I am no scholar but I want to know how we human creatures participate in eternal truth ... it doesn't seem we can arrive by pure reason at the point where revelation begins ... that god is not one only but also three ... the closest we get by reason alone ... the boldest we can be ... is to start by calling it an hypothesis ... resolving now to call it so we should begin with the evidence ... what could we expect to find if this were a true revelation ... with your indulgence I would like to start in reverse ... not with birth but with death ... not a hospital but a hospice ... doesn't matter take your pick a fifty-year old man an eight-year old boy an eighteen-year old girl ... in the building or just in the system at home ... but not by accident and not suddenly ... this death will be a process like a birth or a wedding ... anticipated arranged provided for and participated in by members of a community caring for each other as it proceeds ... there'll be machines to put in place and people to write up schedules and leave instructions ... and there'll be talk lots of it over time ... and it'll be as nothing if the patient revives and survives another twenty forty sixty years ... it's not body or mind we mean here but spirit
cf Ira Byock, Dying Well, 1997
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