Category: Spirituality

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This was how Santa Muerte was adopted by Mexican culture

This devotion that arose in the center of the country has already reached the borders (north and south) and even crossed the Atlantic Ocean, since in European countries all the iconography of Santa Muerte is retaken as an element of kitsch art.

The cult of the skeletal image, as it is practiced today, emerged in the middle of the 20th century, but has its antecedents in the viceregal period, according to the anthropologist Katia Perdigón.

According to the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), the cult of Santa Muerte is known today for their prayers and the veneration of the skeletal image, which you might think was adopted into Mexican culture. However, it has a long history in Mexico.

In an interview that the INAH conducted with the anthropologist Katia Perdigón, she says that Santa Muerte has its antecedents from colonial times. Although for many the word «death» is a taboo that when mentioning it produces silence, admiration and fear.

The doctor in Social Anthropology, and a pioneer in studies on Santa Muerte, mentioned that this “icon comes from macabre dances and some Greco-Latin designs, hence the presence of the scythe, the mantle and the balance, to mention a few elements ”.

By the 19th century, the followers managed to separate their ideologies and there were some who decided to continue preparing for the “good to die” and continued to worship the image of death.

Since the Colony, it was sought to evangelize devotees and converts so that they had a «good death». Reason why at that time you could see large sculptures with the skeletal image that went out in procession on Good Friday. Of these great sculptures, at least three are preserved in the country: the Holy Death of Yanhuitlán, which is visited in the former Dominican convent of that Oaxacan town; and known as San Bernardo and San Pascual Bailón, in Tepatepec, Hidalgo, and Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas, respectively, said Katia.

«In colonial times, the Catholic Church saw this veneration as heresy towards the skeletal image of death. According to inquisitorial documents from the 17th and 18th centuries that I was able to consult, retaliation was not directed at the people involved, but at the action itselfEven in 1797 a chapel was razed to the ground in the town of San Luis de la Paz, where this cult was practiced, ”said Perdigón Castañeda.

By the 19th century, the followers managed to separate their ideologies and there were some who decided to continue preparing for the «Good to die» and they continued to worship the image of death.

“Thus a totally different iconography emerged, for example, the macabre dances and the representation of the Triumph of Death turned into something else, in such a way that they are retaken to carry out political mockery, this was started by the cartoonist Gabriel Vicente Gahona (‘Picheta’) in the southeast, and years later José Guadalupe Posada did it, with the image of La Catrina ”.

According to the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), the cult of Santa Muerte is known today for its prayers and veneration of the skeletal image, which one might think was adopted into Mexican culture.

«The same,» the anthropologist continued. (Santa Muerte) housewives approach her, that doctors or policemen; However, at the end of the nineties, yellow fever has linked its cult to outlaw groups or people who live or work in the streets, after it was reported that the kidnapper Daniel Arizmendi, alias “El Mochaorejas”, captured in that decade, He was devoted to the image.

The researcher concluded that this devotion that arose in the center of the country has already reached the borders (north and south) and even crossed the Atlantic Ocean, since in European countries all the iconography of Santa Muerte is retaken as an element of art kitsch.

Why the celebration of Santa Muerte on the Day of the Dead

Consider that this mixture of beliefs related to more current religions, found a place on November 2 and that the idea of ​​this day celebrating the dead is already ingrained in the collective consciousness.

Endoveliko, who is a follower of Santa Muerte, says that in Ecatepec Santa Muerte is celebrated because it was on those dates, 17 years ago, that the Congregation that began to organize in the area. Each altar celebrates its anniversary on a different date, and they wanted to take advantage of the Mexican celebration to combine it with their foundation.

He believes that both parties are related: remembering the deceased and venerating Santa Muerte are ideas that have always been combined, Endoveliko considers. “Our celebration is eminently from here because since prehistory so much of Europe and here in America, peoples have always worshiped death with different names, different languagesHere, death was worshiped from the Olmecs, Teotihuacán, the Mexica ”, he explained.

But believe that for a while it went out and tried to silence this cult. Although with the freedom of ideologies in the Mexican Constitution, these beliefs reappeared.

Consider that this mixture of beliefs related to more current religions, found a place on November 2 and that in the collective consciousness The idea of ​​this day celebrating the dead is already ingrained.

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Pa’s Smile

Jaimal Yogis’s dad explained his final wishes: “I’ve gotten so much from Buddhism for good living, I’m not going to pass up their tips for good dying.”

