REV. MITSUO AOKI ON RELIGION AND DEATH

Dying itself isn’t the difficult thing. It happens to everyone. One day, you and I will die. Some of us just die sooner than others.

Religion’s Relationship with Death

Religion knows death intimately. Death reveals itself as experienced reality, as real and inescapable. Death is like a light bulb falling and smashing itself on concrete.

Therefore, one of the primary tasks of religion is to enable each of us to experience life against the horizon of death and to challenge us to incorporate that awareness of dying into every moment so we can become more fully human and alive.

Death as a Mystery

There is something unique about religion’s experience of death. It sees death not so much as a problem, a puzzle, but as a mystery to be experienced. Death, whatever it’s meaning and its real nature, seems always to elude us. Death is always and finally a mystery.
Mystery refuses to be captured and used. We do not capture it; we are captured by it. And being captured we can be "engaged" to death and allow it to reveal its depth and richness.

Mystery, however, is not incomprehension. It is a gateway to meaning. True, we "see through a glass darkly" but we do not see. Not everything, but enough. We see enough so that we can walk in confidence.

People have Death Awareness

We know about death as we live our life. Therefore, we in our self-conscious awareness can assume an attitude toward our own death. An attitude that helps raise these kinds of fundamental questions – since I am going to die:

How can I truly live?

How can I awaken within myself the search for a more fundamental reality within myself?

How can I truly be myself?

Religion addresses these questions and promises to assist us to encounter death so that we can truly live!

Death Reveals Man as Individual

Death puts us in touch with sense of a real, individual existence:

• The individual is on the way to becoming decisive

• The individual concentrates on essentials

•The individual achieves integrity, takes charge of one’s life, assumes a total plan for life (source unknown)

Death Reveals Us as Persons in Community

We are more than just individuals; we are an integral part of community. "No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main, if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee." (John Donner)

• Second: Experience of Life Beyond Death ­ In the face of death, there is in man, a compelling and universal need ­ a sense of connection, an immortality (eternal life) in the face of death. This need is part of the organism’s quest for continuity, for meaning. This sense of eternal life is not just our denial of death. Rather in the face of death, death pushes us to search for a way of experiencing our connection with all of human history, with continuity of life, with eternal life.

• Third: Resurrection (Christian Faith) ­ Resurrection emerged out of a grave. For Christian people, resurrection is celebrated and affirmed as the new action of God whose province it is to create new futures for people. Resurrection of life is a new creation of the total person ­ body and soul ­ by God who alone provides the continuity between the old and the new life.

Finally, Death Creates in Us a Special Knowing: Love is Stronger than Death

Love is stronger than death. It creates something new out of the destruction caused by death. "Love does not seek to abolish death. Rather, dares to accept death into its own bosom. Love willingly enters the grave and witnesses its power of resurrection." (Paul Tillich)