A Meditation View

I was recently the recipient of a medical mistake: my doctor injected me with double the prescribed dose of a notably toxic drug. Everyone I know is appalled at this error, and the results for my health won’t be known for a few more weeks.  Hopefully, with a lot of luck and prayer, I may escape serious complications, but maybe not.  I will likely live, however.  Between discovering this mistake and reaching the prescribing specialist for consultation I spent four days wondering if I was going to die for such a silly reason. It put me in mind of my mortality, you might say.

            Then I thought: many people die for silly reasons.  They don’t necessarily die for a noble reason, a tragic reason, or even a complicated reason.  Sophie Scholl died for a noble reason, beheaded as a leader of the White Rose, the German university student’s resistance movement to the Nazis. The composer Benjamin Britten died for a complicated reason: endocarditis, complicated by his need to complete his opera Death in Venice instead of having a critical heart operation, and then the failure to thrive of his eventual heart operation, which left the pianist’s right hand damaged due to a stroke under anaesthetic, his heart and body weakening month by month for two years, until he handed over the five pages of his uncompleted final cantata to Rostropovich on his deathbed.  And some people die for no apparent reason at all, yielding up the spirit before they reach the finish line of an enterprise they confidently expect to complete when they begin.

            And I wondered: who would miss me?  And who would I miss?  Among others, I would miss the gardener, Lisa: we’ve been planning a Japanese garden, the ground already levelled where we intend a small meditation view. I’m consulting books, designs, photographs; learning the aesthetic, the space, the natural materials. We mean to visit the plant nursery soon so a drift of azaleas will float cloudlike under the Japanese maples. I would have missed out on all that.  Not for nothing did God create a garden, and so also in the garden Mary Magdalene met her resurrected Lord and Teacher.

            In the history of the world, one person has died for an intelligent reason.

Jesus of Nazareth, being condemned to execution by the Roman Imperial government, offered up his life to God as satisfaction for the sins of the whole world, and witnessed to the eternal value of every human being. Such intelligence is called wisdom, divine wisdom, by the wise.