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The first and only time I bought dry ice, the grocery store clerk asked if I was going camping. “No,” I muttered, then managed to stop myself from saying it was for a body. The ice really was to lay my father’s corpse on.

An air force colonel who was skeptical of organized religion, my father, who we call Pa, wasn’t sure the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of leaving the dead undisturbed for three days was necessary. But, as he said after being diagnosed with late stage lung cancer, “I’ve gotten so much from Buddhism for good living, I’m not going to pass up their tips for good dying.”

As if summarizing Socrates in his famous pre-execution speech, Pa often said he had no idea where he was going. ‘If the lights go out, it’ll be a good rest,’ he’d say. ‘And if there’s more, it’ll be a great adventure.’

These three days are not unique to Tibetan, or more accurately, Vajrayana Buddhism. Irish wakes often last two or three days while a soul departs, and Jewish Midrashic texts say a soul hovers over the body for three days (or seven) until the body is buried. The idea behind the three days in Vajrayana Buddhism is that as the breath and heart stop, our gross level of consciousness dissolves but more subtle levels of consciousness remain in the body for up to about seventy-two hours. During that time the subtlest stream of consciousness is said to leave, a transition known to go more smoothly if the body can chill—in Pa’s case literally since under California law dead bodies have to be kept on ice.

“Otherwise they tend to smell like dead bodies,” our hospice nurse informed us.

“Right,” I nodded. “And where do we get the ice?”

“Grocery store.”

“Of course.”

As if summarizing Socrates in his famous pre-execution speech, Pa often said he had no idea where he was going. “If the lights go out, it’ll be a good rest,” he’d say. “And if there’s more, it’ll be a great adventure.” Still, he’d reasoned his way toward the three-day death plan. In addition to reading up on how Vajrayana Buddhists use strict tests to prove they’ve found reincarnations of former teachers, he’d read the work of doctors like Sam Parnia of NYU Langone Health. Dr. Parnia has meticulously catalogued data on people who’ve died clinically, sometimes for hours, before being resuscitated. These briefly dead folks often report vivid dreams after waking, sometimes ones in which they correctly recount what doctors had been saying—“Going to the game later?”—when the patients had no heartbeat. “That’s enough evidence for me,” Pa said. “Don’t poke or prod me for a few days.”

As the actual death part of the three-day death plan approached, we—his family—wondered if having Pa’s cold body steaming on carbon dioxide in the bedroom might intensify our grief. And might it be a little creepy? It turned out to be just the opposite.

Death leaves you in a dreamy shock. You don’t know if you should wail or drive all night to Mexico or finally get to writing your own will. When Pa stopped breathing on a warm summer evening, dressing him in his aloha shirt and favorite Christmas socks, then adorning his room with flowers, was just the beautiful busy work our reeling minds needed. Reading Jane Hirshfield’s “It Was Like This: You Were Happy,” a special request from Pa, while he was actually there in the room felt more heart opening than reading it again while scattering his ashes. And as we sat with Pa each of the three mornings while reading him The Tibetan Book of The Dead—a text meant to help us navigate the space between lives—it felt as if we were on a kind of spiritual tour bus with him, visiting the realms where awakened beings are born from lotuses and truths are whispered on the breeze.

Perhaps most surprising was how much the three-day death plan helped before death. As Pa was starting to show signs of getting close to the end, my sister Ciel and I asked if he would like to hear a Medicine Buddha ceremony that is often done for the sick and dying. “You don’t have to bother with that,” Pa said, continuing his usual stubborn quest to keep us from doting. But we argued that the ceremony would be a good warm-up for when he was down for the count and we were reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which Tibetans actually call The Great Liberation for Hearing in the Bardo. Since this made it sound like the reading was for us, Pa agreed.

We sat around his bed, switching back and forth between botching the Tibetan chanting and reading the English translation. The ceremony took about an hour, and we thought ­­Pa had slept through it. But at the end, he sat up with tears in his eyes. “I am so honored you did that for me,” he said. “And now I’m going to get up and see the sky one more time.”

“We’ll get the wheelchair,” Pa’s wife, Margaret, said reasonably.

“No,” he said, “I’m going to walk.”

Pa had already fallen behind the toilet in such a precarious position we’d needed the fire department to come dislodge him, and he’d been bedridden for days now. But charged up by the chanting, Pa managed to lumber slowly to the back porch, rasping with every breath.

