Becoming Music
Jun. 10th, 2017 12:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dedalus_1947Since I am coming to that holy room
Where, with Thy choir of saints for evermore,
I shall be made Thy music; as I come
I tune the instrument here at the door,
And what I must do then, think here before.
(Hymn to God my God, in my Sickness: John Donne – 1630)
I think I first heard of Fr. George Niederauer after a mutual friend introduced Kathy to him around 1993. She took an immediate liking to this engaging priest who demonstrated such a keen wit and a unique “gift of gab”. He was a Monsignor at the time, and co-director of the House of Prayer for Priests in Los Angeles, while in residence at St. Victor’s Church in West Hollywood. I recalled the Saturday morning excursions they took to see him, because Kathy also mentioned that she would walk over to the nearby Book Soup, one of my favorite independent bookstores, to browse around before their meeting. The books she saw or bought often acted as stimulus for many stirring and interesting conversations they had about books, literature, and especially Catholic authors. I naturally became curious about this witty and intelligent man who shifted so effortlessly between spiritual guidance to literary discussions with friends. Those two elements were only a hint to the many aspects that comprised this man of God. Over the next 24 years there seemed to be a new revelation with every meeting.
George died last month. He was 80 years old and had been living at Nazareth House in San Rafael. George was the eighth Archbishop of San Francisco. He was ordained a priest in 1962, received a B.A. in Philosophy from St. John’s Seminary, a degree in Sacred Theology from the Catholic University in Washington, DC, an MA in English Literature from Loyola-Marymount University, and a doctorate in English Literature from USC. During his 55 years as a priest, he did parish work, taught English Literature and served as spiritual director at St. John’s Seminary, was made a Monsignor and appointed Rector there, and then served as co-director of the House of Prayer. In 1994 he was appointed eighth Bishop of the Diocese of Salt Lake City, and served there until his appointment to San Francisco in 2005. I gradually learned of all these impressive titles, positions, and degrees over the years, never seeing them all listed until after his death. To me he was simply George, the valued friend of my wife Kathy. As I got to know him better over the years, he became my friend as well.
For many years I always thought of George as “The Man Who Came to Dinner”, because we mostly saw him on social occasions that involved meals of some kind. We invited him to our home, or the beach house we rented over summer, or met him for dinner at Taix French Restaurant in Echo Park. He vaguely reminded me of Sheridan Whiteside, the central character in the 1942 movie with the same name. Both men were urbane, quick-thinking intellectuals who made clever remarks, biting retorts, and amusing comparisons. They were gifted raconteurs who could startle you with a funny or quirky story, or challenge you with humorous witticisms. Only while Sheridan was sarcastic and snarky, George was always kind, gentle, and compassionate. The other aspect of George that I found most endearing was despite the titles, and the power and authority of the positions he held, he never stopped being a humble and accepting priest, and an encouraging and illuminating teacher.
The only time I truly got a whiff of the power and majesty behind the title of Archbishop, was the installation reception and dinner held at the elegant City Club in downtown San Francisco in 2006. It was a daunting, once-in-a-lifetime experience. The mingling of so many red-hatted bishops, scarlet robed monsignors, and black suited priests all in the same place was intimidating. I felt I was lost at a Vatican Conclave, surrounded by an ecclesiastical army of cardinals, bishops, and priests. The only person who made the experience pleasant was George. He sought me out, introduced me to some of his personable friends and compatriots, told humorous stories of his youth in Long Beach, and lowered my level of discomfort with his consideration and attention.
