by Keith Miller | Bible, Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Keith,
What have you learned as a Christian about death and dying? As an 84-year-old, how are you handling the fact that statistically your own death is not far off for you?
In the first place, death is real for everyone—Christians and all others. But death is also the most important deterrent to serious crime and abuse of others who are weaker than we. In fact, without death most of the morality we have could be lost. The fear of death keeps us from going too far since people could kill us. And with regard to the reign of God in human experience, death is like a beeper light at the end of every life reminding us all that we apparently have a limited time to consider God’s offer of a creative, loving and intimate relationship that starts in this life but extends beyond death. And because of this offer from God we can risk all or part of our lives loving and experiencing love that can transform all of life into fulfilling experiences of freedom from the irrational fears of rejection, injury and death.
I learned a number of things about death and dying between my eighteenth and twenty-ninth birthdays. During that time all of my family of origin either died or were killed. And I found myself planning funerals, picking out coffins and doing the paper work to clear up estates from age eighteen to twenty-eight. I had no idea how unusual that was. I just had to step up and do things because of the way things unfolded.
But I didn’t face the stark fact that I am going to die until the last member of our family—my mother, Mabel Olivia Davis Miller, died.
When she was sixty-three, she discovered she had terminal cancer and had only a few months to live. Since she was the youngest child of her family by fourteen years, her sisters and brothers had predeceased her, she was pretty much alone. When she had to be hospitalized, I asked the major company I worked for to transfer me to their Oklahoma City office (from Texas) so I could be with my mother who had been a sorority housemother in Norman twenty miles away.
I worked in the daytime and took the night nurse’s place for financial reasons. Because of that I got to sit with her while she was dying. And I was amazed. She was calm about her own death. She had me get a notebook so she could tell me what I would need to do as the last member of our family. She told me who to get for a funeral director—a friend of my father’s of whom I had never heard. Then she told me what to give to some cousins in Missouri whom I hadn’t known since I was a child. And she told me some people to notify when she died who would be hurt if they weren’t contacted—and she even helped me to pick out the clothes she’d be buried in—since I would have had no idea.
The bottom line was, here was a brilliant woman dying and in a good bit of pain who was thinking totally about other people. When everything was planned, a few days before her death, she said to me very calmly. “I wonder what death will be like. I wonder if there will be anything like consciousness and if Jesus was right when he said there will be a “place” for each of us—and if so, will we recognize those who have gone before.”
And I realized something I’ve never forgotten: that we learn how to face death by watching people do it with courage and trust.
But even with all that experience I never let my weight down into the stark fear and awareness that I am going to die—until after my mother’s death. After her funeral, I went into our family home in Tulsa and arranged for most of the things to be given to the Salvation Army. The last place I went to was the basement. There was a large room in the center and several smaller rooms with doors opening into the big room. When someone had died, what remained of their personal effects had been put in one of the separate rooms. No one wanted to go through them. But now there was no one else to go down those stairs to go through it all.
I remember sitting on the floor of that big room with boxes of family pictures and mementos of my dead family’s lives all around me. I felt helpless. I began to cry when I realized that there was no one left to tell me who the people and occasions in those pictures were. When I realized that I’d never know, I also realized that I’d just have to burn those last remaining evidences that these people had lived—people who had been so dear to my family and who had loved me. I felt lost and very sad.
That night I had a vivid dream. I was lying in a wooden box with my eyes closed. I sensed that someone was about to nail down the lid but I couldn’t get my eyes open or move my mouth as I realized I was being nailed in a coffin alive! I panicked!
Finally, with all my strength, I exploded my muscles and kicked at the top and woke up trying to scream “I’M ALIVE!”
The next morning as I sat on the basement floor in the midst of the boxes, I realized in a different way that I am going to die. And I thought about that. Then something occurred to me I’d never thought before and I said to God, “Whatever your plan about death is, if it’s good enough for them (and I indicated the boxes of pictures) it’s good enough for me.” And in that moment in the gray concrete basement I felt in some strange way that I had joined the human race. That was when I realized that death is like a red beacon at the end of the tunnel reminding us that if we want to live a good and loving life here on earth, we should get at it, since our time is limited.
