It's the dying season as well as the
holiday season, the next two months having the highest death rates of
the year. The loved ones I have lost are particularly close at this
time of year, as I suppose fits with All Souls and the Day of the
Dead and such events coming around now.
I notice that there aren't any
“scientific” explanations for the mortality statistics, which
pleases me greatly. The temperature outside, for example, doesn't
correlate with the death rate across climate zones. I just love it,
because it tells me that, yes, people are in tune, people do love.
It's immediately understandable from the human perspective why people
should decide to go at this time of year. The “scientists”
dismiss the human heart, the soul, the inner life, because they can't
get meter readings on it.
But it's “Thanks to the human heart,
by which we live,” as Wordsworth says in his poem.
It's pathetic, actually, just to keep
on that materialist, “empirical,” path in the mistaken belief
that we are only particles of “matter.” I see the loss of loved
ones to be of the greatest help in shaking a person out of that view.
The loss of loved ones provides the best opportunity I can imagine to
question whether or not the particles theory doesn't have something
seriously lacking.
And there is this additional
gift, too,
that the loss gives us the occasion to deepen, to purify, our loves
of those who have gone. Here's a blunt statement of it by C. S.
Lewis, from his book, “A Grief Observed:”
We are “taken
out of ourselves” by the loved one while she is here. Then comes
the tragic figure of the dance in which we must learn to be still
taken out of ourselves though the bodily presence is withdrawn, to
love the very Her, and not to fall back to loving her past or our
memory, or our sorrow, or our relief from sorrow, or our own love.”
This seems way, way out there, but it
rings the bells.
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