Passing kayaks on luggage racks reminds me that this year’s paddling will be on lakes not whitewater. Some people my age do shoot rapids—but they long ago set out to remain limber enough to snap a crisp Eskimo roll. I did not. The time to decide to paddle whitewater this year was 30 years ago.

Among the stuff that everybody knows for sure that just ain’t so is that ‘grief proceeds through five stages.’ Bereaved people know otherwise. Those stages were published by a psychiatrist describing how dying persons responded to her daily nudgings. Any nurse, physician, or pastor can tell you that only works if that psychiatrist is daily probing your psyche at your bedside. Mostly people die as they lived. Period.

People who live scared die scared. People who joke their ways through life crack wise with their dying breaths. The curious and interested die so: my father-in-law asked about the national news in his last hour. Serene people die serene.

Putting all that together, we see something obvious: the time to make end-of-life transitions is decades in advance of actual death. If you want to die courageous, get brave right now. If you want to leave life merrily, learn how to come into each day merrily. To lay life down serenely, learn to cultivate serenity under today’s circumstances.

As we approach life’s ending we head into a narrowing funnel of choices, options, and freedoms in our outward circumstances. Our remaining time will feel increasingly cramped unless we have expanded our interior lives apace.

Inner expansion is another way to describe consciousness. To expand consciousness, reclaim it. Take it back from work, from frantic pursuits, from anesthetizing play, from (God knows!) television, from alcohol, from the squirrel-cage wheel of worry. That requires facing into and facing down our habitual fears. It means being good sports about grief. Oddly the same measure helps with both tasks: appreciation. When you are appreciating someone or something you’ve lost, the pain of grief is absent. The same with fear. A zen abbott used to lead his novices swiftly into Enlightenment, asking them simply to ask, “At this precise moment, what is needful?”. A good insight to acquire young.

And facing into that “Good Night” into which the poet bade us “go not gentle”? I may declare to myself that the Scriptures and Creeds upon which I base the hope of Heaven are infallible so I need have no fear; but eventually that rationale will strike me as circular. No, real serene trust before death’s curtain arises from the same Source the biblical writer derived it from: actual here-and-now encounters with the Risen One, moments of timeless intimacy when we know that we are known, accepted, cherished. Those are glimpses into eternity itself.

Cultivate all of that right now. Bishop Sims once remarked, “We say we want eternal life; but how many moments of the way you live now would you want to experience eternally?”

Practice.

by The Rev. Canon Gray Temple
The Rev. Canon Gray Temple, rector of St. Patrick’s Episcopal Church in Atlanta for 31 years, is an author, and a consultant and coach for clergy and non-profit groups around the country.

Easter Practice

• Bishop Glasspool writes that it is the struggle of the caterpillar as he makes his way out of the cocoon which gives him the strength that he will need to live. Are you experiencing a transition that could be described that way—as making you stronger for life?
• Fr. Harkins tells of the ‘disc harrow’ tool which helps a farmer turn over the soil, in preparation for planting. Think of an experience in your life which seems to be preparing you for growth.
• Fr. Temple suggests that we leave this life in the same way that we lived it: afraid, defeated, curious, serene. How would you like to be now—as well as then?