I also never walked away from an encounter with George without learning something about art, literature, movies, or my relationship with God. He presented his ideas and thoughts in such a gentle and inviting manner that he inspired me to investigate and act. Movies were a passion for him, and he loved giving reviews and recommendations. I remember once mentioning that Kathy and I had seen the 2008 movie version of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Without mocking the movie too much, he described the novel in such glowing fashion as one of the finest example of Catholic literature that I was compelled to finally read it for myself, and then buy the 1981 miniseries. He was right on that time, although I still scratch my head in wonder at his quirky love of the movie, Fargo. On another occasion, when we had him to dinner at our beach house, I hesitatingly mentioned that I was thinking of auditing a Bible class at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena. Thinking that a Catholic bishop would try to dissuade me from attending a Protestant institution, he surprised me by heartily recommending it, even suggesting that I might be interested in subscribing to Books & Culture, a Christian review of literature.
However, even though I considered him more of a friend than a priest, he always found a way to remind me of his vocational commitment to serve God. I particularly recall two events that so clearly demonstrated that fact to me, I felt compelled to write about them in my web log. One was about a weekend visit to San Francisco that Kathy and I paid him in 2010, and the second was about a Pastoral Letter he wrote to his Catholic community in San Francisco after undergoing bypass surgery.
On a late Saturday evening in 2010, George welcomed Kathy and me to his residence in San Francisco. After a tour of his beautiful home, he invited us to Sunday’s mass, which was to be an extended celebration of the Feast of the Assumption because the Cathedral was consecrated to St. Mary of the Assumption. He would be con-celebrating the service with two other bishops and three newly consecrated monsignors. It was going to be a big deal, so I assumed it would be filled with much pomp, ritual, and flowery testimonials to Mary and the Catholics of the archdiocese. I wasn’t disappointed. The cathedral was resplendent, and the music and liturgy were elegant and carefully choreographed. A long line of altar servers, chaplains, priests, monsignors, and mitered bishops processed out from behind the altar, paralleled the monumental walls of the cathedral, and streamed down the center aisle, as the choir sang soaring tributes to Mary, the mother of Christ.
As best I can recall, George’s homily went something like this:
He began by reciting specific lines from Mary’s prayer, the Magnificat, explaining how they described who would be first into the Kingdom of God, and who would be last.
“Just listen to Mary’s words,” George told the elegantly clad congregation, “for they contain Christ’s later message: ‘God has shown the strength of his arm, and has scattered the proud in their conceit.’ It is the humble, not the vain and the arrogant, that follow Christ’s example and recognize him in their neighbors. The poor will see life clearly, as through a clean window or an open door, while the proud will look at life in a mirror.”
“Again, listen to Mary’s prayer,” he continued: ‘God has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly.’ Jesus showed the example of this throughout his lifetime, by dining with sinners and tax collectors, and paying more attention to the poor, the needy, and the outcasts like the Samaritans.”
“And finally,” George concluded, “Mary says: ‘God has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.’ God does not value us according to our possessions or our wealth, rather, he measures us by how we use and share those possessions with others. Notice how the values Mary embraced in the Magnificat look ahead to the values her son will teach us in the Beatitudes, during the Sermon on the Mount: Blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, the sorrowing, the merciful, the clean of heart, and the peacemakers. Like mother, like son. Mary is foreshadowing the Good News of Jesus. Do you see how these topsy-turvy Gospel values turn the earthly values of the world upside down? Mary and Jesus teach us the central importance of loving self-sacrifice in finding the meaning and value in life.”
When Kathy and I met up with George later for brunch, I greeted him with a provocative smile.
“That was quite a radical sermon you delivered today, your eminence”, I remarked. “I think your words turned some people’s comfortable values completely upside down. I imagine many of your parishioners walked away scratching their heads or even angry over what you said.” I was purposely baiting him with my words. I had NEVER called George by his honorific title. He was sometimes “Father”, but mostly George. I was also curious to see how he would respond to my calling his sermon radical.
“That’s what Christ’s message is supposed to do,” he replied gently. “I wouldn’t be doing my job as bishop if I didn’t say it out loud”.
That was it. George had nothing more to say on the matter. He didn’t dissect his sermon or draw me a picture of what it hoped to do. I concluded that he had said it all from the pulpit and he was leaving it for me to sort out for myself. His words haunted me for the remainder of our trip.
