Does reflecting on death make life better?
The week in the rearviewmirror: Foo Fighters, Paul Simon, Tiananmen Square and Pat Robertson ... death in all its forms shapes the news.
Good morning, and welcome to a review of some of the week's news and culture happenings that you may have missed ... beginning not with a news story actually, but with the release of an album — the Foo Fighters' latest But Here We Are. Last Saturday morning I decided to forego my normal couple of hours with the magazines and newspapers and went for a long drive to take the new album for an extended run — but I wasn’t expecting to have the reaction to it that I did.
I knew this new album was going to be dominated by how the band have reacted since the death of long-time drummer Taylor Hawkins last year, but I didn't expect such a hard-rocking album to be so emotional. I won't go into it in too much depth here, other than to say when Grohl sings the final track Rest, and particularly the lyrics 'Rest, you can rest now — rest, you will be safe now — rest, you will be saved now' it really hits you in the throat.
Perhaps taking a long drive on a Saturday morning to listen to an album about death isn't your thing — for me, it came on the back of a week or so of contemplating the subject of death following an article I read in The Atlantic magazine: Think About Your Death and Live Better — which, as the headline suggests, encourages us to think about our death more, because it tends to make us better appreciate (and do more constructive things with) our lives.
The article has some incredible quotes, such as this one:
So we banish death from our thoughts. But this leads us to make choices in life that actually curtail our happiness. People who express more regrets tend to be those who postponed profound activities that yield meaning, such as practicing religion, appreciating beauty, or spending more time with loved ones. This is probably because they realized too late that they had implicitly assumed life would always go on and on, so there’s always time to do these meaning-filled things. When we avoid thoughts of death, we unconsciously assume that tomorrow will look a lot like today, so we can do tomorrow what we could do today. But when we focus on death, that increases the stakes at play in the present, and clarifies what we should do with our time.
That article, in turn, made me recall a Sufjan Stevens concert at the Civic Theatre in Auckland in 2016, which was, in essence, a celebration of death, in which Sufjan got the audience to do what The Atlantic article suggests — to spend more time contemplating our final moments so that we appreciate our lives on a deeper level. Towards the end of the concert he read some quotes on the subject, and 'the demystification of the world around us', from French Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne, such as this: "The habitual sight of things makes the mind accustomed to them: it begins to feel no wonder and ask no questions about what is constantly before the eyes." In other words, even great lives can start to feel mundane if eternal matters aren't reflected on. We must 'pull the veil from our eyes', he says, and 'have the mind of a child'.
The nature of a man's death will reflect the nature of his life. Fire will test the realness of each man's work. Is your work frivolous or eternal?
To say this was bizarre at the end of a rock show is an understatement. But it worked, mainly because it was Sufjan and he has an ability to infuse the momentary with the eternal in a way that feels spiritually authentic.
All that to say that I didn't realise it last Saturday, but this theme was to continue right through the week with some of the news stories that, for me anyway, were most prominent.
June 4
FOR EXAMPLE, A story last Sunday about the anniversary of the massacre in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, on June 4, 1989, in which possibly thousands of peaceful protestors were slaughtered when the Chinese government sent in tanks to break up a pro-democracy rally. This story in The Economist caught my eye: How Hong Kong is snuffing out memories of Tiananmen Square about the Chinese government's continued efforts to suppress the memory of the event, even in Hong Kong where it has previously been permitted to mark the anniversary. The story resonated with one I highlighted last week about the Crown Jewels in London, and the royal family's embarrassment about its colonial past — my point being that the Bible never tries to hide its grubby history, because that's how we learn to move forward. This is another of those stories, in which an authoritarian government seeks to erase any memory of an event that shames it, rather than embrace it as a moment to pivot away from.
How can we move forward as humans if we keep whitewashing our past?
MORE CONTEMPLATION OF THE end in a story on Paul Simon's new album, Seven Psalms, in The New Yorker: The Mysticism of Paul Simon. This quote from the story grabbed me:
Outside religious spaces, posing the big questions—how we arrived here; what we’re supposed to do with the time we’ve been allotted—is generally considered the terrain of undergraduate philosophy majors and people who have gravely misjudged their tolerance for edibles. Western culture has tidied and sanitized the moments (childbirth, death) that truly force the inquiry. In the delivery room, a mother might only be granted a dazed hour to cradle her newborn before everyone is cleaned up and wheeled off. Death is medicalized; the deepest mourning happens mostly in private. Yet once you become awake to the puzzle of existence, via loss or its opposite, it can be extremely difficult to think about anything else.