Several months before my mother died I had committed as much of my life as I knew to as much of God as I knew in Jesus. However at that time I had not thought about my own death and how people who might see a picture of me might not know my name. And for me, those few minutes alone with the family’s past in that gray basement constituted one of the milestone steps in realizing that I had to begin to trust every part of my life to God in order to live in Reality.
Over the years I have been very healthy physically and I’m grateful about that. As a counselor I have also learned that everyone is afraid at some level—afraid of a few things or a lot of things. But I’ve also learned that Jesus left us an incredible Life Plan that is designed to free us from fear by teaching us to receive God’s love and acceptance and continual presence right now—without having to earn it. And realizing that I was loved by God somehow freed me to want to give other people who were lonely and afraid the same self-limiting love I felt from God and from other people I met the next few years who were attempting to surrender their whole lives to Him.
Since that time when I hear that someone I know has died, I realize that the best thing I can bring to their family is to be present during the time of the funeral. At first I didn’t want to see people who had lost a loved one because I didn’t know what to say. But then I remembered that Jesus didn’t promise to bring us brilliant or fancy gifts. He just promised to be with us—he promised us his presence. So now I can go and sit with a friend or family member without the burden of having something brilliant to say but just to listen to them tell what happened, how the sickness or death went, or whatever they want to say, if anything.
And over the years, I’ve learned that for me the acts of loving people, helping out if possible or just walking alongside them in simple ways by being present—all of these are parts of what Jesus promised each of us—as an aspect of loving us specifically. The bottom line is: we will never have to be alone again. He will be with us. And it is that love (not courage) that sometimes can cast out fear—even of death. (see John 4)
Regarding my own upcoming death, sometimes I wake up at night afraid. And when I do, I stop and surrender my whole life once more and thank Him for the remarkable years I’ve already had and for the people he’s put in my life to love. But mostly I’m filled with gratitude, and I’m more in love with my wife, Andrea, my grown kids and grandkids, great grandkids, old friends, and the crazy people I still meet with several times a week who continue to teach me how to live and love. So I’d like to hang around a while longer. I am very happy and love the work God has given me to do, as Andrea and I work together to finish a book about a new perspective that we have heard God offering in His story as we try to walk in it.
Lord, thank you that as we learn to love you and other people as you love us, you help us to trust our relationship with you and its continuance beyond pain and death—and the miracle is that we can begin to trust other people as you act toward us in trustworthy ways. Help us to surrender our lives right now—and then help us to look around and see who we might love and help for you today. Amen.
***
“You trust God, don’t you? Trust me. There is plenty of room for you in my Father’s home. If that weren’t so, would I have told you that I’m on my way to get a room ready for you? And if I’m on my way to get your room ready, I’ll come back and get you so you can live where I live.” (Jn. 14:1-4, The Message)
“This image of planting a dead seed and raising a live plant is a mere sketch at best, but perhaps it will help in approaching the mystery of the resurrection body—but only if you keep in mind that when we’re raised, we’re raised for good, alive forever! The corpse that’s planted is no beauty, but when it’s raised, it’s glorious. Put in the ground weak, it comes up powerful. The seed sown is natural; the seed grown is supernatural—same seed, same body, but what a difference from when it goes down in physical mortality to when it is raised up in spiritual immortality!” (1 Cor. 15: 42-44, The Message)
“God is love. When we take up permanent residence in a life of love, we live in God and God lives in us. This way, love has the run of the house, becomes at home and mature in us, so that we’re free of worry on Judgment Day—our standing in the world is identical with Christ’s. There is no room in love for fear. Well-formed love banishes fear. Since fear is crippling, a fearful life—fear of death, fear of judgment—is one not yet fully formed in love.” (1 John 4:17-18, The Message)
“You’re blessed when you get your inside world—your mind and heart—put right. Then you can see God in the outside world. (Matt. 5:8, The Message)
“You don’t have to wait for the End. I am, right now, Resurrection and Life. The one who believes in me, even though he or she dies, will live. And everyone who lives believing in me does not ultimately die at all.” (John 11:25, The Message)
by Keith Miller | Christian Living, Weekly Devotional
Dear Keith,
Where and how did you learn to be open about personal problems all Christians face?
