Another side of recovery.

My last post was written a few days ago, but for some reason the computer wouldn’t post it. So I had to copy and post it today, Sunday. This morning – Beatrix’ last free Sunday before going back to work – we attended worship in Wetaskiwin. Today was Palm Sunday in the Christian calendar, the last Sunday before Christians remember Jesus’ crucifixion on the Friday of this week. The worship dealt with the dark side of the Christian story, as well as looking beyond that to the hope-filled story of Easter. I found it a very evocative and helpful time today. It prompted me to remember my own mortality.

It’s pretty hard not to remember your mortality when you’re lying on a bed, waiting for a team to crack open your chest and start cutting up things attaché to your heart. I thought about it quite a bit, and about my beliefs about what comes after. I believe in life after death…most of the time. But there are times when I wonder what form that could possibly take. Our bodies rot away, our brains, too. What happens to all the ideas and memories stored in your mind? Does your mind end when your brain ends? I think about how no material cells really die. They simply take another form, as the cells of my body will do. Will I be dust? Will I have consciousness? Memory? Presence? Is there a “where” in which I will live? I know that there is no “heaven” up in the sky, as I believed as a child. So what is there? Sometimes I feel fear thinking of that, and then I am pushed back to my convictions about life after, and my trust in God, as I am bid to do.

I often think about fetuses, and what they go through as they are born to become babies. Research has given us hints that there is some kind of consciousness in the womb-bound person. This is their life, the place where they “are.” I wonder what it’s like when birthing starts? Suddenly to be squeezed by powerful muscles, to be pushed out of the only place you’ve ever known, to into a dark and uncomfortable tunnel, and then to be suddenly cast out into a world where light blinds you for a time, where it’s cold compared to the womb, where everything is overwhelmingly new and different. Is that what death is like? Is that what the near-death people mean when they talk about a tunnel, with a light at the end of it?

All of this went through my mind because of this morning’s worship. One of the things Ruth (the preacher) reminded us of, is “that in every beginning, there is an inevitable death; and in every death there is a promised beginning.”

How has this got anything to do with recovery, you may ask. In recovery, as one grows stronger and healthier, a person feels like they are moving towards life. But you know, at my age anyway, that life is limited, and that there will be an end. What sort of beginning will there be? And how will I know it? The mind and the spirit have to recover as well as the body, and one way to do that is to re-work all the things that sustained you “before.” I’m on that journey now, toward life…toward death.