I trust you to kill me…
Today, I meditated on a passage of writing by Madeleine L’Engle. The passage talked about suffering and concluded with an affirmation of “I know my redeemer lives”.
I closed my eyes and let the phrase “I know my redeemer lives” resonate in me…..
I envisioned that I was led down a staircase and was told I would meet my living redeemer when I got to the bottom.
At the bottom of the staircase, I looked up and saw the grim reaper. I was surprised and he said, “you knew it would be me.” And I did. I thought about the leaves that fall to the ground and rot, become soil and new life. I thought of the dead animal in the field that decays and becomes soil and new life. I thought of all the deaths of hopes and dreams and agendas in my life and how even though they were the end of something, they were the birth of something else. How death is redemptive. How new life only comes when something old dies.
Unless a seed falls to the ground and dies, it remains a single seed.
I took the grim reaper’s hand. It was warm and friendly. Not scary at all. This was my redeemer after all. I asked him, “where are you going to take me?” and he said he wasn’t going to take me anywhere, I was already where I needed to be.
We just stood there and I thought about how death and suffering are the redeemer. I thought about how alive death and suffering are all the time. How my redeemer lives.
I thought about how that is the story of the crucifixion.
As the meditation drew to a close, he moved away from me and became large. He raised his hands and in a loud voice said, “Behold I make all things new.”
And he was gone.
We are told in the Bible that the final enemy to be destroyed is death. I always thought that this meant that death would be destroyed – as in – death would no longer exist and we would live forever. But maybe I missed something with this way of seeing it.
After all, we are told that our spiritual lives are supposed to consist of death. We are to be dying daily, losing our life in order to find it, picking up a cross daily, giving up everything. How can we live in death mode if the goal is to get rid of death altogether?
Maybe the passage about destroying the final enemy (death) is talking about the destruction of the enmity – not the destruction of death itself. We are told that Christ destroyed enmity and reconciled all things. If this is true, then death is no longer an enemy, but a friend. Maybe we can see it as a redeemer, just as we see it in the crucifixion. The sting is taken out. Death and suffering whether figurative or even literal, are now simply means to new life, resurrections and the making and growing of new things.
I know that my redeemer lives.
From "checkmate" by Rumi
The soul is a newly skinned hide, bloody and gross.
Work on it with manual discipline,
and the bitter tanning acid of grief,
and you’ll become lovely, and very strong.
If you can’t do this work yourself, don’t worry.
You don’t even have to make a decision,
one way or another. The Friend, who knows
a lot more than you do, will bring difficulties,
and grief, and sickness,
as medicine, as happiness,
as the essence of the moment when you’re beaten,
when you hear Checkmate, and can finally say
'I trust you to kill me.'
I know that my redeemer lives
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