From the Palliative/Spiritual Care Bookshelf

I continue today my series that draws from the wisdom found in the books on my shelf at work. As most reading this would know, my “work,” since September 2018, is that of a palliative care interfaith chaplain at a hospital just north of the Twin Cities.

In this fifth installment I share an excerpt from Kathleen Dowling Singh’s book, The Grace in Dying: A Message of Hope, Comfort, and Spiritual Transformation, which Seymour Boorstein, M.D. describes as “a very powerful and gentle antidote to the fear of dying both in ourselves and our loved ones.”

(NOTE: To start at the beginning of this series, click here.)

I am an ordinary person working with ordinary people dying ordinary deaths. The people I work with are neither saints nor sages. Although occasionally devout, they are not spiritual adepts. These are the people who have been in line with us at the supermarket or in the next lane at the traffic light; they are our parents, our friends, our spouses, our children, ourselves.

The deaths I observed do not include the sudden, violent ones of attack or accident or the unexpected ones of a heart gone suddenly awry. They are the routinely prognosed deaths of terminal illness, the final fading away of a body riddled with cancer or stilled by a failing essential physiological system: ordinary people dying ordinary deaths.

What I have observed in these deaths, however, and what I have experienced is most certainly not ordinary; it is profound, transcendent, and extraordinary. By and large, people die in solemnity, peace, and transformed consciousness, radiating energy that can only be described as spiritual. Death, as no other moment we encounter in life, announces itself in resplendent silence. Death is so absolute that anyone’s encounter with it is transforming. It provokes the strongest of feelings: terror, sadness, rage, utter fascination, and an interior acknowledgement, an intuitive recognition, of liberation.

William James, the American giant of psychology and philosophy, once observed: “The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also; and that although in the main these experiences and those of the world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in.”

It is my observation, after having been with hundreds of people who are dying, that death is most definitely one of those points where “higher energies filter in,” where, as Mircea Eliade describes it, there is “a rupture of planes.”

Wisdom traditions have acknowledged this for millennia. In the West, a series of treatises in the Middle Ages referred to as the Ars Moriendi, the “Art of Dying,” set forth a cartography, a map, of the psycho-spiritual transformations of the dying process in Christian religious terms. At that time in that culture, there was confidence in the prevailing worldview that death, like life, is a pilgrimage. Dying persons, at the edge between life and death, were seen as beings glimpsing the mystery in a way that is rarely possible for those of us in the midst of life; they were seen as beings moving more rapidly in their pilgrimage into spiritual dimensions.

In the East, Padmasambhava gave a precise map and explanation of the dying process in the Bardo Thodol, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, in the eighth century. The essence of its teaching is that, in the dissolution of dying, we move beyond the personal sense of self and the delusions of ordinary mind. In the gap created by that movement, the nature of Reality is revealed, experienced, and entered into. Buddhist psychology sees dying as the moment when the fundamental nature of mind, the essence of who we are, sometimes called the Ground Luminosity or Clear Light or Immutable Radiance, naturally reveals itself in its vast glory.

These viewpoints contain great wisdom. Our culture – America, at the turn of the third millennium – has lost much of that wisdom and we are only now in the process of regaining it. A profound shift is occurring in human consciousness regarding the perception of death and dying. This shift was ushered in by the work of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and others who first turned to dying as a legitimate, heretofore unexamined, area of research. The shift gained further impetus from the hospice movement, the AIDS epidemic, and the advancement of medical techniques that increase the probability of near-death experiences. The limited, yet significant, resurgence of spiritual practice in the West as well as a general and evolutionary maturing of human consciousness have also contributed to the emergence of the study of death and dying as a field of research and interest. Unequivocally, death is coming to be seen as our final stage of growth.

. . . It is time for us to observe and to describe the psycho-spiritual transformations normal and inherent in the dying process. . . . [to] describe the experience of dying by exploring the transformations that many of us who work with the dying are beginning to see. These transformations appear to be inherent in the dying process itself.

It has been said that death is a mirror in which all of life is reflected. When we look into this “mirror” of death and dying, we get a clearer image of ourselves, a clearer image of the inherent possibilities of human consciousness. Increasing our insight into what is generally considered to be the unfathomable nature of death and dying – particularly knowledge that reveals dying’s transformative and transcendent power – helps us to understand our fear of death and to decrease this fear. With this insight, we can recognize death as a part of life as beautifully conceived as every other part. We can come closer to accepting the fact that, of course, part of the experience of physical existence involves the organism’s natural design for death. Why do we die? We begin to answer the question simply: because we are alive. In the words of the American sage Ram Dass, “Death is not an outrage.”

A greater understanding of the process of dying, in both its physical and psycho-spiritual dimensions, also will enable us to better guide our loved ones and ourselves through this difficult and profound time. To observe and intimately participate as a dying person’s consciousness becomes one with the Clear Light or the Ground of Being is an act of great value, inexpressible and unforgettable. It is to be pierced by a power beyond our separate sense of self in a moment that sources both compassion and wisdom.

As we deepen our understanding of the entire human journey from conception through death, we deepen our capacity to live more fully and freely, awed by the fact that we are alive. We become different beings through the transformative power of our insight into the dying process. We become larger, more integrated, and somehow more real with this expansion of our horizons and remapping of our boundaries. We enter levels that allow our now deeper being to open to what is – giving and taking, in living and dying, with fewer gimmicks and simpler truth, with less frivolity and more joy, with less suffering and more gratitude.

– Kathleen Dowling Singh
Excerpted from The Grace in Dying: A Message of Hope,
Comfort, and Spiritual Transformation
pp. 3-6

NEXT: Part VI

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• From the Palliative/Spiritual Care Bookshelf (Part I)
• From the Palliative/Spiritual Care Bookshelf (Part II)
• From the Palliative/Spiritual Care Bookshelf (Part III)
• From the Palliative/Spiritual Care Bookshelf (Part IV)
• Chaplaincy: A Ministry of Welcome
• Interfaith Chaplaincy: Meeting People Where They're At
• Spirituality and the Healthcare Setting
• World Hospice and Palliative Care Day
• Resilience and Hope
• The Calm Before the Storm
• George Yancy on the “Unspoken Reality of Death”
• Arthur Kleinman on the “Soul of Care”
• “Call Upon Those You Love”

Related Off-site Links:
In Pandemic, Health Care Chaplains Address an “Existential and Spiritual Crisis” – Alejandra Molina (Religion News Service, March 20, 2020).
Hospital Chaplains Bring Hope and Solace to COVID-19 Patients and Staff – Lulu Garcia-Navarro (NPR News, March 29, 2020).
It's Time to Get Serious About End-of-Life Care for High-Risk Coronavirus Patients – Jessica Gold and Shoshana Ungerleider (TIME, March 30, 2020).
Learning to Cope With the Pandemic From Palliative Care Patients – Rob A. Ruff (KevinMD.com, May 8, 2020).
Our Crash Course in Being Mortal – Ira Byock (Goop, May 2020).
“Hurry, He's Dying”: A Hospital Chaplain’s Journal Chronicles Pandemic's Private Wounds – Chris Kenning (Louisville Courier Journal via USA Today, September 1, 2020).
How the Arts Can Ease Grief After Loss – Patricia Corrigan (Next Avenue, April 29, 2020).

Images: Michael J. Bayly.