A “C-minus!” I couldn’t believe it! I’d been a good student all my life and had spent hours developing, writing, and editing this, my first sermon for a homiletics class in seminary. I was angry, but, more than that, I was confused. The sermon represented the way I had always thought preachers should preach: by sharing their own personal experience, strength and hope along with the biblical message. But my professor of preaching had dismissed my sermon as being unacceptable.
After pointing out some minor structural mistakes that I could agree with, he leaned back in his chair, drummed his fingers together, and said, “The reason your grade was a C minus was because you were ‘personal.’ You used the first person singular to describe the problems with which you were dealing.” He paused and then went on. “In the first place, using the first person singular in a sermon is not effective. And besides, it is not in good taste.” He pushed my sermon across the smooth surface of the large desk.
But try as I would I could not shake the notion that one’s own feelings and experiences of pain, fear, anger, guilt, shame, sadness, and joy could be drawbridges over which a communicator could carry the message and love of God into the deepest levels of people’s lives. I felt that the world and the church had become so depersonalized that people were growing more and more isolated. Somehow the stance of the “expert” communicator expounding abstract concepts or telling laymen how they should live seemed to further the depersonalizing process. Worse, the message of God’s healing, self-limiting love didn’t appear to be catching the attention of the modern world—even many of those already in churches.
I knew that what I needed personally was a model: someone who was seriously trying to be God’s person and to have intellectual integrity but who also faced the kinds of fears, problems, and failures that I faced. Evidently, this was not a combination to be found in a single Christian communicator. People seriously committed to God who were professional teachers or communicators either did not have the kind of struggles I had, or considered them too insignificant or “personal” to be mentioned. I had met some other strugglers who, like me, were trying to slug it out with this paradox, but we were all nobodies. I had never run across a communicator with any authority who admitted to this strange predicament of feeling unable to be continually whole and righteous, in spite of the power and joy to be found in the gospel.
Then, in 1965, Dr. Paul Tournier[1] came from Switzerland to speak at a conference at Laity Lodge, a new adult retreat center in the remote hill country of southwest Texas. I was director of the conference center. Although I had heard of Paul Tournier, I had never read anything he had written.
Many of the people attending the conference had traveled hundreds of miles for the sold out weekend. As we all gathered for the first session, I wondered how well Tournier would be able to cross the language barrier from his French through an interpreter to us. I had no idea what content to expect.
The first evening Dr. Tournier spoke, the “great hall” at the lodge was filled with psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors of all varieties, Christian ministers, and lay leaders from various professions. The air was almost electric with expectation, and I realized how much the conference guests were looking forward to hearing this man whose books they had read.
Then he began to speak. Within five minutes the room had faded, and we were transported into another world. We heard a little boy describing his struggle with loneliness and self-doubt almost sixty years before in a country several thousand miles away. You could have heard a pin drop on the stone floor. I sat behind the speaker near the huge fireplace and looked past Paul Tournier into the eyes of almost a hundred sophisticated American professionals. In those wide open eyes, I could see other lonely little boys and girls reliving their own struggles for identity and worth.
After fifteen or twenty minutes a strange thing began to happen, something I have never seen happen before or since. As Paul spoke in French, we found ourselves nodding in agreement and understanding—before his words were translated. We trusted him so much and felt he understood us so well, that we knew at a subconscious level we would resonate with what he was saying. He described problems, doubts, joys, meanings and fears—many of which still existed for him—and spoke of them naturally, as if they were materials God normally worked with in his healing ministry among all people, Christians included.
Before us was a man who did not even speak our language, a man in his sixties who wore a wrinkled tweed suit, and was exhausted from a whirlwind trip across America. And yet as he spoke fatigue, age, clothes, and language differences all faded into the background. He turned periodically to make eye contact with those of us behind him. I was conscious mainly of his sparkling eyes, his personal transparency, and a glow of genuine caring about his face. As he spoke I heard and felt love and the truth of God about my own life.