We opened the door. Pa turned his face up bracingly to the blue. He looked so pale, I half expected him to croak right there. Instead, he then looked down at a few small stairs he would have to navigate in order to be fully outside. “Take me back,” he whispered. “I want an easy death. Not to fall off the damn steps.”

We laughed. Finding humor in the face of hardship was one of Pa’s great gifts. But we hadn’t heard zingers with gusto like this for a few weeks. And I think, in addition to the power of the ceremony itself, knowing that his family would be there for three full days—botching more Tibetan chants around him—was a great comfort, a lightening.

Philosophical aspects of the plan were helpful too. In hospice Pa occasionally felt unsure of where—even who—he was. One day he called himself King Henry and my aunt the queen. “You wouldn’t believe what’s happening,” he told me. “It’s like I’m disappearing.” This was scary, but Buddhist wisdom for conscious dying gave Pa a place to put his fears.

According to Vajrayana Buddhists, our gross consciousness is where we construct our version of reality through our senses. This construction is like a video game in our heads in which we are the most important character, the one whose suffering matters most, the one who should win all the gold coins because, as our senses (falsely) tell us, we exist separately from the rest of reality. The more we let go of this illusory separation from others, the more room there is to experience our true blissful and compassionate nature. Vajrayana Buddhist teachers say this true nature is most easily accessible at death because, as opposed to meditative glimpses beyond the veil, in death the gross levels of consciousness drop away automatically. So, when Pa was scared or disoriented, we could remind him that losing a mere idea of himself was not just natural, it was part of spiritual awakening.

In his last hours, Pa’s brow was furrowed and his body appeared tense. He looked like he was trying desperately to remember something. Ciel, Margaret, and I were taking turns sitting with him, and fittingly it was just when Margaret was singing him Nat King Cole’s, “When I Fall in Love,” a song they’d danced to on West Cliff Drive above the sea, that Pa finally let go. As he did, his brow smoothed completely, making him look instantly younger. A distinct half-smile appeared on his lips. A Buddha smile. And whether it was Pa’s newfound bliss, rigor mortis, or some combination of both, that smile remained perfectly serene for all three days.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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The surprising benefits of contemplating your death

Now is the perfect time to face your fear of mortality. Here’s how.

By Sigal Samuel

Nikki Mirghafori has a fantastically unusual career. After getting a PhD in computer science, she’s spent three decades as an artificial intelligence researcher and scientific advisor to tech startups in Silicon Valley. She’s also spent a bunch of time in Myanmar, training with a Buddhist meditation master in the Theravada tradition. Now she teaches Buddhist meditation internationally, alongside her work as a scientist.

One of Mirghafori’s specialties is maranasati, which means mindfulness of death. Mortality might seem like a scary thing to contemplate — in fact, maybe you’re tempted to stop reading this right now — but that’s exactly why I’d say you should keep reading. Death is something we really don’t like to think or talk about, especially in the West. Yet our fear of mortality is what’s driving so much of our anxiety, especially during this pandemic.

Maybe it’s the prospect of your own mortality that scares you. Or maybe you’re like me, and thinking about the mortality of the people you love is really what’s hard to wrestle with.

Either way, I think now is actually a great time to face that fear, to get on intimate terms with it, so that we can learn how to reduce the suffering it brings into our lives.

I recently spoke with Mirghafori for Future Perfect’s limited-series podcast The Way Through, which is all about mining the world’s rich philosophical and spiritual traditions for guidance that can help us through these challenging times.

In our conversation, Mirghafori outlined the benefits of contemplating our mortality. She then walked me through some specific practices for developing mindfulness of death and working through the fear that can come up around that. Some of them are simple, like reciting a few key sentences each morning, and some of them are more … shall we say… intense.

I think they’re all fascinating ways that Buddhists have generated over the centuries to come to terms with the prospect of death rather than trying to escape it.

You can hear our full conversation in the podcast here. A partial transcript, edited for length and clarity, follows.

Sigal Samuel

You’ve worked in Silicon Valley and you still live near there, so I’m sure you’ve encountered the desire in certain tech circles to live forever. There are biohackers who are taking dozens of supplements every day. Some are getting young blood transfusions, trying to put young people’s blood in their veins to live longer. Some are having their bodies or brains preserved in liquid nitrogen, doing cryopreservation so they can be brought back to life one day. What is your feeling about all these efforts?

