished both his life after coming hither and his life going hence with a dignity uncommon to a young man.  Not to raise him above being merely human or to idealize, but he's been quite a fine lad.

I have known people who attempted to endow their departure (or, more accurately, their funeral) with a dignity that their lives failed to warrant.  That is a vanity decorated with funereal baubles -- a sham of empty ornamentation.  I have heard of, read about, and have met others who departed without a dignified remembrance -- with little to no remembrance of the dignity with which they led their lives.

It is rare when these two balance: a dignified endurance of going hence at the end of a life lived in dignity.  That this balance exists with Michael has been emphatic to me as I consider his short life and his long endurance in passing.

His days grow short -- probably a mere few now.  And both he, and we along side, endure his going hence.

Michael, Thanksgiving 2011

 Michael, Dec. 2011

The Rest Is Silence

"And there was silence in heaven for about half an hour." -- Rev. 8:1

Whether or not you believe in a literal heaven, in God, or in something beyond is not the importance of the above quotation just now.  If you don't believe in such things but are sentient enough to read this quotation as you would read any other bit of literature -- by suspending your own, immediate responses and stepping imaginatively into the literature even if it has nothing to do with your own experiences or beliefs -- then read like that now.

What I notice is how this quote points to a recognition -- occurring, ironically, in the place that is the epitome of peace -- but still: it's a recognition that terrible things happen, things that even those who dwell outside the events, those who forever dwell with and in the Ideal, can understand to be devastatingly traumatic.

I'm not talking about the Holocaust, 9/11, a world war, or a tsunami, although remembering such events brings one to profound silence -- and should do so.  There is nothing to say.  That is precisely the point: silence is the only fitting response at times.

And so...my nephew, Michael, is nearing his death due to brain cancer after nearly nine months of slow decline.  He has thus far been gently lowered into that good night.  But even so --.  There is this silence where once was elation, amusement, wit, humor and laughter, serious talk, and young insight.

I have nothing to say except that silence is the appropriate response.  What exasperates is precisely this: too many words -- WORDS! -- have, over these months, been led out to battle a reality that came silently upon him, slowly took away the happy sounds emanating from his young life, and will leave an immense silence in its wake.

It is understandable, yes, that people have tried to find the right words along the way -- the right words to comfort, to empathize, to sympathize.  And some of these people have listened to themselves as they tried to articulate something fitting, and as they listened to themselves, they sensibly found their words were failing to deliver their good intent.  They would stop...and finally understand that silence was the thing they sought to express.  I thank these people not only for their empathy but more: for their good sense.

Others?

For these nine months I have read insipidly trite messages that people repeatedly posted for Michael on his Caring Bridge and Facebook pages -- all those lengthy statements about healing, that the writer just knows God will provide healing, and here are the scriptures to prove it....  God in a box: pull him out, like a spot remover, and advertise what He can do, like the Almighty Mr. Clean.

God, so far as I've experienced Him, is never so commercial a product as he is among many of these people of a faith -- a faith that is both unexamined and devoid of understanding that we all -- the just and unjust (if you must say it this way) -- share the same human condition.  That bit of understanding is just what too many people of faith are devoid of, especially in America.  They are too often thoughtless, tactless, without depth or sensitive understanding in a moment deserving nothing but silence.  Instead, there's the self-ordained, the self-justified, talk-show mentality with its free and freely-associated advice imposed on the situation -- as if everyone is obligated to hear their opinions.  One friend observed how these people's "compulsion to fill up the emptiness with banal, meaningless comments can be more painful than not."

The ability to wait in silence -- even while holding hope for a miracle and anticipating praise to be sung at such an event should it occur -- that act of silently waiting holds compassion and depth of soul.  It shows Negative Capability in the most positive sense.

Question: what is appropriate (let alone compassionate) about preaching a trite sermon on healing from Philippians to a 13-year-old boy who is losing every single thing in life -- his parents, all of his family and friends, his dreams for the future, his ability to play sports, his favorite toys -- and at the end of all these losses, life on earth itself?  Or what about a delivering a mini sermon on "firey trials" to a boy who is past moving, drinking without choking, eating, speaking his last words to his parents, or focusing his eyes in a last look at them?

It's taunting.  It's rubbing his nose in "what ought to be." It's to say "now, boy -- you make absolutely certain that you understand this last little lesson before you take your final breath!" Nothing whatsoever is appropriate in such words, nothing resembling empathy.  It is appallingly calloused, shallow, and indicative of the worst vestiges of faith.  To do such a thing speaks of what one book calls "The American Disease": an inordinate sense of entitlement.  And when the sense of entitlement is "sanctified" because it's from a believer?  All the worse.  They believe their words have a special warrant to violate a heaven-sanctioned silence.  At root, it is only pride and a desire for control.  You know what a martyr is?  It's someone who has to listen to a saint.

