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O'Malley's Best Life-Giving Death I'm not overly fond of those cautious bridesmaids who hoarded their oil. I realize I'm too judgmental, but I'm uncomfortable with people who are guarded, reserved, restrained. I'm not against thrift or prudence--only when they undermine openhandedness, and spontaneity, and risk. Any crucifix tells me inescapably Jesus held nothing back. Had he been cautious, they'd have left him alone. You don't crucify an irrelevance. Faced with friends in need of lamp oil, I'd hope a Christian would say, "Hell, if all ten lamps go out, so what? Might even be fun pawing around together in the dark. And if the master who took his sweet time coming can't forgive us for getting bored and falling asleep, who wants to party with a heartless nit-picker like that anyway?" But that's not to undercut the burden of the story, which is similarly (if more vulgarly) embodied in "Ya better watch out, ya better not cry...." because you never know when the reckoning's coming. To Matthew's audience, the "bridegroom" was Jesus coming at the end of the world--which, we now know, has taken considerably longer than expected. But that doesn't let a modern Christian off the story's hook. For us, the bridegroom is death. Grim, but a fact. Peer into your future and ask, "Will I be successful? Will my marriage last? Will my kids be proud of me and I of them?" Your life right now is focused on preparing a self to "assure" the answers will be "yes." But no guarantees; too many curves in the road ahead, too many predictable unpredictables. The answer to future questions is: "Que sera, sera"--Whatever will be, will be. Except for one event: Nobody gets out of here alive. Each of us will die. Today, death is as obscene as sex to Victorians. On the one hand, we deny it: don't talk about in front of the children, hide it away in nursing homes and hospitals. Yet on the other hand, death's trivialized. By the time you hit kindergarten, you'd seen more deaths on TV--real and scripted--than a veteran in the army of Napoleon. As a result, death isn't real to us. On the one hand, over-awareness of one's death is crippling; you wouldn't run the risk of getting out of bed in the morning. Yet refusal to admit one's own death is equally crippling; you live an illusion- "Oh, I've got plenty of time." Maybe. Maybe not. Last year 95,000 people died accidental deaths, "before their time," 27,000 of them under 24. Statistics predict 67% of you will reach 70. But, undeniably, 33% of you won't. Grim, but a fact. Three indisputable truths about death: it's inevitable, it's unpredictable, and it renders everything before it unchangeable. But although death's a very maudlin fact to ponder, owning the fact of your own death can be, ironically, very liberating. First, it shows the real value of time. Nobody values dirt; there's so much of it; but gold and diamonds are precious because they're relatively rare. Now we find--now we're polluting- even air and water are more precious than we'd thought. So too our days. The breakfasts you'll eat are a finite number. Because I've really wrapped my head around that, I never wake up grouchy the way a lot of people do: "Oh, God, another day!" Nope. It's "Oh, God! Another day!" A lot of people worthier than I didn't wake up this morning. I did. When you realize every day is a gift you did nothing to deserve, it tends to make an honorable person grateful. And vigilant. Forget about death catching me with some unspeakable sin on my soul. God forbid Death should ever catch me bored, or bitter, or living half-assedly. Owning your own death shows you the value not only of time but the value of everything. It puts everything into proper perspective. If you knew you were going to die in a month, all the things ads and commercials tell you are important would show themselves as not important at all. You never saw a U-Haul hitched to a hearse. Death tells you that what small-minded people think of you really doesn't matter. And it tells you a bruised ego or a bitter grudge are not really worth more than the friendship they threaten to obliterate. Understanding death makes you aware that, one day, it'll be too late to say "I'm sorry," too late to say "I love you." All my adult life, my mother was in one hospital after the other, again and again, but my Dad never complained. But one time they'd come to visit me in the seminary, and as they were getting in the car to go home, Dad got me alone and said, "Pray for us, Bill. This last year's been hell." I hadn't kissed my Dad in my whole life, but right then I didn't care whether everybody in that seminary was looking out the windows at us. I kissed my Dad goodbye. It was the last time I ever saw him alive. God, was I glad I blew my cool. God, I was so lucky. We always tell ourselves we'll tell them when the time is right. Trouble is, most often we won't know it was the right time--till the right time is irretrievably past. Grasping the truth of death can make everything in your life so much more precious.
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