I had heard Mary’s Magnificat hundreds and hundreds of times throughout my life, but never grasped its revolutionary message. I was doubly struck by the place that it was expressed. George proclaimed Christ’s radical gospel not on the mean streets of the Mission District, where it would be welcomed by the poor and homeless, but from the pulpit of San Francisco’s luxurious Cathedral, surrounded by elegantly dressed and coiffed parishioners who came to celebrate the feast day of their beautiful church. Besides the tributes and honors being bestowed on that day, the Archbishop was reminding everyone of their harsh duty to Christ’s message of Love and Humility, and what that meant in terms of actions, values, and possessions. Honestly, despite my chiding words to George later that morning, I was in fact one of those parishioners walking out of Sunday mass, struggling to make sense of his homily and the challenge presented in Mary and Christ’s words to us. “The Kingdom of God is here!” Christ had proclaimed, but to see it we needed to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength; and love your neighbor as yourself”. George was right. Christ’s message is radical and revolutionary, and it will never fall or fail, as long as people seek it and strive to live it.
A year later, in 2011, I wrote an essay on aging and death called, When I’m 64. In it I struggled to link three disparate ideas; my age, which coincided with the Beatles’ song, my father’s death at 50 years of age, and my quickly growing granddaughter, Sarah Kathleen. I found the key to my dilemma in a Pastoral Letter George wrote after his bypass surgery and a difficult recuperation. In it he reflected on five lines of a poem by the 17th-century Anglican clergyman, John Donne, called Hymn To God, my God, in my Sickness:
Since I am coming to that holy room
Where, with Thy choir of saints for evermore,
I shall be made Thy music; as I come
I tune the instrument here at the door,
And what I must do then, think here before.
On re-reading George’s letter, I found two reassuring ideas of death and transition:
“What a lovely image,” George wrote of Donne’s metaphors, “to connect our life here on earth with eternal life! Donne is not gloomy or saccharine or vague. Our life here is a practice session, a rehearsal, if you will, and we prepare for eternal life by living the life of Christ together here and now. We ‘think here before’ about our loving God and our relationship with him, and we ‘tune the instrument’ of living this life here so that it is in harmony with what Christ teaches us in the Gospel in our life together as Church. As I prayed about these lines of Donne, I realized that the rest of my life, long or short, is for tuning and thinking, and, of course, daily practice and rehearsal.”
“We get heaven wrong,” he concluded, “because we spend much of our life here as consumers, so we assume that we will be consumers in eternity. If God brings us to heaven then it is up to him to entertain us and make us happy always. But look at what Donne says: We are not going to an eternal concert where we will listen to God’s music, just as we go to an all-Beethoven or Greatest Broadway Hits concert here. Instead, we become one with God’s music, the profound and eternal music of creation, redemption, and holiness. We will not be God’s houseguests. We will be one with him in love. Of course this is a deep mystery, and there are no floor plans or previews of coming attractions available. Still, Jesus did tell a crucified criminal, ‘This day you will be with me in paradise’, and St. Paul, citing Isaiah says, ‘What eye has not seen, and ear has not heard, and what has not entered the human heart, what God has prepared for those who love him’ (1Corinthians 2:9). Finally, St. John tells us: ‘Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is’ (1John 3:2). That’s more than enough to get me to ‘think here before’ and to ‘tune the instrument here at the door.”
Not only did George’s letter clearly restate the Christian Easter promise of resurrection and eternal life with God, but it also provided some beautiful metaphors to help me understand my doubts and fears of death. Strange, isn’t it, how some metaphors get to the point better than concrete explanations or definitions? Metaphors are the language of poets and mystics when describing the abstract, or the unexplainable. How else can one express the divine, the eternal, love, and God? We can’t, so we describe something else; an object, an action, or an idea, that conveys a similar feeling or emotion. A metaphor, as a Buddhist would say, is “the finger pointing to the moon”. They are the words and expressions that approximate the mysteries of the eternal and divine.
