Choices

Duccio, the Maesta, "Christ Taken Prisoner." Click for larger view.

“As I lie here I have so much time to think. You know, M. really didn’t want to die. What if we had the ability to exchange ourselves, and die for another? What if at that point I had said, ‘Fine, I’ll go instead!’ It would have been perfectly OK with me, and she could have gone on living, which is what she wanted.”

“Few of us have that choice in life.”

“Yes, but it’s a very interesting question, isn’t it? It's in the Gospels: Jesus said the greatest love was to lay down one’s life for one’s friend. He did it! He died ‘to atone for the sins of all.’”

My eyes flew open wide. “You can’t be telling me that you’ve suddenly decided to believe that!”

He smiled a cryptic smile and refused to answer. “But you have to admit that we’re getting to the essential core of Christianity here. What would you do?”

“I don’t know. It probably depends on the circumstances and the person. I’d like to think I would do it but I don’t know. How can any of us know unless we face it?”

“You may be right. But in her case, I would have done it gladly. I really think so.”

“Maybe we should invite Socrates to come in and participate in this discussion,” I suggested.  He laughed. I went on: “Did you ever read any Bonhoeffer?”

At first he couldn’t place who Bonhoeffer was, and then remembered the young Lutheran theologian who was imprisoned for his part in a plot to assassinate Hitler, and was killed on April 9, 1945. “Of course! For a long while he was a hero of mine. He was executed in prison, wasn’t he?”

“Yes,” I said. “When I first read his books I found them really shattering. They influenced me a lot. But most recently I read his ‘Letters and Papers from Prison” and what moved me about it wasn't the theology or the politics, but his correspondence with a friend about books, music, ideas. It was so human – this great desire to keep a sense of his intellectual life alive while he was imprisoned, and the way it gave him courage. I suppose I could see myself in it.”

He nodded, and said he had several of Bonhoeffer’s books. “One I found in a Quaker library where they refused to let the books circulate. Imagine! So I simply stole it -- I “liberated” it. I was always doing things like that.”

I let that moral question fall into the abyss between me and the bed, and told him instead about Jonathan Daniels, the young Episcopal seminarian and civil rights activist from New Hampshire who had died in Alabama in 1965, when he pushed a young girl out of the way of a deputy sheriff’s shotgun and took the bullet himself. An Episcopal chapel nearby was being dedicated to his memory that weekend, and the girl, Ruby Sales, who had spent her life as an activist for peace and for black women, was speaking at the dedication.

He raised his eyebrows and gave little shrug, never quite as interested in my stories as his own. “In most cases it would be a sudden, almost spontaneous decision like that. But sometimes not.” He told me about the case of a parishioner he had known who had two children both suffering from kidney disease. The father was a good tissue match for both, but he was unable and unwilling to choose between them. But when one of his children died, he immediately gave one of his kidneys to the other one. “Fascinating!” he said. “And such a pure, selfless act. Beautiful!”

I admired the father’s selflessness too, but also imagined the suffering he had felt when confronted with an impossible “Sophie’s Choice” that ultimately required the death of one child for the other to live; it struck me as neither beautiful nor poetic, but as a real tragedy, not theoretical at all.

His eyes were shut then, and a satisfied smile played on his lips, but I couldn’t tell where it came from: was it pleasure in the discussion; or pride in his own intellect; or simply a feeling of comfort at being in his bed with time to do nothing but think? I suspected that something else, still unexpressed, lay at the bottom of these musings about exchanging places, and his apparent preoccupation with two events: the choice to marry her and not another, and their last conversations before she died. At length he spoke again:

“I lie here and think about these things, and wonder, ‘Am I a Christian or not?’ And I really don’t know the answer.”

Comments

[Kaycie]

I completely relate to his last statement.

And I have to say, I would have "liberated" the book, too.

[leslee]

I think he's staying alive simply to tell you (and/or recount to himself) every single thing he wants to divulge before he goes!

[Pica]

These are wonderful stories, Beth. Juicy stories with lots of chasms.