There it is again, the idea that puzzling over the big themes, birth, death, and why we're here, is not typical, but can dominate your thinking once it's begun. A cancer diagnosis will do this for people, or the loss of someone close. I grew up in a small faith community, so I was bombarded with the big questions my whole life. Even so, it didn’t really come home for me until I witnessed the deaths of nine people in a cliff collapse — my life was forever changed from that point, and I don’t think a day has gone by that I haven’t contemplated ‘the eternal’ questions since that day back in 1996.
The writer of the article traces Paul Simon's 'search for God' through his past songs and brings his focus to one track called The Rhythm of the Saints from 1990, which has the line: The cross is in the ballpark.
He ends with this quote about it:
The final line of the verse can be read in several ways. Perhaps Simon is suggesting that we’re capable of locating God in anything we love, including baseball. Perhaps he’s making a point about how religion is inextricably stitched into the cultural fabric of America. It may be an allusion to Pope Paul VI holding Mass at Yankee Stadium, in 1965. He could be saying that, although Christianity is not foolproof, it’s close enough. Or maybe he’s simply suggesting that faith—in the world, in ourselves—is always within reach. We’re never so far from mercy.
Which I thought was pretty cool. The new album is good too. But in terms of records with the title Seven Psalms, I prefer the one by Nick Cave.
June 7
SO DISTRACTED WAS I this week by this recurring theme of death that I almost missed the launch of Apple's latest life-changing gadget, the Vision Pro, on June 6, but I caught up with the follow-up media on it on June 7, such as this this story in The Atlantic: One More Screen for Your Face and this one in The Economist: Apple’s Vision Pro is an incredible machine. Now to find out what it is for. I admit that I'm an Apple fanboy, but even I'm cynical about a giant pair of goggles that places you inside the iPhone, essentially, and completely isolates you from everyone else in the room (though not completely, since the Vision Pro projects your eyes onto the front of the screen so that people think you're actually making eye contact with them — really!).
This isn't the time to go into the Vision Pro in depth, other than to say at least Apple understands the importance of maintaining connection between people, which is why the gadget doesn't totally seal users off from their ambient space ... but is this really the direction we want to go in when many of us are already struggling with isolation?
I WAS FAR more interested in a story from The Atlantic: What It’s Like to Learn You’re Going to Die. I have some personal experience of this subject. I was told I might die in hospital with pancreatitis several years ago, and I've had friends who were told they were going to die (and did). Back in 2014, I wrote a book with Dr Jared Noel, who had only eight weeks to live when we started out. There's nothing like sitting with a dying man every day, recording his life story and his reflections on what's to come, to make you confront your own fears (and questions) about mortality.
This article discusses the 'existential slap' when people are given the awful news by their doctor, and a couple of pertinent quotes stood out for me.
The existential slap doesn’t always entail mental suffering, and medical professionals who work with the dying say there are rare cases in which patients seem to skip this phase altogether, or at least experience it in a much less painful way. “People can gradually come to the realization,” Coyle says. “No one has to go through the sudden shock of awareness.”
And this:
But for most, figuring out how to adapt to living with a life-threatening disease is a difficult but necessary cognitive process, according to Lee. When patients do emerge on the other side of the existential crisis, she finds that many are better off because of it. These patients are more likely to have a deeper compassion for others and a greater appreciation for the life that remains.
That same refrain ... the awareness of how close the end is, is not a bad thing. In fact, it can lead to a greater appreciation of not only your life, but the lives of those around you.
June 9
Predictably, the week ended with a fairly significant death — that of US televangelist and right-wing political heavyweight (and Christian nationalist) Pat Robertson. This article in The Washington Post is a good summary of the impact he had in shaping the political landscape in the US: How Pat Robertson created today’s Christian nationalist GOP.
