I am travelling today to say goodbye to my brother. In his hospice. There will be loss with approaching absence. I feel it in my chest. People talk about “feeling emotional”, but I have always wondered – “what do you mean; which emotion”. Is this what is being described?. A whelming, a wave coming from below, threatening perhaps to overflow – to overwhelm. The sensation is a reminder or reconnection to other losses. Parents, cousins, friends. Each echoing the experience of our birth; traumatically torn and separated from mother and pitched out into an alien world. Ah, but separation is necessary. Boundary is a precondition for the experience of love; without a frontier how would the joy of connection and integration be possible?

We are then born – and not by our choice. Our separate body grows, and brings with it a growing sense of self. This can be frightening, exciting, ecstatic and engrossing – this discovery of our ego as it forms within the material world. It is easy to forget that we remain a part of all-that-is; particularly in our 21st century as skin-on-skin and eye-to-eye contact is replaced by screens and bits and bytes of stuff.

Reality is relative. We know nothing except as measured against something else. For materialists and narcissists – this yardstick is self rather than other. This is an illusion. It is Martin Buber’s state of existence as “I-It”. It takes bravery and determination to stay vulnerable and open to the infinite otherness of nature, people and God. It requires patience and trust to wait for the moments of grace which Buber describes as “I-Thou”. These are glimpses of the love that is the force that drives existence forward. Narcissists and evangelical atheists are absorbed in their clever and beautiful selves, and they miss the truth in these moments when “the fire and the rose are one” and “all manner of thing shall be well”. As Eliot puts it elsewhere – “do not let me hear of the wisdom of old men, but rather or their folly. Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession, of belonging to another, or to others, or to God”.

Our self and ego dies alongside the dissolution of our body – and it rages against the “dying of the light” whilst seeking to lose itself in an orgy of materialism. Me me me.

Yet

Yet, there is as Jung puts it also a Self – Self with a capital S. This does not die since it is and always was connected to the universe. “At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless”. Said otherwise – Self is Soul; and it – and we – belong to each other and to God. Within this we are together eternally; part of “the Word existing beyond time”.

I am so grateful that my brother is dying in that hope and belief; not knowing exactly what will come, but trusting in Christ and the connection to Self, as self dies. We have a reason to be confident, we have each been here before. After all, when we were secure in our mother’s womb we had no conception of a world outside. Yet here we all are. What comes next for my brother is death; but at the same time life. This is as incomprehensible to us now as independent life would have been before our last birth.

I will not rage against the dying of the light, rather I will stand as witness to the loving connection that is the essence of my brother’s spirit and to its rebirth into a place beyond space-time. Beyond, but infinitely close to us. Together. I honour the courage you have, my brother, open as you are to grace. Therefore I summon joyful tears and salute the flighting of your wight. Adieu x