I welcomed George’s images of our life here on earth as a practice session, a musical rehearsal for the next stage, when we will die and become one with God’s music. It’s a more elegant and poetic way of saying “I believe in the holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints, the forgiveness of sins, the Resurrection of the body, and life everlasting”. That concise statement acknowledges death and resurrection, but implies that we will be instantly changed from conscious mind to enlightened soul. My dreams aren’t quite sold on the idea that the transition from mind to spirit will happen that fast, and I don’t think it can be taken for granted. I love life; I treasure the people I love; and I will be loath to give them up. I anticipate that death will be a difficult transition for me, unless I become better prepared. I also believe that at the moment of death, the soul remains – somewhere, for a time. I can’t guess how long this period of transition lasts. The Buddhist Tibetan Book of the Dead claims that this period of adjustment lasts from two to five days, or until the spirit sorts itself out in one of six realms. Like Dr. Kubler-Ross’ “preparations for death”, and John Donne’s “tuning the instrument at the door”, and “thinking” before entering, I’ve come to the conclusion that we need to be ready for what happens next. We need to welcome death as a friend, and visualize the next phase – anticipating the moment we become “one with God”.
George retired as Archbishop of San Francisco in 2012, but he never stopped serving as a priest. He continued giving classes, homilies, and doing retreat work, conducting at least six week-long retreats over the last 4 years before his illness forced him to stop. At the Memorial Mass said at the Cathedral of Our Lady in downtown Los Angeles, shortly after his death, his life-long companion and fellow Archbishop, Cardinal William Levada, summed up his old friend with these words:
“Archbishop George Niederauer lived his 80 years applying the truth of the Gospel to his own life as a Christian, and as a priest and bishop, preaching and teaching others to join him on his journey. He did this with great intelligence, ‘laced’ with good humor. I think all of us who knew him would agree that he loved to laugh, and to see us laugh with him. He used the many gifts God gave him to great effect, and we thank God for lending him to us for this long while.”
I would simply add that George had perfected his instrument after years and years of practice, and it was finally time for him to perform his symphony and become music with his Lord. Rest in peace, my friend.
Where, with Thy choir of saints for evermore,
I shall be made Thy music; as I come
I tune the instrument here at the door,
And what I must do then, think here before.
(Hymn to God my God, in my Sickness: John Donne – 1630)
I think I first heard of Fr. George Niederauer after a mutual friend introduced Kathy to him around 1993. She took an immediate liking to this engaging priest who demonstrated such a keen wit and a unique “gift of gab”. He was a Monsignor at the time, and co-director of the House of Prayer for Priests in Los Angeles, while in residence at St. Victor’s Church in West Hollywood. I recalled the Saturday morning excursions they took to see him, because Kathy also mentioned that she would walk over to the nearby Book Soup, one of my favorite independent bookstores, to browse around before their meeting. The books she saw or bought often acted as stimulus for many stirring and interesting conversations they had about books, literature, and especially Catholic authors. I naturally became curious about this witty and intelligent man who shifted so effortlessly between spiritual guidance to literary discussions with friends. Those two elements were only a hint to the many aspects that comprised this man of God. Over the next 24 years there seemed to be a new revelation with every meeting.
George died last month. He was 80 years old and had been living at Nazareth House in San Rafael. George was the eighth Archbishop of San Francisco. He was ordained a priest in 1962, received a B.A. in Philosophy from St. John’s Seminary, a degree in Sacred Theology from the Catholic University in Washington, DC, an MA in English Literature from Loyola-Marymount University, and a doctorate in English Literature from USC. During his 55 years as a priest, he did parish work, taught English Literature and served as spiritual director at St. John’s Seminary, was made a Monsignor and appointed Rector there, and then served as co-director of the House of Prayer. In 1994 he was appointed eighth Bishop of the Diocese of Salt Lake City, and served there until his appointment to San Francisco in 2005. I gradually learned of all these impressive titles, positions, and degrees over the years, never seeing them all listed until after his death. To me he was simply George, the valued friend of my wife Kathy. As I got to know him better over the years, he became my friend as well.
