Death and silence.

Today meeting was very very quiet. We've lost another Friend this week, a 91 year old woman in an advanced stage of Alzheimer's. She was a hard-working contributor to the Quaker Meeting where ever she lived for most of her life, and many at Meeting today clearly felt a sense of quiet sadness over the loss, not just due to her death, but the loss of her mental presence when this horrible disease took her self-awareness away from her.

It was quiet. For the entire hour.

I thought about death and how we are tempted to think it's goodbye forever when someone passes away. I don't hypothesize about what happens after we die. But I do try to listen to God and the God I listen to is present and real to me. And I don't believe that omnipresent Love is absent or dissolves because we go through some physical change we call death.

So I won't write about what I think is true about human "life after death" but I can write unswervingly about what I believe to be true about God. And in the end I think that is what matters.

A fellow Friend wrote me just yesterday about the passing of his parents several years ago, that there were "still a whole list of "should have's" written on my heart. But they are fading."

I don't think they fade. I think those "might have beens and should have dones" are healed as we get closer to God and recognize our one-ness with Life and Love and Truth. We can connect to everyone else on this planet, and yes, those who have passed from it, by recognizing that one-ness. I love the term Namaste, which the blog by the same name points out:


As defined by Mahatma Gandhi: In India when people meet and part they often say, Namaste' which means:

"I honor the place within you where the entire Universe resides;
I honor the place within you of love, of light, of truth, of peace;
I honor the place within you, where,
when you are in that place in you,
and I am in that place in me,
there is only one of us."

That place within that is holy? It outlives death. I am convinced.