{"id":14540,"date":"2022-06-13T16:23:52","date_gmt":"2022-06-13T16:23:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lediemchihue.com\/?p=14540"},"modified":"2022-06-13T16:23:55","modified_gmt":"2022-06-13T16:23:55","slug":"david-guy-trust-in-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lediemchihue.com\/?p=14540","title":{"rendered":"David Guy – Trust In Life"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Last week, while I was eating lunch with a friend, he brought up a subject many of us are talking about these days: we\u2019re nearing the end of our lives and wondering what\u2019s next. His brother-in-law had just lost his wife to pancreatic cancer; she died just weeks after her diagnosis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019re living with people we love and we don\u2019t know how much longer that will be true,\u201d my friend said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve got to value that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He\u2019s right, of course. It was sad to hear how his brother-in-law was suddenly bereft. Although I suppose death always seems sudden when it actually happens. But it\u2019s hard to remember our mortality day by day, moment by moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDo you think that religious believers, people who believe in the afterlife, have an easier time at the end of their lives than others?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I stopped to consider this question. He seemed to think it was unquestionably true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou can completely disagree with me if you want,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know, to tell the truth,\u201d I said. \u201cI think there are believers who have a hard time at the end. And non-believers who do okay.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I really think is that none of us knows how we will do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My primary spiritual mentor, Buddhist teacher Larry Rosenberg, has taught that we need to face our fear of death in a raw and unadulterated way. His whole teaching was about facing fear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf we all theoretically have the same amount of fear,\u201d Larry said, \u201cbut one person\u2019s fear is muffled by some religious belief, that\u2019s actually a bad thing. The only way to move beyond fear is really to face it. But you need to face all of it. In that way it\u2019s better to have no faith at all.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Gospels suggest that even Jesus, in the garden when he saw what was happening, and even (in one Gospel) on the cross, faced real despair at the end of his life. He wasn\u2019t shielded by his special relationship to God. He had the full human experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A couple of days after the conversation with my friend, I asked my wife what she thought. She spent a summer working in an AIDS hospice when she was in Divinity School, and saw any number of people die. Some had peaceful deaths. Some deaths were terrifying. But she didn\u2019t think they divided up according to religious belief.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For some people trust comes naturally. Others need to practice it.<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt didn\u2019t seem to matter if they believed in God or not. What was important was something beyond that.\u201d She\u2019d spent a fair amount of time talking to one of her mentors about this question, and the woman agreed with her. \u201cThe thing that was important \u2014 what some people seemed to have and others didn\u2019t \u2014 is what I call trust in life. Some people were able to relax and settle into what they were going through, others weren\u2019t. They fought and resisted.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It wasn\u2019t a matter of believing some particular thing. It was a matter of trusting life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m reminded of a question I once asked my brother. I was rereading the Gospels, many years into my Buddhist practice, and I asked him how he translated the famous verse that evangelicals always quote, \u201cFor God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.\u201d My brother is a lifelong Christian, also a scholar of Greek (and Hebrew). He teaches a Sunday school class where he translates from the original language.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI don\u2019t translate that word as believe,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s not a matter of assenting to some set of propositions. The word means something more like trust. Trust in me, in this way of life I\u2019m showing you.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trust in life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think I lost that trust when my father died, or perhaps even earlier, six months before, when I found out he had leukemia. I was sixteen years old. In the interim I knew my father had a fatal illness, but kept thinking about ways he could beat it: he might have been diagnosed incorrectly; someone might find a cure; he might be the one person in the history of the disease not to die of it. I imagined all kinds of possibilities. They went up in smoke when he died.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I knew intellectually that anyone could die anytime, that there were no guarantees. But there was a natural order of things, a man was supposed to grow old and die, and when my father didn\u2019t have a chance to grow old, I lost my faith in things. I lost trust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was a long period when I couldn\u2019t get it back. I tried to return to the Presbyterian church in my early twenties, and to the Christian church in general; I tried for 10 or 15 years. I think now that I was trying to understand something intellectually that wasn\u2019t intellectual. I was trying to believe things that weren\u2019t believable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was like banging my head against a wall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was one moment that I think of as the low point of my futility. The church I attended was large, and in order to give people a chance to relate it created small study groups where people could get to know each other. My first wife and I joined one, and there we were, in our early twenties, hanging out with a bunch of older people in the stuffy apartment of a fiftyish woman, some kind of Christian educator. She had a Masters degree and led the discussion. At one point, speaking of some missionaries, she said, \u201cI don\u2019t know how they do what they do. Actually, I do know. They have a very strong prayer life.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cA strong prayer life\u201d, I thought. \u201cWhat the hell is that? Where do you get one of those?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I spent a period of years when I had no religious or spiritual life at all (except my life as a writer, which I knew to be spiritual in some way, but that aspect of it was elusive, hard to put my finger on), then met a woman for whom religious life was as natural as waking up in the morning. It wasn\u2019t that she believed some particular thing. She had that quality of trust, even in the face of adversity. She trusted in life. That was probably, at some deep level, what attracted me to her. She had something I needed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She wanted us to have a spiritual practice in common, and she could sense my anger at Christianity. It wasn\u2019t that there was anything wrong with the religion, in my opinion; there was something wrong with me. I was somehow unacceptable, or unaccepting, so we went to a meditation center in Cambridge, where she was in graduate school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There, Larry Rosenberg taught me to sit in a certain way, give up my intellectual endeavors, settle into my body, and accept what I found there and what I was. He taught me to accept life. To trust life. He was also teaching me what prayer was. He was giving me a strong prayer life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wouldn\u2019t hesitate, in fact, to call meditation the practice of trust in life. For some people such trust comes naturally. Others need to practice it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I didn\u2019t need someone to tell me what prayer is theoretically. I needed someone to say: sit this way. Hold your body this way. Settle into yourself. Feel yourself breathing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And trust that. Trust life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s how you get ready to die.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

David Guy\u2019s sixth novel,\u00a0Hank Heals<\/em>, will be published by Monkfish in October. He writes about Buddhism, books, movies, and life .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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