What is the worst part of such inane messengers?  They feel (not think, but feel) that they have a license to babble, which issues from the fact that they "mean well."  God save us from people like these who mean to do us good.  They don't think and, consequently, will not understand.  Yet they will smile at their own "goodness" and "understanding" while they spread more pain.

When I was yet in my teens, it struck me that a shallow brook makes a great deal more noise with what little water it has than does a deep and silent river.  But which has the greater power?  And shallow we have all been at a time, another time, and some time again.  I know my own lines here....

So it goes here on Earth.  But the quote: what's the scene in Heaven?

"...silence in heaven for about half an hour."  Yes.  The dwellers of heaven know, apparently, when to shut up.  Ironic, that.  Those -- having a clearer knowledge of Him and the answer to the paradox of how the giver of life is involved in the workings of death -- they know when to shut up.  There isn't some tres chic Archangel stepping lively and clapping to get everyone's attention -- then rattling like a choreographer on the set of a musical rehearsal: "OK, EVERYONE! Thank you!  Great job, Suzie!  Now we're just going to have a moment of silence."

 No.  These beings know when to shut up because of their own humble prescience and understanding of Him who is just and sovereign -- and because of their simple recognition that terrible things happen on the earth, things that their words do not have the power to undo.

Job -- the guy in the Old Testament -- had "friends."  When they first came to Job in the midst of his devastating calamities, they did what?  "For seven days and seven nights they sat beside him on the ground, and none of them spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great" (Job 2:13).  They had the right idea that week.  They went wrong when they opened their mouths to deliver their little sermons and lessons.  They knew nothing of what God was doing.  Yet in their petty self-concern for offering the best word for the situation, each "friend" had to add what he knew.  They undertook to explain God and His ways to Job, nothing about which they understood.  And...they were dead wrong.  In their self-entitled, ego-driven, and uninformed "opinions" (the very pablum of thought), they cruelly increased their friend's suffering.

And think: is it not the absolute worst irony in Job's story that the only family member left to him was his wife (it doesn't matter that she was a woman; it only matters what her advice was)?  At the start of his troubles, she simply tells her husband to "curse God and die."  Helpful advice, that.  This is who is left to Job beyond his "friends."  And such people most often think they are serving God by their words....

When Jesus went to his friend, Lazarus', grave, we are told merely "Jesus wept."  An action only.  St. Paul remarked, "rejoice with those who rejoice. Weep with those who weep."  Again, action only.  What about words?  And what about the woman caught in the very act of adultery? (Um...if it takes "two to do," where'd the guy go?  Setup, eh?)  There she sat, moments before suffering a horrible death from stones thrown by the religious elders (ironic, is it?  No -- that's invariably typical ).  And -- from Jesus she hears merely, "Neither do I condemn you.  Go and sin no more."  And then silence.  Silence to live in or silence to die in, but silence.

And Jesus' own suffering?

He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth

                               (Isaiah 53)

Tradition is that we should remember horrible events, remember those who perished and those who sacrificed, with a moment of silence.  Charles Hamilton Sorley, a British soldier and poet of WWI killed on 13 Oct. 1915, wrote this:

When you see the millions of the mouthless dead

Across your dreams in pale battalions go,

Say not soft things as other men have said,

That you'll remember.  For you need not so.

This is precisely why speaking is prohibited and silence enforced at the great ossuary at Douamont, where people still today take new-found bones of soldiers of WWI, lost in the mud of the fields outside Verdun.  Beyond the silence, the only occasional sounds you might hear there are the aching strains of Faure's Requiem...itself largely a lament for our condition and prayers for God's mercy in it.

The Ossuary at Douamont, France (Source: Naidoo)

In remembering the victims of 9/11 this year, there were "six silences and a prayer" [Link].  Paul Simon sang his old song -- movingly, memorably -- "The Sounds of Silence" [Link].

Terrible things happen on this earth -- whether to a throng of people in some great and sudden conflagration or to one young boy in the lingering decline of an insipid disease.  They happen in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia..., on the highway outside, at the house next door.  As someone once said (in a quote given in an earlier posting), "sometimes the mountains have nothing to say."  So should it be.  Shakespeare, who lost his young son Hamnet, also knew this. While grieving for his own son, he wrote the play Hamlet and gave this as the dying Hamlet's last words: "The rest is silence."