Nikki Mirghafori

It’s the quest for immortality and the denial of death. Part of it is natural. Human beings have done this for as long as we have been conscious of the fact that we are mortal.

A person who really put this well was Ernest Becker, the author of the seminal book The Denial of Death. I’d like to offer this quote from him:

This is the paradox. A human is out of nature and hopelessly in it. We are dual. Up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill marks to prove it. A human is literally split in two. We have an awareness of our own splendid uniqueness in that we stick out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet we go back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with.

There is a whole field of research in psychology called terror management theory, which started from the work of Ernest Becker. This theory says that there’s a basic psychological conflict that arises from having, on the one hand, a self-preservation instinct, and on the other hand, that realization that death is inevitable.

This psychological conflict produces terror. And how human beings manage this terror is either by embracing cultural beliefs or symbolic systems as ways to counter this biological reality, or doing these various things — cryogenics, trying to find elixirs of life, taking lots of supplements or whatnot.

It’s nothing new. The ancient Egyptians almost 4,000 years ago, and ancient Chinese almost 2,000 years ago, both believed that death-defying technology was right around the corner. The zeitgeist is not so different. We think we are more advanced, but it comes from the same fear, same denial of death.

Sigal Samuel

It seems like in the West, we really have a bad case of that denial. I think we rarely talk about death or are willing to face up to the reality that we’re going to die. We seem to be wanting to always distract ourselves from it.

You are a Buddhist practitioner and you have a practice that is very much the opposite of that, which is mindfulness of death, or maranasati. You’ve done trainings and led retreats around this subject. But some people might say this is too morbid and depressing to think about. So before we actually delve into the mindfulness of death practices, could you entice us by telling us a few of the benefits of doing them?

Nikki Mirghafori

First and foremost, what I found for many people, myself included, is that facing the fact that I am not going to live forever really aligns my life with my values.

Most people suffer what’s called the misalignment problem, which is that we don’t quite live according to our values. There was a study that really highlighted this, by a team of scientists, including Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman. They surveyed a group of women and compared how much satisfaction they derived from their daily activities. Among voluntary activities, you’d probably expect that people’s choices would roughly correlate to their satisfaction. You’re choosing to do it, so you’d think that you actually enjoy it.

Guess what? That wasn’t the case. The women reported deriving more satisfaction from prayer, worship, and meditation than from watching television. But the average respondent spent more than five times as long watching television than engaging in spiritual activities that they actually said they enjoyed more.

This is a misalignment problem. There’s a way we want to spend our time, but we don’t do that because we don’t have the sense that time is short, time is precious. And the way to systematically raise the sense of urgency — Buddhism calls it samvega, spiritual urgency — is to bring the scarcity of time front and center in one’s consciousness: I am going to die. This show is not going to go on forever. This is a party on death row.

Sigal Samuel

So the approach here is to bring to the forefront of our consciousness how precious our time is, by impressing upon our minds how scarce it is. And that helps align our life with our values.

Are there other benefits to practicing mindfulness of death?

Nikki Mirghafori

The second benefit is to live without fear of death for our own sake. That way, we don’t engage in typical escape activities. And it frees up a lot of psychic energy. We have more peace, more ease in our lives.

The third benefit is to live without fear of death for the sake of our loved ones. We can support others in their dying process. Usually the challenge of supporting a loved one is that we have a sense of grief for losing them, but a lot of that grief is actually that it’s bringing up fear of our own mortality. So if we have made peace with our own mortality, we can be fully present and support them in their process, which can be a huge gift.

My mom passed away two years ago. And for me, having done all of these practices, I could be with her by her deathbed, holding her hand and supporting her so that she could have a peaceful transition. She didn’t have to take care of me so much and console me. She could be at peace and take delight in this mysterious process that we just don’t know what it’s like. It might be beautiful, might be graceful. We don’t know — there might be nothing; there might be something.

Sigal Samuel

Now I feel sufficiently enticed to learn about the actual practices of mindfulness of death. Let’s start with one that seems simple: the Five Daily Reflections, sometimes called the Five Remembrances, that are often recited in Buddhist circles. Would you mind reciting those?

Nikki Mirghafori

Happy to. These are the Five Daily Reflections that the Buddha suggested people recite every day.

Just like everyone, I am of the nature to age. I have not gone beyond aging.

