Limited creation.

On the 16th (a mere week ago), I received a call from my mom telling me how her dad, my grandfather, collapsed. He was rushed to the hospital and immediately put into the intensive care unit. For days, he remained comatose. The night after the news was received, both my parents took a red-eye out to Hong Kong and to then board a train to the mainland, to Guangzhou. For a while, I had a difficult time processing all of this.

Merton's Love and Living has been really important to me for a couple of months now. It was strangely appropriate that on the day I tried to escape from what seemed like imminent grief, I started the new section in the book entitled "Death".

In it he writes,

"We know that death cannot be turned aside by deceit, yet nevertheless we try to live lives that will at least outwit death as long as possible".

As overprivileged, consumerist Americans, we make it so easy on ourselves to deny death. If it doesn't surround us and isn't our socioeconomical, political constant, we can easily and daily make the mistake that we can be untouched by it. Even if we turn our eyes or ears to the news and images of everything around us, we can still pretend.

What about healthy morbidity? What would it look like in our polished, delusional society to recognize death as something greater than this big scary proverbial elephant that we try to cover up with our fancy clothes and shiny toys? Merton writes that death does not have to be seen as this tragic ending we should do what we can to prolong its arrival. The end of life should not be considered a "termination, but in the sense of a culminating gift". Death is death when each of us has given everything to our community. That is love. And to die to ourselves, not just for the sake of Christ but because we will choose to live in the grace and purpose of who He is and what He means. That's the difference.