It will be the death of me

For some unknown reason, I don't fear death. At least that's what I tell myself, fairly reassuringly, from time to time.

In between those times, I try to trace my journey from being shit scared to see, much less experience, death to my current, almost cavalier framing of it as just part of everybody's life, species notwithstanding. A mere walk in the celestial park.

What happens when we die?

I start my ritual perusal of possible answers to this conundrum with a cursory review of the main religions, their tenets and practices. That sounds pretentious. To clarify, I contemplate what I know about these various faiths.

Where to begin, in this screed about where it ends?

I was raised as Catholic as one who's Catholic can be. Mass, sometimes daily, weekly confession, nighttime Rosary. The Pope was our guy and we revered his infallibility. My first Pope was John XXIII, and he was by all accounts a lovely man, well-educated (as are they all) and gentle. I had no proof that he was infallible, but I believed it. Isn't that what faith demands? Everyone I knew believed it, except my best friend who was Protestant, Lutheran to be exact. We were very close and, in my then-young life, she was a major player.

But, I’d been taught to believe only Catholics had direct access to Heaven. That credo, handed down through untold generations, held that we Catholics were to believe that Protestants and all their non-Christian ilk had no business darkening Heaven's door. That element would, we were told to believe, be fated as unbelievers; and those heretics who were unbaptized (including babies) were doomed and turned away from the mysterious place called Heaven. They were summarily dispatched to a perhaps more mysterious place, Limbo.

This never sat well with me. My best friend – call her Eva – was kind and a whole lot of fun, things that would identify her as a good person. I went to a different school than she, and found that the majority of my fellow RC classmates were mean and made my school days a torture. But they got to go to Heaven (albeit after a stretch in Purgatory) and my friend Eva was to be summarily relegated to Limbo?

(An aside: This was exactly the time in cultural history that the Limbo, a dance involving a lot of backward bending, became popular. I’m not sure how that affected our collective understanding of the place, Limbo, but I’m sure it did.)

I was six at the time and this whole arrangement coddling Catholics seemed patently unfair. Because it was.

The Church, however, some time during The Second Vatican Council (1959 – 1965), thought better of this whole Limbo set-up and removed it from Catholic dogma. It left silently and, I think for the most part, unnoticed. So did St. Christopher whose likeness in tiny statue form graced the dashboard of nearly every RC car. Suddenly he was no longer the Patron Saint of travel, a serious downgrade. I’m sure my memory of this development is skewed by my youth and general ignorance of world affairs, but that’s how it went then, and exists still as far as I know.

I was six when I discovered this whole inequity after death idea. Though happy when Limbo was shunted (though I was really annoyed about Christopher and the sudden removal of his dashboard statue), I recognized, in my childish logic, that significant beliefs had just been dispatched for no apparent reason. Thus began my (still) lifelong quest to find somewhere to belong, to locate a faith system that complied with my beliefs. I wanted, in effect, a ‘faith accompli’.

Back to the topic of death. Of all the differences between the many and varied sets of religious beliefs, how death is regarded is a pretty important piece. The Catholic, and I hope Christian, idea of no Heaven for mortal sin, but a Purgatorial stretch for combined venial sins (viz., for a full understanding of what is and isn’t considered a mortal sin, see The Baltimore Catechism – I studied the bejaysus out of that publication), then, thus cleansed, a free ticket to Heaven and all its majesty truly seems an unegalitarian system. It was all so random, not a strong feature in a religion that launched more than two centuries of pitched battle during The Crusades. Google offers a handy description of what that was all about. (The Crusades - military expeditions initiated by the medieval papacy to wrest the Holy Lands from Moslem control). Hardly the stuff of a religion that purported to be all about love and The Golden Rule.

The more I encountered through the years, as my thought processes struggled to blossom, about the religion into which I was born, the more I wanted to find another established faith that aligned with my beliefs. I especially wanted to thrash out the various ways in which religions regarded death.

Somewhere along the way, because of my love for animals, I became vegan. This informed, in a big way, what I wanted to find and where I would discover a group espousing beliefs that aligned with my own. But the death thing yet reigned paramount.

I’m pretty sure Catholics no longer believe that only they can enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but I haven’t gone so far as to ask any of them. I do know we are to believe the soul leaves the body at death, the soul continuing to eternal rest (most likely after a stop in Purgatory) and the body in the ground or in ashes. (“Remember, man, that Thou art dust”). So some salvation is enshrined but you first must make amends for the earthly in the spiritual. The sheer fear of residence in Hell with all its agonies may, I hope, steer even the most heinous among us from commission of a ‘mortal’ sin.

From the Christian (mostly Catholic), let’s traverse to the other major world

Hindi: At physical death, the eternal soul continues and is reborn, a precept in common with Buddhism, in a cycle continuing in a succession of existences. We know this as reincarnation or the transmigration of souls, one’s earthly behavior determining the kind of being he or she will be reborn.

Islam: Existence in this world is terminated with the body remaining in the ground until The Day of Judgment (Yawn al-clin).

Buddhism: Physical death is a natural occurrence but consciousness continues in an ongoing cycle of death and rebirth (Samsara) via Karma and eventual enlightenment. A Buddhist wants to escape Samara and achieve Nirvana, the end to suffering.

Jainism: Again, the soul continues, entering a new body after physical death. Of the options, the Jain beliefs are closest to my own, something they may or may not want to know.

Were I asked which of these fates I’d choose, I’d go with the rebirth and reincarnation options. I know I wouldn’t, in my reborn state, realize I’d been reincarnated per se so, for sake of argument, one could contend that there is a death of sorts, in that one conceivably has no knowledge of a previous life. Still, it seems a better choice.

Agnostics don’t know and Atheists don’t care. That’s just my pat and simplistic attempt to describe these beliefs with a modicum of humor, and I hope no offence is taken.

Who knows?

I guess the thought of actually dying does scare me a bit. The unknown tends to cause fear, and I’m not looking much forward to my physical denouement, yet anxious to find out if any of these religious adherents have cornered the market on the afterlife by identifying the correct choice. Again, bereft of previous consciousness I won’t be me. I’ll be someone else who doesn’t realize I’d been here before.

And that’s something I’ve been told many times: “You’ve been here before.” I tend to agree or maybe I just want to agree.

Make it so.