Just like everyone, I am of the nature to sicken. I have not gone beyond sickness.

Just like everyone, I am subjected to the results of my own actions. I am not free from these karmic effects.

Just like everyone, I am of the nature to die. I have not gone beyond dying.

Just like everyone, all that is mine, beloved and pleasing, will change, will become otherwise, will become separated from me.

Allow whatever arises to come up. It’s okay. These contemplations can bring a lot up. So just be with them as much as possible.

Sigal Samuel

I’ve done these reflections before, but every time I do them, I notice that some are much harder for me to absorb than others. The fourth one — I’m of the nature to die — does not terrify me. Maybe that’s weird, but that’s not the one that really scares me. The one that I find impossibly hard is the fifth one. Everyone that I love and everything that I love is of the nature to change and be separated from me.

It’s really the death or the separation from the people I love that I find much harder to face than the death of myself. Because if I’m going to die, you know, then I’ll be gone. There won’t be any me to miss things.

Nikki Mirghafori

Yes. So appreciate and make space for the one that really touches you.

Also I would say that with the fourth one, making peace with our own death, I’ve done the practice and sometimes I’m like yeah, sure, whatever. And then I’ve really stayed with it, and thought, “This could be my last breath.” When the practice really takes hold and becomes alight with fire, it’s like, “Oh, my God, I am going to die!” It really hits home.

Sigal Samuel

Just to clarify, this is a separate mindfulness of death practice, where you contemplate with every breath, “This could be my last inhale. This could be my last exhale.”

Nikki Mirghafori

Yes. And to bring the historical context into it: This particular teaching is what’s called maranasati. Marana is death in Pali, the language of the Buddha. Sati is mindfulness. The mindfulness of death sutra, that’s where the Buddha taught it, and it’s actually quite a lovely teaching.

The Buddha comes and asks the monks, “How are you practicing mindfulness of death?” And one of them says, “Well, I think I could die in a fortnight, in a couple weeks.” Another one of them says, “Well, I think I could die in 24 hours.” Or “Well, I could die at the end of this meal.” Or “Well, I could die at the end of this bite of food I’m eating.” And another one says, “Well, I could die at the end of this very breath.”

And the Buddha says, “Those of you who said, two weeks, 24 hours, whatever — you are practicing heedlessly. Those who said right at this breath, you are practicing heedfully, correctly. That is the practice.”

There are ways to really bring the sense of immediacy and urgency to all this. It’s not out of the question that there could be an aneurysm or that a meteor could just hit the Earth in this moment. Use visualizations; be creative.

Sigal Samuel

Another thing I find really helpful is remembering the idea of impermanence. Which, of course, is the theme of our whole conversation — that our whole life is impermanent — and that’s a very central Buddhist teaching. But also any emotion that I’m feeling is impermanent. So if I’m feeling an intense surge of fear as I do a practice, that’s impermanent, too.

Nikki Mirghafori

Yeah, I love that. When I teach impermanence, there are little impermanences that come and go, and then there is the big impermanence, which is your life! I’m chuckling because this is a case where impermanence is on your side. Impermanence is just a rule of how things run in this world. It’s impersonal. It’s just the way things are. But in our perspective, it’s either working for us or against us.

Sigal Samuel

Can you tell me about another kind of contemplation — the “corpse contemplation” or “charnel ground contemplation”? Charnel grounds are these places where, after people have died, their bodies are left to decay above ground, to rot in the open air. And Buddhist monks would go and observe them up close, right?

Nikki Mirghafori

Many monks do that, especially in Asia. In order to become more intimate with a sense of mortality, the practice is to go to the charnel ground and to actually see a corpse. And the contemplation is: My body, this alive body, is just like this body that is decaying. It’s in different stages of being a body, of decomposing.

A specific practice in the Buddhist canon is to contemplate a corpse in different stages of decay. This particular practice requires a sense of stability of mind. Do the other ones first. I only teach it on a retreat when there’s a container of safety, holding people and supporting them through it.

Sigal Samuel

I definitely have not yet worked myself up to doing corpse contemplation by looking at images of actual human corpses. But when I go for a walk, whenever I see a dead bird or squirrel or mouse that’s been run over in the road, I actually pause and take a minute to look at it. I’m trying to ease my way into this practice.

