Death ends 1 chapter in a long book

To refuse to die would be more than a social impertinence. It would throw off the scientific rhythm of the universe. It would toss a monkey wrench into the apparatus of the galaxies, and challenge the very mind of the creator.

Death is designed as an inevitable consequence of birth, providing needed closure for each of us. It is the kind of closure that marks graduation from high school, which is required before the graduate moves on to higher education.

Death and eternity are mysterious, not mysteries invented by Conan Doyle and not the mysteries of gene and cell exposed in laboratories like prisoners of undeclared wars. There’s the kind of death that’s examined on an autopsy table, fixed in time and place. There’s also an eternity that’s for discoveries in space and hopes about time. Jesus and Einstein speak a common language.

There could be no death without life. Life could reach no conclusions without death. The system may be a mystery, but it is part of the genius of creation. Suspense is necessary to mystery, but fear is not. Nobody remembers being born; nobody is told that birth is the leading cause of death, inevitable rather than incurable, because it is not a disease.

I guess I can say that, as a reporter, I’ve been gathering material for this article for 85 years. Life and death can be exciting. We are conditioned to make the most of life and death, or to fear them. Many never speak of death. Others deny death. I was in my teens when I first heard someone deny the permanence of life. An older woman said she hoped to God — her phrasing — that there would be no life after death. Her family, her education, her faith were all ad hoc, she hoped, and would vanish as she would vanish. I wonder where she’s living now.

During my years in Hawaii I knew many Buddhists, whose friendship included invitations to speak at Buddhist celebrations and services. I learned to appreciate Buddhist ideals and even Buddhist controversies. Buddhism has its denominations, even as Christianity and Islam and Judaism have sects and denominations. Buddhist concepts of life and death, of reincarnation and transmigration, appeal to many. I’ve known Roman Catholics, Episcopalians and other Christians, including clergy, who believe in reincarnation.

My belief in God, the Eternal, the Holy, the Triune Creator, Love itself, gives meaning to life and death. Not everyone who is offered this gift has unwrapped it. Christ Jesus gives of himself. As newspaper carriers used to call out when they had an armload of Extras to sell: Read all about it.

Because of that gift I believe in the seen and unseen. I believe in the human body, ocean waves and printed words. I believe also in gravity, radio waves, thought, love and eternity. I recognize a desire for a good life and its companion desire for a good death.

Jack Wall, my dad’s brother, was born in the 1890s with a form of paralysis that was to end his life when he was in his early teens. My dad and another of his brothers have each told me this: The family was gathered in the garden of their Liverpool home. Jack, cheerful and much loved by everyone in the family, was on his father’s lap.

Suddenly he said, “Listen. Can you hear them?” No one heard anything unusual as Jack said,“Can’t you hear them singing? Listen to the music. They’re coming; they’re coming for me.” He slumped dead on his dad’s lap. Other families have similar experiences.

Maybe it is because I’m a writer that I think of life as prose and religion as poetry. The holiness in holy scripture is poetic. That’s why myopic literalists don’t notice God’s bigness while they squint at scripture with watchmaker’s loupe and tweezers, magnifying some words and plucking at others, like links pried loose to disconnect a chain.

Death clobbered me when I was 10 years old and living in my grandparents’ house. I was called home from school, no reason given, and was barely off the streetcar when I spotted the hearse parked in front of the house. The place was swarming with people and I headed for the privacy of the basement to try to sort it out. My beloved grandma, I knew, had died while I was choosing true or false for a history teacher. I was numb, but not at a loss for words. A memorized poem was there for me,” The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…”

When I heard about William Cullen Bryant, a newspaperman who wrote poems, I was already primed for his “Thanatopsis.”

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, that moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of the couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

Thanks, Mrs. Faulkner, Mrs. Crane, Mrs. Bracken, Mrs. Humm, Mrs. Peters and all you who taught restless teenagers with smiles and a beat.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson grabbed me as a teenager when one of those teachers opened the book to “In Memoriam” and especially to “Crossing the Bar.”

Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the
boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.

And then there was (and is) Walt Whitman:

At the last, tenderly.
From the walls of the powerful fortress’d house,
From the clasp of the knitted locks, from the
keep of the well-closed doors,
Let me be wafted.

Let me glide noiselessly forth;
With the key of softness unlock the
locks—with a whisper,
Set ope the doors O Soul.

Tenderly—be not impatient,
(Strong is your hold O mortal flesh,
Strong is your hold O love.)

We who love life embrace it with enthusiasm. We accept death as an element of life, if not its fulfillment, but we do not kill others.

Some deny death. Some deny life. Jesus died. Jesus lives.

Way to go, Jesus. Way to go, everyone who accepts the gift of life. The Eternal, the giver of life, doesn’t take it back.

Pope respects queens, but won't ordain women

Pictures of Pope Benedict XVI and Queen Elizabeth II together in Scotland stir spiritual whirlwinds. There’s the leader of a billion or so Roman Catholics, and there’s the leader-of-record of the Church of England, defender of the faith by inheritance from Henry VIII.

The pope acknowledged to journalists during a flight from Rome to Scotland that the Church performed badly in handling worldwide charges that priests and religious had engaged repeatedly in criminal acts of a sexual nature.

In the shared respect of their encounter, the pope tacitly recognized that a woman may be the head, perhaps figurehead, of a Christian church. Maybe he finds it awkward to ponder the sharp loss of moral authority his church feels today in many parts of the world, while defending a priesthood that celebrates maleness if not manhood.

