Through the Lens of Death
Thomas Joseph White, O.P. tells us, “mortality is a boundary that sets a question to everything else the human person does in this life.”
What might seem morose at first glance will be the inevitable lens through which we must see all things at the end of our lives. It’s not simply wisdom that would cause such clarity, but pragmatism. Our other options for viewing ourselves and our decisions will have faded away. Yet to meditate upon that end earlier can defog our decision making today.
Most of us spend our lives distracted, both by the frenetic nature of each day and by the sense that we have to check certain boxes by certain ages in order to receive social approval or simply have a positive self-regard.
What does it mean, to “catch up” to where you should be? Most of us live with at least some sense of comparative self-awareness. We notice what our contemporaries are doing at certain ages, compare their accomplishments, and place ourselves in a self-made hierarchy. Even those who don’t consider themselves to be competitive find it difficult not to look at their colleagues’ successes with a sense of comparison.
It’s common to use others as a yardstick, because without any measure at all, we do not know when we are failing. We likewise don’t know what we should be aspiring toward. Our approximation of ‘realistic’ goals is roughly found in the public accomplishments of our peers. Yet so many of the promoted successes are being distorted into things that we cannot acclaim:
Civil marriages increasingly predict little more than the potential for divorce. College degrees belie only their associated debt. Well-maintained social media profiles point to loneliness—for in isolation, people have the unstructured time to curate such personas of themselves.
So, if we instead return to the question of where we should be at particular times in our lives, we might wish to use another measure. As people of Faith, we must recognize that wherever we are, we are not alone or abandoned. There is a tendency to presume that because we have all made decisions that we regret, that the ideal version of ourselves is in some mythical future that we could have reached if only we had made all of the right choices. But God is either with us now, or not at all—he cannot be in some hypothetical place in the future or past that never happened.
St. Catherine of Siena, who we remember yesterday and today (in the new and old Roman calendars, respectively), implored us to “Start being brave about everything. Drive out darkness and spread light. Don’t look at your weaknesses.” In living that modus operandi, she successfully implored a Pope to return to Rome, beseeching him to act with courage.
It is part of the human condition to err, and to thus find ourselves in a spot different from even our own ideal. We are always a long journey from the imagined destination, in which there are no sins of our own or others, nor sickness, death, or unforeseen externalities. Yet the today that we are given is the only potential atonement for the pain of yesterday. At the day of our death, we will ultimately be helpless to right the ships of our lives and will have to accept the decisions that we have made. For now, we have some time.
Notice how the non-culture around us makes virtuous decisions more difficult than they ought to be. We are encouraged to live lives of decadence and degradation, choosing the momentary over the eternal. Those who try to live a moral life increasingly face ridicule. Moreover, our objects of comparison so often chase targets that will be their downfall. Thus, the disorder around us affects us if we fail to resist.
Likewise, our own peace (or disorder) can have an impact on others. How and where we aim will be noticed by those close to us. We change how people aspire simply by living good, moral lives. That is how a real culture is formed. If we want to build lives that we can reflect on positively when our mortality is at hand, then we must make decisions that point beyond this world and into the next. In so doing, we may even lead others Home too.