Nikki Mirghafori

Brilliant. Similarly, another informal practice I wanted to share is having a memento mori. Like a little skull, or those bracelets that are all skulls. I just drew on a little Post-It a skull and bones, and posted it on my computer monitor, so I would remember: Life is short. I’m going to die.

I’ve had various memento moris on my desk throughout the years, and I invite people to have them. They don’t have to be sophisticated. On a piece of paper, just write out, “Life is short” or “You are going to die” or “Traveler, tread lightly.” Whatever works for you to keep death in your perspective. And I think it’s good to switch memento moris around so that your mind doesn’t get used to seeing the same thing all the time.

Sigal Samuel

I’m glad you brought this up because I was going to say the corpse contemplation reminds me a lot of that memento mori tradition, which is a centuries-long tradition in Christianity. So many different religious traditions have emphasized the importance of meditating on our death and have devised ways like the memento mori to try to keep forcing the ego to recognize its looming demise.

Nikki Mirghafori

Yes. And I know that for me, I feel most alive and I feel happiest and I feel most connected with myself, when I’m aware of my death. If it happens for a day or two that it’s not in the forefront for whatever reason, I’m not as bright, as sharp, as alive. So I just love bringing it back. It enlivens me. It supports me to live more fully and hopefully die with more delight and joy and curiosity.

Sigal Samuel

I’m wondering if you can help me with something else. I mentioned earlier that I’m not really scared of my own death so much, but I am scared of the death of the people I love. And especially during the pandemic, I think that’s causing a lot of anxiety for me and probably a lot of others. We’re scared about the potential death of our grandparents, our parents, our friends. Is there a way to free ourselves of the overwhelming fear of their death?

Grief is a natural part of the process. However, it is complicated by our own seen and unseen fear of death. So I invite you to actually work with the practice of making peace with your own death. That’s what’s underlying it. Even if you think you’re not afraid of your own death, you probably are.

When people are really at peace with their own passing, there is a different perspective. There’s a different way of being with the fear or sadness of losing others. There is still a pain of loss, but it shifts.

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At New York hospital, a friar watches over those dying

‘The miracle is to let go’

Brother Robert Bathe, a Carmelite friar, outside of Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan.

By Kevin Armstrong
The morning after he turned 52 last month, Brother Robert Bathe emerged from the Millennium Hotel on West 44th Street. He ambled half a block into Times Square and reflected on the emptiness. A street cleaner’s whoosh broke the silence.

Dressed in a brown robe, the traditional garb of his Carmelite order, Bathe began his daily walk down Broadway. At 28th Street, he hooked left and continued to Bellevue Hospital, where he is a Roman Catholic chaplain and bereavement coordinator.

“Welcome to ground zero,” he said before a nurse trained a thermometer gun on his forehead and scanned for a reading.

It read 98.6. The nurse nodded.

“Normally,” he said, “the family is there with me bedside at death, and when we say the Our Father it is very emotional. Now I stare at a person that is taking their last breaths. I’m with a doctor and a couple of nurses. We’re saying goodbye.”

Bathe is the friar on the front line of the coronavirus pandemic. A native Tennessean who was a soil scientist before entering religious life at age 27, his Southern accent is the first voice many patients’ family members hear from the city’s oldest hospital when he calls to inquire about special needs.

Each morning, he reviews death logs. He then walks through the emergency department and intensive care unit, where he stands behind glass and cues up music on the smartphone he keeps in his pocket. “Bridge Over Troubled Water” is a favorite selection. On Funky Fridays, as he calls them, Bathe mixes Benedictine chants with James Brown. If patients are awake, he flexes his biceps or pumps a fist — encouragement to stay strong. He takes precautions when praying over the intubated, slipping on an N95 mask and face shield. In all, he ministers to more than 25 patients daily.

“Music gives a little more sense of sacredness so I don’t get distracted by nurses and doctors screaming,” he said. “I am focused on that patient, looking at that face. I know who that person is, imagine what it is like for them to be alive.”

Bathe speaks with a man across the street from Bellevue Hospital. He says he was called to become a friar more than two decades ago after witnessing a man die in North Carolina.
Bathe greets people in the Mount Carmel Place courtyard near the hospital. The coronavirus continues to paralyze New York and stretch the limits of its hospital system.

