dying daily

Death from the outside is the scary enemy that meets us when it will.  It is the man with the scythe, by whose strokes the flowers fall...We can do nothing to stop him...But the other death is death within us; it is our own death.  We die it daily in Jesus Christ, or we refuse him.  This death within us has something to do with our love for Christ and for other people...This death is grace and the completion of life.  That we may die this death, that it may be given to us, that the death from the outside will not find us before we are made ready for it through this death of our own: let this be our prayer.  Then our death is really only the passageway to the perfect love of God.  

                                                                       - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Getting a dismal diagnosis has a way of focusing your attention on the reality of death.  The death that gets your attention at first, of course, is what Bonhoeffer describes as the "scary enemy" that will come for us all eventually.  This is the mortality that wilts flowers and weakens flesh.  This death's proximity is never so clear as when the doctor's computer screen glows with trails of white spots, the renegade cells adorning my vertebrae like so many Christmas tree lights.  I sit with these twisted, ruinous strands of glowing cells waiting like last year's lights to be untangled and unfurled and brought out of the darkness.  And that is the plan--to unpack them--though without an eye to Christmases future, but with the deliberate and ruthless efficiency of one who defuses a bomb.  The goal is to forestall the death that these strands would portend.  For the death that comes as our enemy--while unstoppable ultimately--may need to wait until other deaths have been died.   

These other deaths have been much on my mind of late, the deaths that Bonhoeffer says are "grace and the completion of life."  Dying these deaths has meant an inversion of my life's structure and schedule and economy.  Dying these deaths has meant changing how I function and transforming how I understand myself.  Dying the small daily deaths described by Bonhoeffer (and prescribed by Jesus and Paul) has meant acknowledging that my care belongs to hands and hearts beyond my usual (small) circle of caregivers.  Dying daily has meant receiving in far greater measure than I am able to give.  Dying daily has meant radically adjusting my role in the care of my own children and locating myself again as a vulnerable child in need of care.  Dying daily has meant releasing the burdens of pastoral work to the capable hands of Christ's body, the church--which both cares for others while I can't and takes care of me and my family with little fanfare and abundant love.  

All of these ways of dying have been costly in one way or another.  Certainly I have had to relinquish control of many things I would ordinarily hold close. But the death of my grip on control has brought me a paradoxical sense of freedom, peace, and life, that I think Bonhoeffer would recognize as the "passageway to the perfect love of God."  For dying these small deaths--whether we're afflicted with lymphoma or not--is precisely the baptismal training we need to rehearse and be ready for the death that comes as our enemy, but does not finally defeat us.  As Paul says: "We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's." (Romans 14:7-8)  So here I am living, as the Lord's.  And here I am dying, as the Lord's.

And however long I must wait for these two realities to be resolved in my own journey, I wait as one who has (by dying and rising daily) been taught this basic and existential truth: "Death has been swallowed up in victory." (1 Cor 15:54).