The pope’s church understands Mary of scripture to be the mother of God and Queen of the Universe, but unqualified for priesthood.

Catholics tend to love their church the way they love their families, faithful even when in vigorous disagreement. In many years of Catholic journalism, beginning in 1958 as a freelancer for the Hawaii Catholic Herald, I did not always live up to my own ideals. I claim that much affinity with St. Paul, an early Christian journalist who famously said to the Romans, “The good which I want to do, I fail to do; but what I do is the wrong which is against my will…” [Rom. 8:19, REV]

For years most of my friends were Catholic priests and religious, and lay church staffers, and many were gay. Most, but not all, were happily avuncular with my children. One, who had baptised my child, was later accused of molesting others. A close friend in the hierarchy was mugged during a parking lot encounter with a young man, a well-known educator made passes at my son, and a bishop was accused in a paternity action. There was a time of horror when priests who were important to me and my family were painfully lost to AIDS.

Many years ago I described to a diocesan bishop some overtures from another in the hierarchy. I was alarmed in part because I knew he might be roughed up, blackmailed, arrested. He might even approach a minor, but I didn’t think he would. Responsible adults, straight or gay, do not prey on children. Sexual abuse of children and adults is observed among some heterosexual persons, some homosexual. Most people seek long-term relationships, especially in marriage.

I was managing editor of the morning newspaper in Honolulu when a long-time friend invited me to visit him, secretly, in Washington, D.C. He was Bishop (later Cardinal) Joseph Bernardin, at that time general secretary of the U.S. Catholic Conference and the National Council of Catholic Bishops.

The National Catholic News Service, now known as CNS, was a division of the Conference. It was in trouble, losing money, losing clients and losing respect. At the time it produced a daily news package, which was mimeographed and mailed to clients all over the world. Most were diocesan newspapers.

Bernardin asked another long-time friend, Fr. Thurston Davis, S.J., along with Robert Beusse, communication secretary for the Conference, to talk to me about the woes at the news service. Davis was the brilliant editor-in-chief of America magazine, a former Fordham dean. The three of us met in Beverly Hills, and soon afterward I was asked to fly evasively from Honolulu to Washington. Bernardin’s wish was that I fly directly to New York, then switch to the shuttle for the rest of the trip. Nobody was to know my destination, which turned out to be nothing less than the Watergate. Bernardin had a suite for the day, during which he asked me to resign as managing editor of The Honolulu Advertiser and take over as director and first editor-in-chief of the Catholic news service.

My charge was to reorganize the news agency, creating a wire service to replace the mail service. And simultaneously I was to balance the budget, retrieve lost clients and handle a new union contract for employees who had become demoralized by the shaky condition of the news service.

After intense negotiations I completed an agreement with Reuters to provide a leased wire available 24 hours a day to distribute news by teletype. NC correspondents were authorized to send their articles to NC from any Reuters bureau anywhere in the world, with guaranteed delivery within 20 minutes. Vatican Radio was one of the first wire service subscribers.

It was a lonely experience. I was told that I must negotiate an agreement without any counsel from Bernardin, Davis or Beusse. The Conference took a similar hands-off position in negotiating the first contract with the American Newspaper Guild, although the labor expert Msgr. George Higgins cheerfully answered my questions about Catholic teaching on labor issues.

It was a memorable moment when the wire service formally opened with a transmission of a message from Pope Paul VI in Rome to my staff and me in Washington. The pope’s words were recorded on the perforated tape used in wire transmissions in those days, then embedded in a transparent display which was presented to me by the bishops. It is now on permanent loan at the Washington headquarters of Catholic News Service, along with the St. Francis de Sales award I received from the friends and co-workers at the Catholic Press Assn.

There’s more, of course, but this is not the time to tell it. The stern little counter on my computer screen warns that I am approaching the 1,000-word mark. That’s enough for one reading, as you will certainly agree.

The communication between queen and pope in Scotland is symbolic of gains in Catholic reporting and commentary since the beginning of the Second Vatican Council, and a reminder that the Catholic church is the oldest multi-national, run by leaders drawn from a limited pool of talent which excludes ordained women. These men seldom admit their mistakes to anyone outside the confessional. The church does not exclude gays, but it affirms biblical demonizing of non-celibate homosexual persons. Thus hypocrisy serves theology. There’s an additional concern: How do journalists stumble through millions of words online, in print and even unformed — more words than anybody can read or count – and blue-pencil them into all the news that’s fit to tint?
©A. E. P. (Ed) Wall

Even the stoned are welcome

● Stephen Hawking, the respected scientist who has made a science of promoting books, indicates in “The Grand Design” that he has no personal knowledge of God and therefore God does not exist. Little kids still cover their eyes and shout, “You can’t see me!”

● An application form for an important church activity asks candidates whether they have ever done anything that might embarrass the church. The form does not ask about anything the church might have done to embarrass believers. There’s a tension between the healing love of Jesus and the institutional cover treasured by human pillars of the church. Jesus, who was excommunicated by the temple staff, challenges everyone poised to throw stones at sinners and invites them all into his church, even the stoned.

● A bishop declares that a woman religious is excommunicated by virtue of a hospital decision she okayed. Christians pray for the bishop and the nun, aware that excommunication is a failure of the church. The church pronounces itself divorced from a person with whom there is a sacramental bond, as though baptism can be annulled.