His pager pulses with death updates. It is programmed to receive alerts for cardiac emergencies, traumas and airway issues. Whenever a coronavirus patient on a ventilator needs attention, it comes across his screen twice. When a nurse who worked in the neonatal ICU died of covid-19 recently, Mary Ann Tsourounakis, Bellevue’s senior associate director of maternal child health, called pastoral care for help. A group of nurses grieved. First to arrive was Bathe, who led them in prayer in a small hallway.

“One of the most healing and loving I’ve heard,” Tsourounakis said. “People think it has to be a big production. Sometimes those moments are the moments.”

The virus continues to paralyze the city and stretch the limits of its hospital system. Confirmed cases have surpassed 185,000 and more than 20,316 deaths had been recorded, according to the New York City Health Department.

Bathe’s path to New York began in Knoxville, Tenn. He grew up around his grandfather’s cattle farm, went on frequent hikes as an Eagle Scout and eyed a career as a forest ranger while a teenager. His mother, Linda, worked at the University of Tennessee, and she consulted with faculty members about her son’s future in forestry. Prospects were slim, and alternate paths — archaeology or agriculture — were suggested.

He didn’t see himself traveling to Egypt to unearth tombs, so he dug into agricultural studies and toiled with botany and geology as well. Following graduation, he worked for the Buncombe County environmental health agency in North Carolina. Hired to protect groundwater, his release was to drop a line in honey holes for catfish, pitch a tent and listen to bluegrass songs after dark.

One day, Bathe was sent to meet a man named Robert Warren to evaluate his soil so he could build a house. When Bathe arrived, he saw Warren slumped over in his truck. As Bathe approached, he said, Warren grabbed his hand and asked, “Would you pray with me?”

They recited the Lord’s Prayer, he said. Moments later, he was dead, Bathe recalled. Bathe accompanied him to the hospital and attended the memorial service and funeral.

Bathe joined the Carmelites soon after, and in 1997 was assigned to Our Lady of the Scapular and St. Stephen’s Church, two blocks from Bellevue. Lessons followed.

One day, he said, a woman fell from her window in a neighboring building and through the church roof. Bathe was sent up to investigate.

“First dead body I ever smelled,” he says. “Life is tender.”

long his almost two-mile walk to work, Bathe’s appearance and demeanor have become well known and appreciated.

Transfers are part of the friar life. He taught in Boca Raton, Fla., and served as the vocation director from Maine to Miami before returning to Manhattan two and a half years ago.

In ordinary times, Bathe receives a monthly allowance of $250, lives in the St. Eliseus Priory in Harrison, N.J., and rides the PATH train. He fell ill in January, experienced the chills, registered a temperature of 101 and lost weight. He believed it was pneumonia then and self-isolated, using a back stairwell to his room. His brothers left meals outside his door, and he returned to Bellevue after convalescing. He has yet to be tested for covid-19.

Since March 30, the hospital has facilitated his participation in a program that provides free or discounted rooms for front-line workers, first at a Comfort Inn on the west side of Manhattan and now at the Millennium, to limit his commute. Along the route to work, his bald head, eager gait and hearty laugh are known to mendicants and administrators alike.

He carries on the tradition of the Carmelites, who have ministered at Bellevue since the 1800s, through periodic epidemics, saying Masses from the psychiatric ward to the prison unit. Colleagues include a new rabbi and a 20-year-old imam.

When a Catholic dies, he performs the commendation of the dead, a seven-minute service. His responsibilities range from distributing Communion to finding prayer books for patients across faiths to leading memorial services for staff. He is “staunchly against” virtual bereavement, which has become common amid the pandemic, insisting on providing a physical presence.

“People are looking for a miracle when the miracle is to let go,” he said. “Call me too practical, but I don’t pray they leap out of the grave like Lazarus. I think we’re meant for better. We’re meant for God.”

Hospital staffers are processing what has happened since the pandemic first gripped New York, and they’re bracing for a potential second wave. Since Lorna Breen, medical director for the emergency department at NewYork-Presbyterian Allen Hospital, died by suicide last month, Bellevue has increased its support services for employees. Questions about closure come from all mourners.

“Families ask, ‘Are we going to be able to have our loved one go to Mexico?’ ” Bathe said. “How are we going to do the next step, to bury our loved ones?”

long his almost two-mile walk to work, Bathe’s appearance and demeanor have become well known and appreciated.

On a recent Sunday, Bathe stepped outside for a breather in what some people call Bedpan Alley, the east side neighborhood that includes hospitals and a shelter on First Avenue. He checked on a homeless woman who sits in a chair facing Bellevue each day, rubbing his thumb against hers as she slept. A shoeless man was prone on the sidewalk. Bathe inquired about a can collector’s economic concerns. Business was slow.

