Writerly Wednesday is featuring my book On the Edge. Please drop by!    Sally http://sallyfranklinchristie.com/wp   

Merry Meet Everyone,
 
I am pleased to announce two of my book covers are entered in this months Yougottareadcovers contest!!! 

Please Go to the link below, review the covers, and cast your vote in the poll.
 
My book Till Death and Beyond is # 18 and my book No Reins is #3
http://yougottareadcovers.blogspot.com

2. Death is a mystery of life.  Without life we do not stand in awe at death.  We do not even consider it (who weeps over the not yet born, or cries for them, or gets nervous for their safety and preservation from death?).  For some, death is reduced to a problem (some are led to confusion by modern myth-making about freezing bodies, ect., another example of the rationalization of death; even were such a process manageable, death would retain its mystery, for death is mysterious not because it is unavoidable but because it is bigger than we are).  Once reduced to a problem state, death can easily disposed of and swept away out of sight along with other problems (e.g., mental retardation, poverty).   Thus psychiatrist Rollo May can say that for modern, middle-class man, death is pornography; it is the unmentionable.  Why is that?  Because it is simply a bad problem, a bad trip; it can be "solved" with a little more make-up and softer music and more satin lining in a coffin and more efficient refrigeration.  Death must never be discussed, considered, or meditated upon as a mystery itself.  

But a conglomerate conspiracy not to talk about death may well prove far more pernicious than any Victorian or Puritan plot never to talk about sex.  For when one shortchanges death, one shortchanges life.  They run on one tether.  It is just coincidence that a culture bored with life is also bored with death?  Is it mere coincidence that the age of the ennui with life was ushered in by mass slaughters of individuals-children, women, and men-in the World of Wars of this century; that is, by the loss of wonder and concern for life?  What would be the consequences for a society or for an individual if the decision is fallen into neither life nor death has a value in itself?  When death becomes as boring as life, all mystery will have ceased.  Lifelessness will rule supreme, but with supreme boredom.   

There are experts in our midst on the mystery of death.  They are people not put off by death as a problem but to whom death remains a mystery constantly accompanying them.  Among them is a family who have experienced the death of a child, of one of them, of a living person grasping for life, awakening to its mystery, reaching for its touch and its pleasure and its pain.  Do not tell such a family, when their child is suddenly removed from their life, that death is a problem.  Do not interrupt the mother as she weeps for the child at night with news that cadavers can be frozen; do not tell his four-year-old sister who looks in vain for her brother to play with that when she reaches the age of reason and is educated she will understand death and learn to resolve the mystery of her absent brother.  

When we cannot respond directly to death; when we take it for granted or ignore it by silence or by talking around it (and reducing it to a problem to be solved); when the published lists of traffic fatalities, of war dead, of assassinated heroes, of earthquake victims do not arouse respect for the mystery of death and its constant presence within and without us; when we can no longer face our own death as a distinct moment in our life wherein we stand in the mystery of our life as past and finished; when we can no longer be aroused to working to prevent death, to putting it off, to fighting for life; and when those who fight to survive no longer inspire us - then we are already overcome with the spirit of lifelessness.  We are bored and boring.  

On Becoming A Mystical Bear Spirituality American Style by Matthew Fox Paulist Press/Deus Books New York/Mahwah pg. 34 - 36 ISBN # 0-8091-1913-7

1. Life, the primordial mystery - The first and most universal experience of mystery is the mystery of life itself, that which no one can deny or run away from, the mystery all share even if reluctantly as on a battlefield when the purpose is to extinguish the possibility for mystery in another, i.e., to rid him of his life.  Even to talk of life is itself mysterious; we can only offer examples of our experiences that others may or may not have had.  Pasternak has pointed out how delicately one must treat life when he insists that "life is never a material, a substance to be molded...it is infinitely beyond your or my obtuse theories about it."  

Life is that which happens to us between our birth and our death, beginning with the slap on the behind from the doctor to the obituary in the paper that our funeral will be at a certain time and place.  To whom do we go to "know Life?"  So often it is less educated, formally speaking, who have something worthwhile to say about the mystery of life.  For life is first of all survival and the poorer are the experts at survival.  So much of their time (life's sole quantitative measurements) is spent in survival that they are the experts.  They are the ones with "savoir faire" (or "wisdom" in the Old Testament meaning) in the original meaning of the phrase of "knowing how to make it" when " making it" does not refer to test tube-making of life but to surviving in life.  