For many years I always thought of George as “The Man Who Came to Dinner”, because we mostly saw him on social occasions that involved meals of some kind. We invited him to our home, or the beach house we rented over summer, or met him for dinner at Taix French Restaurant in Echo Park. He vaguely reminded me of Sheridan Whiteside, the central character in the 1942 movie with the same name. Both men were urbane, quick-thinking intellectuals who made clever remarks, biting retorts, and amusing comparisons. They were gifted raconteurs who could startle you with a funny or quirky story, or challenge you with humorous witticisms. Only while Sheridan was sarcastic and snarky, George was always kind, gentle, and compassionate. The other aspect of George that I found most endearing was despite the titles, and the power and authority of the positions he held, he never stopped being a humble and accepting priest, and an encouraging and illuminating teacher.
The only time I truly got a whiff of the power and majesty behind the title of Archbishop, was the installation reception and dinner held at the elegant City Club in downtown San Francisco in 2006. It was a daunting, once-in-a-lifetime experience. The mingling of so many red-hatted bishops, scarlet robed monsignors, and black suited priests all in the same place was intimidating. I felt I was lost at a Vatican Conclave, surrounded by an ecclesiastical army of cardinals, bishops, and priests. The only person who made the experience pleasant was George. He sought me out, introduced me to some of his personable friends and compatriots, told humorous stories of his youth in Long Beach, and lowered my level of discomfort with his consideration and attention.
I also never walked away from an encounter with George without learning something about art, literature, movies, or my relationship with God. He presented his ideas and thoughts in such a gentle and inviting manner that he inspired me to investigate and act. Movies were a passion for him, and he loved giving reviews and recommendations. I remember once mentioning that Kathy and I had seen the 2008 movie version of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Without mocking the movie too much, he described the novel in such glowing fashion as one of the finest example of Catholic literature that I was compelled to finally read it for myself, and then buy the 1981 miniseries. He was right on that time, although I still scratch my head in wonder at his quirky love of the movie, Fargo. On another occasion, when we had him to dinner at our beach house, I hesitatingly mentioned that I was thinking of auditing a Bible class at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena. Thinking that a Catholic bishop would try to dissuade me from attending a Protestant institution, he surprised me by heartily recommending it, even suggesting that I might be interested in subscribing to Books & Culture, a Christian review of literature.
However, even though I considered him more of a friend than a priest, he always found a way to remind me of his vocational commitment to serve God. I particularly recall two events that so clearly demonstrated that fact to me, I felt compelled to write about them in my web log. One was about a weekend visit to San Francisco that Kathy and I paid him in 2010, and the second was about a Pastoral Letter he wrote to his Catholic community in San Francisco after undergoing bypass surgery.
On a late Saturday evening in 2010, George welcomed Kathy and me to his residence in San Francisco. After a tour of his beautiful home, he invited us to Sunday’s mass, which was to be an extended celebration of the Feast of the Assumption because the Cathedral was consecrated to St. Mary of the Assumption. He would be con-celebrating the service with two other bishops and three newly consecrated monsignors. It was going to be a big deal, so I assumed it would be filled with much pomp, ritual, and flowery testimonials to Mary and the Catholics of the archdiocese. I wasn’t disappointed. The cathedral was resplendent, and the music and liturgy were elegant and carefully choreographed. A long line of altar servers, chaplains, priests, monsignors, and mitered bishops processed out from behind the altar, paralleled the monumental walls of the cathedral, and streamed down the center aisle, as the choir sang soaring tributes to Mary, the mother of Christ.
As best I can recall, George’s homily went something like this:
He began by reciting specific lines from Mary’s prayer, the Magnificat, explaining how they described who would be first into the Kingdom of God, and who would be last.
