Death

“Death is the way in which the living make an offering so that more life emerges.” -Andreas Weber, Matter and Desire

When I finally die, and I say finally because I know it will happen soon enough, place me in the offering plate among discarded change and straggling dollar bills, on top of tithe checks and prayer requests. Let my dead body be an offering to the Almighty that lives around me and within me. I hope that, when I die, you turn me into something that can be used. I intend to have purpose and I shudder at the idea of my body hidden away in a casket with a gravestone to mark my life. My human body may die, but my essence will live on.

After you turn my body into ash, spread me in the wild places and allow me to live my afterlife among the mushrooms that grow on decaying matter. One day I will be decaying matter. I am death and I am life. No boundary exists here, and I must let go of a worldview that I once held. I lived a life on Earth only to be guaranteed a better life following my death. However, that life remains unknown, even to those who choose to strive for admittance to heaven. If you ask me if I believe in Heaven or Hell, I think I would probably say no, and probably is the key word here, because how I can I truly know about the existence of anything beyond my current experience?

I think, to speak with candor here, I have had trouble with Christianity because I’m not sure I buy the idea that God awaits us in heaven or that God has separated himself (herself? themselves?) from our existence here on Earth. If I am creation, death and life intertwined, and able to understand this boundess existence, then God should be right here with me as the creator of my existence and the being who fully understands how death only begets more life.

Jesus dies in the Bible, which most people know, so he can bring eternal life to all people. After his death, he rises again in three days. After my death, I will be integrated into the innerworkings of our earth and become a flower that blooms with romance or the bones of a baby fox who searches for her first meal among the brush.

I know that God lives on the Earth and in the earth, an essence that permeates all life to continue the creation of new life. Though I sit in an apartment twenty feet above the ground, a room void of any sign of life other than myself and a snoozing kitten, I still feel connection to the earth.

During my time of strict unbelief, I both feared death and my afterlife, worried that I would be damned to hell by God Almighty, living on in the fiery pits of healing, burning and burning until I no longer exist, only to begin the cycle again, for eternity. You and I, whether or not these ideas of heaven and hell are true, will live for eternity. We will commune with nature. A close friend of mine says she will become a tree in a cow pasture to shade them in the summer.

We are natural beings, sprouting from some organic form of living. You may think that sitting in my air-conditioned bedroom is an organic form of living too, but I’m not so sure. I hear the spirits speak to me when I walk through the woods or sit on an idle beach when the waves lap against the shore. I feel at peace to be one with the other life, to touch and be touched by this life, but also have concern for the slow death of our natural spaces. The spirits speak to me in these moments and ask if I can do anything. With my life, I promised to promote life and with my death, I promised to be an offering.

Spread my ashes in a barren place when I die. Sit and meditate there for a while and let me speak to you. Let me help you understand how we must cherish the ground beneath our feet and stop taking life for our own consumption, rather than for celebration.

When you sit in your house of worship and pass around the offering plate, offer up the earth and offer up life, offer your own death. Create a sacred ground and know that when you die, you continue to live.