I found myself having to fight back tears—tears of relief and gratitude, and release. I was not alone because of my own struggles. I had sensed that to be healed we need more than good medical advice or even excellent psychological counseling. We need presence—vulnerable, personal presence. I knew the Bible claimed that was what God gave us in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit: his own presence to heal and strengthen us. And I had felt that somehow we Christians were to continually embrace the personal realities of life and presence of God, and somehow be channels to convey that healing presence personally to other people’s lives through our own openness and vulnerability. In Paul Tournier I met at last a living model of the kind of communication I was trying in a stumbling, uncertain way to find. And he obviously knew a lot about the source and healing of psychological difficulties.
I made two decisions during that conference. First, I would go back to school to get some psychological training since I realized that I needed to know more about the source and nature of the problems people faced. Second, as soon as I finished the book manuscript I was working on, I would read some of Paul Tournier’s books. I was already in the process of writing a book for new Christians about living in a personal relationship with God in their everyday lives. Other books of this sort seemed to me overly pious, and they did not deal with the actual inner and relational “stumbling blocks” that had bothered me as a new Christian. After Tournier’s visit, I completed the manuscript of that, my first book, with great enthusiasm.
When I had sent that manuscript to a publisher, the next thing I did was read The Meaning of Persons. Again, tears. For years I had been looking for books whose authors were real and transparent so that I could identify with their problems and move toward healing in Christ. The closest thing I had found was Augustine’s Confessions (written in the 5th century), which is what had finally persuaded me to write a book about my own struggles as a contemporary Christian. But if I had read Tournier first, I might not have felt the need to write my own first book, The Taste of New Wine.
Knowing that a man existed who loved God, (and had apparently surrendered his whole life to God) who used the discoveries and methods of scientific investigation, and yet faced his own humanity did something for me. And knowing that, at least partially because of Christ, this man could afford to be honest about his own struggles, helped push me far beyond my own small horizons of security and faith.
From that day forward Paul Tournier became a mentor and friend, until his death in 1986. We traveled and spoke in conferences with other Americans and Europeans in Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece. His work has influenced me deeply. But more, his life and his way of personal dialogue gave me a direction for living as a Christian which has brought more hope and courage than I could have imagined—which is why I am writing this to you.
Dear Lord, Thank you for letting me see you in a man with a skin face, who had the courage to be himself—so we could see through him to the Father who created him—and the rest of us. Help me to trust you enough more often to share honestly the life I’m finding in You with people I meet along the ways you take me. And help anyone who may be reading this prayer to know how beautiful they are when they trust you with their lives—as scary as it is at times. In Jesus’ name, amen.
***
(St.) Frances prayed day and night that God would give all men the courage to be themselves instead of what others expected them to be.
He did not want men to enter the brotherhood… he only wanted them to be free, to be what they wanted to be in their own hearts. For God spoke differently to every man, calling one to marriage, another to virginity, one to the city, another to the country, one to work with his mind and another with his hands. But who was brave enough to look into his own heart and ask if this is what he should be doing, what he really wanted to do with his life?
-Murray Bodo
Francis: The Journey and the Dream
Hypocrisy is a strange slavery. When I do so much of what I do to gain the respect of others, I get warm feelings (when the respect comes). But when the respect and (or applause) are absent I am frantic and depressed—which tells me I am a hypocrite and a slave to an “audience” out there.
I don’t want any more of that.
-Keith Miller, Note from his journal
March 14, 1984
Honesty with oneself as laid down by psychoanalysis is the condition of man in which biblical revelation (can) touch him, in which the sense of guilt, the very mainstream of morality matures.
-Paul Tournier, Guilt and Grace
What keeps us from being ourselves, Carl Rogers says, “it is always fear: of a conflict, of being rejected, or breaking up a harmonious relationship. But it is the very lack of congruence which stands in the way of the establishment of true relationships between persons.
-Paul Tournier, The Violence Within
[1] Paul Tournier (May 12, 1898 – October 7, 1986) was a Swiss physician and author who had acquired a worldwide audience for his work in pastoral counseling. His ideas had a significant impact on the spiritual and psychosocial aspects of routine patient care, and he had been called the twentieth century’s most famous Christian physician.
