With feet firmly on the ground - reach for the stars!
Tuesday, 28 December 2010
Death
Its that time of year when everything is dead and people can get depressed, The pagan Christmas is not about celebrating death, but the light that is to come, similarly, in Christianity the celebration is not so much about the birth of Jesus as it is disputed as to when he was actually born, but to draw attention to God in man, God made flesh. The qualities Jesus gave, and also the promise of his return one day when there is peace.
The picture above was created by my nine year old niece, she didn't like it and asked if I would take it from her which I have done as you can see, I understand completely as I have also created in pictures and clay things that are not loved and cherished, but dark and disturbing.
My niece prayed for and lit two candles, one for all the living people in the world and one for the dead. This was when we paid a visit to an ancient Abbey up North, this Christmas. Then she asked me some difficult questions, one of them was about death and what to do if and when faced with death. The agony and pain of it, she was indignant and asked how would I feel.
I said to my beloved niece that if there is nothing you can do about it and it is going to happen, you must resign yourself to death, let death take you. She was resistant to the idea, but then something in the Abbey, a picture I think caught her eye, and she accepted it, and I felt her relax.
This started me thinking then and I wondered how satisfactory the answers I gave her actually were, I felt them to be a little too harsh, especially for a child. I felt the need to tell her about Jesus, but she gets a lot of that from school and she would rather tell me about what she knows about Jesus than listen my ramblings on the subject, she was much more succinct and articulate about him anyway,to her it was all very simple.
So now there will be the returning of light as we head into the new Year towards spring, to everything turn turn turn, there is a season ...
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I quite enjoyed your musing. The implications and acceptance of death is hard for the experienced and elderly not to talk of a child. Your niece's artwork is quite uncanny (the representations of death, stray animals and the vicar) but also very impressive. Is this the kind of work Francis Bacon would have produced before his tenth birthday? Perhaps, the last week of December is a time to reflect on the beginnings and ends of things. There is an appointed time for everything.
ReplyDeleteI once read a book called 'You Forever' by L Lobsang Rampa and I had my 'Eureka!' moment when I read this experiment that demonstrates the nature of existence:
ReplyDeleteGet a glass of warm water and a sugar cube. The cube represents us in our physical for and the sweet taste is our essence. Drop the cube in the water and as the sugar molecules change shape it looks like the sugar is 'gone' but when you tastes the water the sugar is still there, just in a different shape. The physical form may cease but our essence doesn't :).