 It is the one struggling to survive who teaches the primordial mystery of life: the value of life itself.  Thus looking at a new born baby (especially if it be one's own, particularly one's first, and most especially if we are observing its very birth) is so often an experience of mystery and wonder at something greater than ourselves.  Not only the projections of our dreams for this bundle of possibilities, but the very fact of its living at all (when nonlife is so near temporally and physically to it) arouses the mystery in us.  Ask the mother who is close to her baby of life's intrinsic value.  But ask  by observing her care and concern, not by direct (and therefore problem-oriented) questions.      

To observe those adults who are barely making it-the poor or the drunk or the prostitute (in how low-income positions, not the new class of hired-outs that an opulent society provides for) or the sick-is to reexperience the tenuousness of life and the intrinsic value of living.  These are the people who will not let go of life.  They will fight for it to the end.  Simply because it is there; because it is theirs.  The value of life is not polluted for them 9and distracted for observers) by the "values" of the the things they possess, whether deeds or degree or domain or reputation.  Theirs is a naked and open-wide struggle for all to observe: for their daily bread; for a roof from the rain and excessive sun (palm branches will do for that); for heat in cold winters; for some human communication (here wine or beer or something better helps a great deal); in short, for survival.  Survival is their problem.  But life, the reason for their toil, is their mystery.  It is not to be confused with moralities pronouncing "good" or "bad" on their actions or their styles of life (for moralities are for others to feel justified by and that is a stage of life beyond survival).  Mystery simply is.  As life is.  And these people feel called in their own way to live out that mystery and to survive at all costs.  

So often middle-class man and women lose the sense of life as survival and therefore the mystery to which the survival problem points: life as a value to which one must say either Yes or No.  The suburban "mad housewife" can so often be caught in the web of pseudosurvival problems (invariably linked with judgements, i.e., multiplied moralities pronounced by her neighbors or her husband's office-watchers) that all sense of mystery and worth seeps from her and her husband's life.  Life is reduced to cleanliness and comparisons (keeping is with the Joneses" and "keeping in" with the styles).  Life itself becomes a problem.  A thing to solved.  A new appliance to save for.  A new promotion to be prepared and plotted for.  Life goes on, but it is fully defined and circumscribed by the next problem to be solved.    Mystery-the appreciation of life for its own sake-is excluded from the daily routine and gradually from the possibilities of one's consciousness.  And this because survival is no longer a problem.  Boredom and tedium haunt middle-class existence because only those freed from necessity of survival can be bored with life.  Samuel Beckett's two sad tramps sitting forever under a drooping tree waiting for their lives to begin have no problems to solve but no mystery or spirit to arouse the, either.  

An ultimate decision each individual can make (if his freedom is broad enough) is that "life is, or is not, worth it, i.e., that the struggle to survive, the struggle to face problems, is balanced in some way bt the mystery of life's intrinsic worth.  To judge negatively is to choose suicide.  Suicide is a spiritual option, a deep one at the level of mystery, for it is a positive NO to the mystery of life.  As such it arouses more respect than does a nonoption, a nonchoice, a simple passing out of life "with a whimper" while still within the possibility of life; that is, an option for tedium, for boredom, for lifelessness.  Suicide contradicts itself insofar as it affirms one's power to act to end life;tedium on the other hand is an affirmation of nothing, not even the power to end one's life.  It is a nonaction, allowing one's world to dictate one's problems; it is far more insidious a disavowal of the mysterious than is physical suicide.  It is a spiritual suicide accomplished by doing nothing, asking nothing, thinking nothing.  Only a creature capable of mystery (one does not see bored dogs or cats) could opt for such a lifelessness.  

 *pg 31-34 On Becoming a Musical Mystical Bear - Spirituality American Style by Matthew Fox Paulist Press/Deus Book New York/Mahwah  ISBN #0-8091-1913-7