The impact of Pat Robertson’s Christian conservatism, and how closely merged it became with right wing politics, shaped the conversation much further than the borders of the US. His ideas influenced Christian ideology even as far as Australia and New Zealand. Much of the toxic Christianity we see shared on social media can be directly linked to Pat Robertson and his allies, as well as his TV station, the Christian Broadcasting Network.
I wanted to point out from this article the awful legacy left behind by Robertson. This is a matter of perspective, of course, and there are many millions of people who would think Robertson's legacy is something to be proud of. But if the 'grammar of the gospel' is faith, hope and love, what do you call it when a Christian's legacy is marked more by hate and small-mindedness, lies and conspiracies?
This is a segment of a question and answer interview in The Washington Post article with historian Rick Perlstein, author of several books that chronicle the history of the American right. Just listen to the exchange on how Robertson shaped American culture, and see if there’s anything in here that resonates with faith, hope or love:
Robertson was also central to Newt Gingrich’s rise and the GOP House takeover in 1994. That’s when the GOP fully embraced national scorched-earth political warfare. What’s the relationship between this type of Christian politics and that transformation?
Robertson’s contribution to the scorched-earth style of Gingrich is signaled by his absolutely bonkers turn toward conspiratorial thinking. In 1991, he published “The New World Order,” an argument that liberal elites make up a “tightly knit cabal whose goal is nothing less than a new order for the human race under the domination of Lucifer and his followers.” Once you go down that road, you’re not exactly committed to consensus and compromise.
And this:
Robertson relentlessly demonized gay people. Between that and him making abortion central to GOP politics, his influence on the party is felt today in the end of abortion rights, in extreme anti-choice laws on the state level and in the right’s attacks on LGBTQ people.
Yes, yes, yes. Every time a riot breaks out at a school board meeting because the board wants to recognize that gay people exist, that’s Pat Robertson’s shadow. Every time a crusade against teaching the history of race in America leads to a school limiting access to Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem, that’s Pat Robertson’s shadow. If you want to talk about the overturning of Roe v. Wade and women who are dying because of it, look at his response to 9/11, when he and Jerry Falwell go on camera and say that God has given us what we deserve. The villains they cite are the ACLU, the “paganists,” the “gays and lesbians” and the “abortionists.”
And finally, this:
There’s a conviction among many evangelicals today that Donald Trump was — and is — their savior leader and that the insurrection was a kind of last stand to save our Christian nation from secular ruin. Can you trace Robertson’s influence straight to the insurrectionist wing of today’s GOP? Many of those Republicans are also self-described Christian nationalists. Is that partly Robertson’s doing?
Yes, absolutely. It’s their mission to redeem the world by redeeming America — and that means defeating any influence or trace of liberalism. You can make the argument most directly by pointing to Robertson as the vector who brought the kind of ideas that used to be limited to people communicating by shortwave radio straight into the mainstream of the Republican base.
The historian, Perlstein, concludes: "The idea that God’s law trumps man’s law absolutely saturates his world. Along with Falwell, he’s most responsible for turning Christianity into Christian nationalism and Christian nationalism into insurrectionism.”
How should we weigh up a life like Pat Robertson's? If you do so from the point of view of someone firmly camped in the right wing of politics, you would laud how he's shaped Christian conservatism and the US Republican Party. But I'm not particularly interested in assessing his impact politically. My perspective is to ask what story he was operating out of ... who was the God he claimed to be serving and how did he arrive at that image of God? How did that story shape his understanding of love, of the other, of how humans should engage with marginalised and persecuted people? And did he generate hope in the world because of the story he believed and the way love had impacted his life ... or did he make the world a more dangerous place, particularly for people who were not like him, and didn't share his beliefs?
One thing is for certain … I would much prefer to be the person being sung about in the Foo Fighters album, addicted and tormented though he was, than the ‘Christian’ who died at a ripe old age but is remembered in the media as one of recent history’s most hateful dividers.
Have a rich and rewarding week!
David
That, was good Sir David. Thanks for doing that Mahi to enable us to read it. So true that death of another, or a bad diagnosis, can actually enrich our days. Xx
YEEEESS!! This!! "One thing is for certain … I would much prefer to be the person being sung about in the Foo Fighters album, addicted and tormented though he was, than the ‘Christian’ who died at a ripe old age but is remembered in the media as one of recent history’s most hateful dividers."