“Just listen to Mary’s words,” George told the elegantly clad congregation, “for they contain Christ’s later message: ‘God has shown the strength of his arm, and has scattered the proud in their conceit.’ It is the humble, not the vain and the arrogant, that follow Christ’s example and recognize him in their neighbors. The poor will see life clearly, as through a clean window or an open door, while the proud will look at life in a mirror.”
“Again, listen to Mary’s prayer,” he continued: ‘God has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly.’ Jesus showed the example of this throughout his lifetime, by dining with sinners and tax collectors, and paying more attention to the poor, the needy, and the outcasts like the Samaritans.”
“And finally,” George concluded, “Mary says: ‘God has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.’ God does not value us according to our possessions or our wealth, rather, he measures us by how we use and share those possessions with others. Notice how the values Mary embraced in the Magnificat look ahead to the values her son will teach us in the Beatitudes, during the Sermon on the Mount: Blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, the sorrowing, the merciful, the clean of heart, and the peacemakers. Like mother, like son. Mary is foreshadowing the Good News of Jesus. Do you see how these topsy-turvy Gospel values turn the earthly values of the world upside down? Mary and Jesus teach us the central importance of loving self-sacrifice in finding the meaning and value in life.”
When Kathy and I met up with George later for brunch, I greeted him with a provocative smile.
“That was quite a radical sermon you delivered today, your eminence”, I remarked. “I think your words turned some people’s comfortable values completely upside down. I imagine many of your parishioners walked away scratching their heads or even angry over what you said.” I was purposely baiting him with my words. I had NEVER called George by his honorific title. He was sometimes “Father”, but mostly George. I was also curious to see how he would respond to my calling his sermon radical.
“That’s what Christ’s message is supposed to do,” he replied gently. “I wouldn’t be doing my job as bishop if I didn’t say it out loud”.
That was it. George had nothing more to say on the matter. He didn’t dissect his sermon or draw me a picture of what it hoped to do. I concluded that he had said it all from the pulpit and he was leaving it for me to sort out for myself. His words haunted me for the remainder of our trip.
I had heard Mary’s Magnificat hundreds and hundreds of times throughout my life, but never grasped its revolutionary message. I was doubly struck by the place that it was expressed. George proclaimed Christ’s radical gospel not on the mean streets of the Mission District, where it would be welcomed by the poor and homeless, but from the pulpit of San Francisco’s luxurious Cathedral, surrounded by elegantly dressed and coiffed parishioners who came to celebrate the feast day of their beautiful church. Besides the tributes and honors being bestowed on that day, the Archbishop was reminding everyone of their harsh duty to Christ’s message of Love and Humility, and what that meant in terms of actions, values, and possessions. Honestly, despite my chiding words to George later that morning, I was in fact one of those parishioners walking out of Sunday mass, struggling to make sense of his homily and the challenge presented in Mary and Christ’s words to us. “The Kingdom of God is here!” Christ had proclaimed, but to see it we needed to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength; and love your neighbor as yourself”. George was right. Christ’s message is radical and revolutionary, and it will never fall or fail, as long as people seek it and strive to live it.
A year later, in 2011, I wrote an essay on aging and death called, When I’m 64. In it I struggled to link three disparate ideas; my age, which coincided with the Beatles’ song, my father’s death at 50 years of age, and my quickly growing granddaughter, Sarah Kathleen. I found the key to my dilemma in a Pastoral Letter George wrote after his bypass surgery and a difficult recuperation. In it he reflected on five lines of a poem by the 17th-century Anglican clergyman, John Donne, called Hymn To God, my God, in my Sickness:
Since I am coming to that holy room
Where, with Thy choir of saints for evermore,
I shall be made Thy music; as I come
I tune the instrument here at the door,
And what I must do then, think here before.