[language hat]

Fascinating. I agree about the tragedy, but I suspect when you're facing the end of your own world, other people's tragedies don't mean as much.

(I cannot approve of "liberating" library books. It's way too selfish.)

[beth]

Kaycie, I'm surprised he's asking himself this now; I thought he was sure of the answer (If I were answering for him I'd say "no," but maybe in his world of reasoning he'd say "yes.")

Leslee, actually I think it has nothing to do with me, personally, but he is clearly voicing things he's trying to come to terms with - when he's done maybe he'll let go.

Pica, thanks for enjoying the stories... and their holes.

LH: Probably exactly right. And I don't approve either!!

[Dave]

Being privy to some of the wealth of material your FIL has provided you with in recent days, I am most impressed with the "choices" you made in writing this installment.

[Pat]

Two comments:
First, Beth you have such a capacity to sit with him in silence and allow him to go deeper.

Second, I have to wonder about Bonhoeffer (and all of us) keeping our intellects in gear. In the last few years I am seeing how I turn my intellect on when I need to protect myself from the full impact of feeling.

My Zen(?)teacher speaks of "dancing on the Void" - avoiding full transcendence by avoiding feeling. I have been watching how I do that with my intellect. I kind of view it now as "cheating" on my next bit of spiritual work.

But, it doesn't seem like either you or your father-in-law are cheating for a moment ... Perhaps this is just an illustration of the different paths to knowing. I would welcome other's comments on this.

OK- apologies for length... this whole series you're presenting really moves me.

[Lucy]

Someone very dear to me stole a book from a library, it was Meister Eckhart's sermons the volume was long out of print and unobtainable (pre-internet), he wanted it so much. It was completely out of character, I was astonished. He wept when he told me, which was after he'd secreted the book back into the library! Happily it came back into print and he now has his own copy.

I sympathise when you say he's never quite so interested in your stories as his own, but I suppose that's as it must be...

Thanks again Beth. I liked the last post too.

[beth]

Dave, yeah...it wasn't easy to "choose." I've got notes on a great deal more material and some of it will definitely eventually make it into the manuscript. When families and living people are involved, it's so hard to know what to write, and what to leave out.

Pat - I agree about using one's intellect as a protective device and think we all do it, perhaps even especially those of us who are drawn to Zen. And in difficult situations, we need our capacity to reason! I'm such an empathizer that I know I feel and absorb too much sometimes, but that edge your teacher talks about is, I think, the porous and scary-feeling place where we learn the most about non-separation and "I AM" as opposed to "i am." Your comment has made me think, and I want to continue to muse on this before writing much more - maybe I'll try to discuss this in a post and see if we can get some additional comments from readers. I'd like to hear more from you about this.

Lucy - thanks for sharing this story, and its very human ending. Desire is so strong sometimes; it's like we go a little crazy. I wonder what Meister Eckart would have said - I doubt he would have been very judgmental.

[Natalie]

Fascinating bedside philosophical dialogue.

[melo]

wonderful writing!

birth and death, so spiritualising, so numinous.

i watched my 3 children born at home, i watched my mother die.

right there with the absolute peak experiences of my life.

now i am a massage therapist, and work with clients in their 90's sometimes, trembling on the brink...

one foot in, one out. such a fine line, to give them peace without over inviting them back into the world of the senses, helping them let it go.

what i find most fascinating is the character unspooling, the essence emerging as the rings of conditioning, the mental superstructure disassembles itself with the same quirky individuality with which is was built.

i love also how, just as with newborns, the non-, or better termed para-verbal kicks in, and the silence becomes so pregnant with meaning and love, that it seems like the ceiling will fly off, there's so much reality in the room.

thankyou for sharing this unbelievably poignant discussion with us.

it really hits my sweet spot. bookmarked!

[Dick]

When the time comes and for long after, these commentaries will be so valuable a resource.

[rr]

Yes, what Dick said. My ceiling's close to flight just sitting here.