A NATURAL CHANGE
Through generations, perhaps for hundreds of thousands of years, custom
has ordained grief for the dead, we have come to feel that it is a
proof of affection or of sensitiveness or a sort of virtue: we indulge
in the luxury of woe, we nurse our grief until, like a spoiled lap-dog,
it becomes a burden. But we know that the unselfish dead would only be
distressed at our grieving.
When we look upon the change called death as no more mysterious than
any of the other changes in our bodily or mental development, which we
either welcome or are unconscious of, we shall lose our terror of it
either for ourselves or for others.
Our terror for others is not really for those others so much as
for ourselves. The sense of “our great loss” is really a piece of
selfishness. For life cannot mean one thing for us and another for our
brother; as we see our own lives, so must we see the lives of those we
love. The purposes of life are the same for all men, for all men are in
the plan of the Spirit.
If for any reason our brother has passed from our earthly cognizance,
we cannot say that we have really lost him. It is true that we do
not see him with our eyes or touch him with our hands, but we have a
remembrance of him in the form of a mental picture down to the minutest
details of how he looked and moved, and we also have a remembrance of
his spiritual character.
For the character—that sum of the abilities of those we love—remains
with us after the physical form has passed away. We are affected by it
just as we were when the loved one lived. We can feel the appeal that
that character makes to us, its effect upon our thoughts and actions,
as strongly as if the absent one stood beside us and claimed our
attention. How, then, can we say he is lost?
The dead whom we have loved hold us as securely as they did when they
were living; it is only that we do not see how. It has come within the
experience of many that the death of father, mother, or some dearly
loved one has led to the awakening of some wayward or misguided one who
seemed to be wasting all the opportunities of life. We know that it
was not the mere death which worked this seeming miracle. That simply
woke the dormant love in the one who had hitherto desired only his own
way. As soon as he became conscious of his love for the beloved one who
has passed out of his earthly life, he longed to be what his beloved
would have had him be, and so he turned his attention to using the
opportunities of life, to the end that he might grow and develop. Thus
in death the loved one held the wayward friend even more securely than
he ever had in life.
We shall not fear death, even for those we love, when we have realized
that it is but a passing from life to life—just as the falling leaves
do not mean the annihilation of the life of the tree, but merely the
end of one phase of that life. Somewhere, some time, that which was
really our loved one will blossom again in the world’s experience,
and even now is continuing to live through its influence upon our
lives. “There is no death; what seems so is transition.” The bodily
companionship with all that it implies, that we have lost: yet, if our
beloved had gone to be Viceroy of India, we should miss him, but we
should not put on mourning for that, nor “grieve” that we had lost his
companionship.
“But we could write and hear from him and so keep in touch with him.”
True: it is then for your own loss that you mourn.
Nearly all the suffering that death causes us is for ourselves. It
is our feeling of helplessness, the emptiness of the earth that is
left, the changed world that we look at in the sleepless hours of the
night, or, when we awake in the morning, our pity for our own loss
and the seeming uselessness of what remains of our existence. This
consciousness of our loss numbs us so that we cannot get a realizing
sense of the joys of the spirit set free from the limitations of the
body. Our love is still so earthy that it demands fleshly as well as
spiritual communion.
So real is our suffering when those we love best are torn from us that
for a time we are inconsolable. Philosophy, religion, the affectionate
ministrations of those about us, avail not to bind up the broken heart.
There is but one cure for such grief—to minister to others. Unselfish
devotion to a great cause—the cause of our fellows, whether in the mass
or individually—is a sovereign balm for a bleeding heart.
When we understand life we know this, for we have learned that neither
in joy nor in sorrow can any man live to himself. Action of any sort
relieves tension and suffering. If we bottle up all our sympathy for
ourselves, it becomes so tainted with selfishness and narrowness that
it loses its healing qualities. But if we let that sympathy go out
freely to others, forgetting our “personal” needs, it blesses them and
blesses us.
A friend of mine lost a son and daughter by drowning, just as they
had entered young manhood and womanhood, and for a time his grief
threatened to crush him. He found no relief until he had his attention
called to the sorrow of another who, through a train wreck, had lost
his only child. Although a stranger to this stricken father, he sought
him out and, because of his own double loss, was able to comfort him
as no one else could. Moreover, the restlessness went out of his own
heart; he realized his kinship with all sufferers as never before.
There is a story in “The Light of Asia” that Buddha, to comfort a
mother broken-hearted over the death of her only child, sent her to get
black mustard seed from a house where death had never been. The mother
carried her dead babe about the village, and in each house she was
offered mustard seed, but each giver said, “Death has been here.” At
last she realized that she was not the only sufferer, that death was a
necessary accompaniment of life as shadow is a necessary accompaniment
of light. Her grief, she saw, was but a part of the common sorrow. The
recognition that either joy or sorrow is common to all increases the
healing sense of unity, it is a “touch of nature” that “makes the
whole world kin.” There is no wrong in our grieving, if it comforts us:
but to look thus each for himself dispassionately at the cause and the
nature of his grief, will surely give so clear a view of it that it
will no longer deprive us of sleep.
Then why lose sleep worrying about what we know to be merely a change?