Happy Monday!
I hope everyone had a great, long weekend! I know I did...spending time with my family always renews my spirit :-)
As the world prepares to say goodbye to Michael Jackson tomorrow with a Memorial Tribute at the Staples Center, I can’t help but think of all the high profile deaths that have occurred in the past couple weeks - Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Billy Mays, and now Steve McNair. The only difference between Steve McNair and the rest is that he was murdered. While we were shocked at the death of MJ, and perhaps Billy Mays, the others we could almost see coming. After all, Ed McMahon was 86 years old and lived a full life, and Farrah Fawcett put up a brave fight against cancer. MJ was the picture of health just 2 days before he died and the death of Billy Mays seemed to come out of nowhere. But Steve McNair was shot. Dead.
What is going on? This is turning out to be one of the saddest summers ever as far as celebrity death is concerned. It goes to show that death is the universal equalizer, no one can escape it. We will all die one day, one way or another.
Death is as natural as birth...as breathing in and breathing out. Yet we don’t deal very well with death. We think of it as the enemy, especially when it happens in a violent, unfair way. Even though it signals a life cycle completed, we look at all the deaths I mentioned above as those of people who were taken too soon. For our loved ones, it's always too soon. We simply cannot conceive of an end to ourselves or the people we love, which is a natural response. Some of us sense deeply that we are immortal, and death is a sinister, external force.
As sad as it is to say goodbye to loved ones, death ensures that the stream of life is not dammed up, but is allowed to flow. Knowing that we have a finite amount of time on this earth should infuse our existence with life, make us trust the impulses of our heart and spirit and allow us to LIVE life to the fullest. Anxiety over death comes from our confusion that we mistakenly identify our true self with our physical self – our opinions, associations, memories and illusions about ourselves and life itself. But within our lifetime, we have lived and died many little births and little deaths over and over again.
We are not who we were at 10 years old, or 10 years ago. In order to become adults, we had to say goodbye to our childhood and adolescence. For some, in order to be married, you had to give up your singlehood. In order to become a parent, you had to put someone else first. Pieces of us are dying all the time, and new experiences give birth to a new consciousness and identity - and new life. Where there is life, there’s change – an all encompassing theme of existence. Without it, there would be no growth, no life, no death – nothing.
God is change, and to become one with Him allows us to go with the flow, knowing our spirit will live on forever. God manifests in infinite variety, and He gives us the entire Kingdom...a boundless gift of life that cannot be contained to this earth alone. From Michael Jackson to Steve McNair – perhaps we don’t bury our dead, but simply plant them in the faith that their spirit is raised up into a new life.
Knowing this may not comfort those who are grieving and suffering here on earth, and it seems we’ve lost so many in warp speed over the past couple weeks. Loss is never easy to take, but it goes to show that we must do it up big while we’re here. We have to love hard, and hug our children a little tighter. We have to tell those we love how we feel about them everyday while they're alive, not just in memorial tributes after they're gone. The cycle of birth, death and rebirth repeats itself eternally, and we all will experience it in our lives. And as above so below, on earth as it is in heaven, we should love in the image and likeness of God so that we too, are life eternal.
-b
