Communion before Dying

I had a season of madness.

At its beginning, I believed that a particular client and his allies were conspiring against me. As my madness deepened, the conspiracy seemed to widen. Eventually, the whole world was in on it. Before I was seized and confined, I came to believe that I was the focus of a universal conspiracy that had existed for my whole life, and I alone had not known of it.

I feared to eat, because I believed that my food was being poisoned to control my mind.

In time, I believed that God was my only friend. But then a cruel voice told me that I was condemned by God. And I believed that voice.

If I had died, I would have died a lonely death – fleeing from my enemies, and my enemies were the whole world, and God.

1. A bad death: Saul.

There are good deaths and bad deaths. The biblical King Saul died a bad death. In the book of First Samuel, King Saul was chosen by God to lead Israel. As king, he fell short, and God repented of selecting him. Then darkness closed in on Saul. At the end, his enemies the Philistines pursued him. The Philistines killed Saul’s sons, and Philistine archers wounded Saul.

Saul feared that he would fall into the hands of the Philistines, and that they would abuse him, so he told his armor-bearer to kill him. But his armor-bearer would not. So Saul died by his own hand. He fell upon his sword.

The Philistines found Saul’s corpse. They beheaded him, and they fastened his body to a wall.

There’s nothing to envy in Saul’s death, save that the prophet Samuel mourned him, and that brave men risked their lives to recover his abused body.

2. A good death: Jephthah’s daughter.

I consider the daughter of Jephthah to have had a comparatively good death. Jephthah was a leader of Israel. Before battle against the Ammonites, Jephthah swore to God that if God gave him victory over the Ammonites, he, Jephthah, would sacrifice to God "whatsoever cometh forth from the doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace from the children of Ammon".

God gave Jephthah victory. Jephthah returned to his home. His daughter, his only child, came from the doors of his house to meet him.

Jephthah’s daughter agreed that Jephthah had to fulfill his vow to God. She asked only first to go into the mountains for two months with her companions. She did that, and then she returned to Jephthah and gave herself up to death.

My exposure to "feminist theology" is limited. But I know that some feminist theologians believe that the story of Jephthah’s daughter was designed to terrorize women. There may be much good in feminist theology that I don’t know of, but I think that that complaint misses the point. Jephthah’s brave daughter is a hero of this story.

And she did not die alone. She died after two months of fellowship.

3. An immaculate death: communion and alienation.

I believe that Jesus read of Jephthah’s daughter and was strengthened by her story. In fact, just as Jephthah’s daughter yearned for fellowship before she died, Jesus craved fellowship before he died. Before he died, he had a last supper among his disciples. Also, in the garden of Gethsemane, he yearned for Peter and the sons of Zebedee to watch with him. But they fell asleep.

Then Jesus died a lonely death. He died the death of a criminal. According to Matthew, even the thieves who were crucified with him taunted him. Before he died, he cried out, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

4. My mother’s death.

When my mother died, of brain cancer, we kept her in the hospital long after it was clear that she would not live. We resisted the hospital’s pressure to take her home. That was a mistake. But eventually we did bring her home. She could not speak, but her eyes seemed to seize on the familiar surroundings when we returned her to her home and restored her to the embrace of her family. She died among us, and that was a good thing.

5. Suicide, murder, and the will to die.

The opposite of that good thing is the death of those who murder others before they kill themselves. Murder is the ultimate alienation. It alienates the victim from all they know, all they love, and from life itself.

I used to wonder why some suicides did this. I used to speculate that they were driven by hatred, and that their own deaths were afterthoughts. But I’m not sure of that.

As somebody who has tried to take my life, I know that it’s hard to gather the will to embrace death by your own hand. That I live might show that my dedication to death was not entire.

The last time I tried to end my life, a decade ago, I tried to tie up loose strands of my life to lessen the harsh effect that my death might have. I chose a time when I had no immediate, pressing duties. The only task that worried me was a reply brief for an appeal that I had been hired to do. From my place of slow death by starvation, I hiked to a pay phone and called my brother to suggest who he might hire to complete that task.

But in the end, I didn’t die.

Maybe if I had been less neat in wrapping up my affairs, maybe if I had left my affairs in a mess, then fear of going back to my life might have moved me to go forward and not retreat when my way of death shifted from slow starvation to sudden drowning. Of course, I can’t know that for sure.

But it makes me wonder if people who murder others before they kill themselves commit murder to compensate for a lack of courage. I wonder if these murderers do horrible things to make sure that, at the end, continued life will be less appealing than death. The truth probably is complex. But what I say might have a piece of the truth in it.

It’s horrible to use others for that evil purpose. It’s the opposite of the communion sought by Jephthah’s daughter and by Jesus. It’s like the death of Saul, who was moved to die by the thought of capture and abuse by the Philistines.

6. The principal theme of scripture: breaking communion and restoring communion.

I say this to emphasize the importance of communion. Communion is part of a good death. Alienation comes with a bad death.

In fact, the beginning of the Bible, Genesis, is the story of the breaking of communion between God and humankind. Communion was broken between God and humankind when Adam and Eve ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They were ejected from Eden, and death and suffering entered the world.

The end of the Bible is the restoration of communion with God by the death of Jesus, who took our sins upon himself. By his death, heaven became reachable – heaven, the new, eternal Eden.

Communion was broken by eating from a forbidden tree; it’s restored, symbolically, by eating communion, in remembrance of Jesus’s Last Supper.

7. Communion and the secular world.

Communion and alienation are important themes in our society. That’s true whether you’re a believer or not.

I didn’t take the privilege to serve in the armed forces. But I’ve heard that love of their fellow-warriors can lead warriors to sacrifice themselves. Warriors who sacrifice themselves for others are heroes.

There’s wisdom in Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s archest villains were dividers: Richard III and Iago. Iago had a genius for creating division. At the end of Othello, Shakespeare is so certain that his audience despises Iago that he ends the play on the crowd-pleasing note of Iago being led off to suffer imaginative tortures.

8. Living in alienation and in communion.

Communion and alienation are central to Jesus’s instructions to us. "Love one another" is a call to communion. "Judge not lest ye be judged" is a warning against alienation.

When I was young, I judged harshly and often. I often hated somebody for some moral failing that I spotted in him, and I was vocal about it. A slightly-younger friend of mine adopted my habit of expressive hatred. Even then, before I was religious, I saw this and regretted that of all of my traits my younger friend chose that one for himself.

Judging somebody makes that person an outsider. I made a lot of outsiders in my own young mind. Forgiveness makes a person an insider.

9. Striving for communion.

To sum up, communion is good, alienation is bad, and we should always consider whether our words and acts lead to one or the other.

I’ve put off death, but I’ve not put off death forever. And any death, when it comes, is better if you’re loved than if you’re hated. This might seem obvious. Maybe I’m instructing mostly myself.

But maybe not. To say that America is polarized is to state the obvious. Left hates right, and right hates left. I believe that some organizations strive to stir up hatred among Americans. (To my mind, one organization does this more than any other.) We should strive for common ground, for a respectful restoration of communion among ourselves and with other nations, religions, and peoples where possible.