On re-reading George’s letter, I found two reassuring ideas of death and transition:
“What a lovely image,” George wrote of Donne’s metaphors, “to connect our life here on earth with eternal life! Donne is not gloomy or saccharine or vague. Our life here is a practice session, a rehearsal, if you will, and we prepare for eternal life by living the life of Christ together here and now. We ‘think here before’ about our loving God and our relationship with him, and we ‘tune the instrument’ of living this life here so that it is in harmony with what Christ teaches us in the Gospel in our life together as Church. As I prayed about these lines of Donne, I realized that the rest of my life, long or short, is for tuning and thinking, and, of course, daily practice and rehearsal.”
“We get heaven wrong,” he concluded, “because we spend much of our life here as consumers, so we assume that we will be consumers in eternity. If God brings us to heaven then it is up to him to entertain us and make us happy always. But look at what Donne says: We are not going to an eternal concert where we will listen to God’s music, just as we go to an all-Beethoven or Greatest Broadway Hits concert here. Instead, we become one with God’s music, the profound and eternal music of creation, redemption, and holiness. We will not be God’s houseguests. We will be one with him in love. Of course this is a deep mystery, and there are no floor plans or previews of coming attractions available. Still, Jesus did tell a crucified criminal, ‘This day you will be with me in paradise’, and St. Paul, citing Isaiah says, ‘What eye has not seen, and ear has not heard, and what has not entered the human heart, what God has prepared for those who love him’ (1Corinthians 2:9). Finally, St. John tells us: ‘Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is’ (1John 3:2). That’s more than enough to get me to ‘think here before’ and to ‘tune the instrument here at the door.”
Not only did George’s letter clearly restate the Christian Easter promise of resurrection and eternal life with God, but it also provided some beautiful metaphors to help me understand my doubts and fears of death. Strange, isn’t it, how some metaphors get to the point better than concrete explanations or definitions? Metaphors are the language of poets and mystics when describing the abstract, or the unexplainable. How else can one express the divine, the eternal, love, and God? We can’t, so we describe something else; an object, an action, or an idea, that conveys a similar feeling or emotion. A metaphor, as a Buddhist would say, is “the finger pointing to the moon”. They are the words and expressions that approximate the mysteries of the eternal and divine.
I welcomed George’s images of our life here on earth as a practice session, a musical rehearsal for the next stage, when we will die and become one with God’s music. It’s a more elegant and poetic way of saying “I believe in the holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints, the forgiveness of sins, the Resurrection of the body, and life everlasting”. That concise statement acknowledges death and resurrection, but implies that we will be instantly changed from conscious mind to enlightened soul. My dreams aren’t quite sold on the idea that the transition from mind to spirit will happen that fast, and I don’t think it can be taken for granted. I love life; I treasure the people I love; and I will be loath to give them up. I anticipate that death will be a difficult transition for me, unless I become better prepared. I also believe that at the moment of death, the soul remains – somewhere, for a time. I can’t guess how long this period of transition lasts. The Buddhist Tibetan Book of the Dead claims that this period of adjustment lasts from two to five days, or until the spirit sorts itself out in one of six realms. Like Dr. Kubler-Ross’ “preparations for death”, and John Donne’s “tuning the instrument at the door”, and “thinking” before entering, I’ve come to the conclusion that we need to be ready for what happens next. We need to welcome death as a friend, and visualize the next phase – anticipating the moment we become “one with God”.
George retired as Archbishop of San Francisco in 2012, but he never stopped serving as a priest. He continued giving classes, homilies, and doing retreat work, conducting at least six week-long retreats over the last 4 years before his illness forced him to stop. At the Memorial Mass said at the Cathedral of Our Lady in downtown Los Angeles, shortly after his death, his life-long companion and fellow Archbishop, Cardinal William Levada, summed up his old friend with these words:
I would simply add that George had perfected his instrument after years and years of practice, and it was finally time for him to perform his symphony and become music with his Lord. Rest in peace, my friend.
