Henry James’ last words are reputed to have been, “Here it is at last, the distinguished thing,” and indeed he captures the perennial task of postponement in which we all live. The human mind knows, whether we admit it or not, that we don’t know what happens. For some, the uncertainty becomes the glue of certainty that there is nothing beyond the grave. This hangs its hat on the rough edge of rationality, insisting that man’s refusal to accept the truth is the source of all sorts of grandiose fantasies. In contradistinction to this notion is the legendary belief in many African tribal societies that the presence of the ancestors continues from supernatural issue in the here and now. This is where what we mean by religion begins to cross over in the realm of magic, giving rise to derision about the fantastic. Yet early philosophers were interested in visitors who appear in dreams.
Human beings work hard at living, social education and moral values, as well as accomplishments and setting examples, whether in a practical sense or more acclaimed, but we cannot create life or know what it is. We are in the same boat when it comes to speculation about the abyss, but should never trivialize death. Many people consider it the most important statement in a person’s life. Others regard it for a footnote of little consequence to their remembrance. In this sense, some live for the hereafter, others for the day.
Although there is much in lifespan psychology about the cultivation of children, their minds, their habitats, their trust, health and character, exploring Freud, Bonhoeffer, Adler and Dreikurs, Gardner, Erikson, Kohlberg, Piaget, Baumrind and others, the most powerful forces of wealth and prosperity, good fortune and wisdom cannot forever forestall the day of death and because the presence is in our lives of things gone before, the characteristic of veneration arises in how we remember the past and treat the dying and the dead. There are psychological and spiritual explanations, there are religious reasons, there is a depth of meditation we might think of as art, but our beliefs become servants of an attempt to calm the mortal letting go and we carry these beliefs into our treatment of the rituals surrounding the process of funeral, burial, remembrance and healing of loss by veneration. I will now visit two responses to death that are deep with meaning and ritual, and the context by which they announce their terrestrial authority.
Both Li-Ling Hsiao and Emily Ahern write about Taoist practices in the Taiwan areas of Chinese culture, describing the chantings and tablets that bear the name of the dead to the Ancestral Hall of the village where the permanent sense of belonging is held in family tree inscriptions. Under Tao training they had special spiritual musicians, (Hsiao, 2012, p. 233) and placed bones in a earthenware pot after cremation for reasons of reaching to eternity with the mortal remains. They have professional geomancers who advise on placing objects in the grave, and hold seances to inquire into the comfort of the deceased. (Ahern, p. 180). Half in dread of inauspicious results of hard feeling from the hereafter, and partly from a sense of loyalty and obligation, there is an attempt to ascertain that the omens are good and the emotions fulfilled, that the life had been honored and duties carefully and thoroughly indulged with meaning and love.
It seems to me from these studies that there are perhaps what could be described as two prominent considerations in the Taoist funeral services limned in the Taiwanese cultural beliefs these studies focus on in the modern world are: establishing pride of place, adding the names of the deceased to the tablets of the ancestors in the Temples, which is a status of belonging that is assured and a right of filial piety; the other would be acknowledgement of what they achieved and person they were, how they are remembered and will be missed, what potentials and abilities were lost. These come together in a supernatural way that seems to contain the place in their families of mourning, an act of setting right and making sure.
One finds something similar in Judaism, in the tearful, but beautiful Kaddish read to initiate and celebrate the opening of the gates of heaven, for it is in the Kaddish that we praise the spirit by our tears, the soul of the dead by celebrating the admission; the prayer is pathetic, gorgeous, terrible and sweet, and it conveys the one most precious thing that you can hope for other than life, that someone cherished you, that your treasured desire to live was loved and felt by another with whom you had endearing connection, bound by grace:
Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba
b’alma di v’ra chirutei,
v’yamlich malchutei,
b’chayeichon uv’yomeichon
uv’chayei d’chol beit Yisrael,
baagala uviz’man kariv,
v’im’ru: Amen.
Y’hei sh’mei raba m’varach
l’alam ul’almei almaya.
Yitbarach v’yishtabach v’yitpaar
v’yitromam v’yitnasei,
v’yit’hadar v’yitaleh v’yit’halal
sh’mei d’kud’sha b’rich hu,
l’eila min kol birchata v’shirata,
tushb’chata v’nechemata,
daamiran b’alma, v’imru: Amen.
The gorgeous emotion is a tie that binds the community’s loss of an individual to the primary forces that unite us as a species. Whether Taoist or Jewish, as in many other ways, there is a feeling among some that their way is the true way, among others more charitable that their way is only a way among others, equally emotive, reasonable and worthy of prestige, and so there is hope in the similarities.
Now shall I explain there is only One Truth by the Doctrine of the Absent Mercy? My opinion?
Absolute, non-jingoistic, unvarnished, heavenly revealed, widely known
Absolute Truth
What the Russians perhaps mean by their social forum word: Pravda, which means the Glorious, Unassailable, Absolute Truth: Let the Majesty of The Truth unfold among the paradisaic dances of the eternally hopeful little flowers we call man that you may go whether gently or no into that good night from the bed or the floor?
The Maybe-less Pravda
Even those who appear serene at death which came to them peacefully in their slumber, unwitnessed by the assembled, the maidens and knaves around Sir Don Quixote as he lay imperishable, his soft breath quieting beyond all quiet, the Sainted Ladies of the Dark Ages, the humble in their NORC’s, all who arrive at the Gates of the Archangel of Absent Mercy must traverse the Pitiless Heropass guarded by Cerberus the Three-Headed K-9. No averting of the eyes, offering of the back, or prostrations to the Holy Father will avail you of the Final Accountant. In the wizardry of a seemingly endless blink of the divine eye you are beset with every manner of ratty alien places and Gestapo holes as bemuses Saint Nameless by with which to so do you petrify in horrendous, unfair lucidity. If you are especially unlucky a griffin-like Eagle with iron grasp will whoosh you over a suffocatingly deep abyss of everlasting emptiness, like boy am I gonna fall into dat, practically annihilates your desperately clinging mind, while the Great Petitioner Angelo Kong the Never Before Named hollers and wails at the Door of Absent Mercy, “Give them a break!” And it seems from this that malice alone holds sway thereafter…
... but if you pray Allah and do the 40 ministrations you are engulfed with serenity and allowed return to your nub from which again perhaps one day you will awaken full of feeling for the illusory realm of Flesh and Blood.
This, in their hearts, all men have always known
As surely as Doubt doth guide them.
Works Cited
Ahern, E. 1973. The Cult of the Dead in a Chinese Village, Stanford Press.
Hsiao, L., 2012, The Soul and its Ceremonies: Funeral Practice in Modern Taiwan, Southeast
Review of Asian Studies.