“Are you a priest?” a woman on a bench asked Bathe.

“No, ma’am,” Bathe said. “I’m a friar.”

She introduced herself as Shonda. She was anxious about a meeting with her manager.

“You want to say a prayer for me?” she said.

“Put the phone down,” he said.

Bathe closed his eyes and prayed.

“Breathe,” he said.

“I’m going to breathe,” she said.

As he walked back to the hospital, his pager went off. “Cardiac Arrest,” it read, “10 West 36.”

“Somebody’s dying,” he said.

Bathe makes his way to the hospital from his hotel in midtown Manhattan.

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How to cope with our collective grief:

Psychologist sister offers counsel

On April 23, Michael Neel, funeral director of All Veterans Funeral and Cremation in Denver, looks at the casket of George Trefren, a 90-year-old Korean War veteran who died of the coronavirus in a nursing home.

by Chris Herlinger

Day to day, things remain at a standstill in much of the world. And out of that standstill comes grief, says Australian Mercy Sr. Maryanne Loughry.

In a recent blog, I discussed Loughry’s webinar about how to deal with anxiety and stress during the COVID-19 pandemic. Loughry, a trained psychologist who teaches part-time at the Boston College School of Social Work, has done double duty with another webinar, providing more insight into some of the challenges the pandemic poses.

This time, in an April 21 webinar, also coordinated by the Rome-based International Union of Superiors General, Loughry’s focus was on grief: specifically, personal and social (or collective) grief as well as “anticipatory grief” — waiting for tragedy to unfold.

As she did in the earlier webinar, Loughry made clear that we must respect others’ different experiences and reactions right now, that everyone is dealing with this unsettled moment in different ways and at different paces.

That affirms an insight that New York Times opinion writer Charlie Warzel recently made: “Tragedy and suffering is unevenly distributed and everyone’s lived experience is unique. It feels a bit like we’re living with one foot in two different worlds, or experiencing every outcome of a projection model at once.”

The idea of different “projection models” is a good segue into one of Loughry’s key points. Loughry praised the insights of the late Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whose seminal 1969 book On Death and Dying laid out the idea of sequential stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, finally, acceptance.

While Kübler-Ross’ insights about grief are still affirmed, the field of psychology has since embraced the idea that the stages are not necessarily always in sequence.

“We grieve differently,” Loughry said. “We move back and forth [between the stages]. We move around the different stages. That’s what emotions are.”

And emotions are very much in flux right now, given that people are experiencing both personal loss and a shared, profound collective loss in communities and societies.

“We’ve lost a lot in this pandemic,” Loughry said. “We’ve not just lost people we’ve known and loved: family, community members, people from our own countries, routines and jobs. But our natural world has been turned upside down. So we’ve lost that sense of what our world is about and what we’re about.”

What people have known and experienced in the past — the basic fiber and texture of life as people experienced it, the pillars “we rested on” — have “now receded,” Loughry said.

“We never thought we wouldn’t be able to bury our dead or visit the sick. But that’s what’s happening right now.”

And in some regions, the situation is exacerbated by already-existing humanitarian and social challenges.

“In some countries, people don’t even get to hospitals,” Loughry said.

But Loughry said at both the collective and personal levels, people have experienced grief before. And that they have, perhaps more than they know, the tools to deal with the situation right now, despite its unprecedented nature.

Noting a string of natural disasters like the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the recent Australian bush fires as well as manmade tragedies like the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Loughry said that, ultimately, people rebuild their lives.

“What we know about collective grief is that we survive. We move on,” Loughry said. “Our world is different, and we know [more] about ourselves and our society.”

That was one affirmation and insight. There were numerous others.

Don’t underestimate collective grief right now.

One of the things many are mourning is “our lack of normalcy.” That’s a shared, collective experience, “a source of grief for us,” Loughry said. But another source of grieving is what we see around us.

“We know our families and the local businesses we deal with are suffering,” she said.

That sadness is accentuated by our day-to-day disconnection from others.

“We’ve also had a profound loss of connection. We can’t physically embrace anybody.” The result? “This can lead us collectively to grieve what we’ve lost.”

Be aware of another kind of grief.

That is “anticipatory grief,” waiting for something to happen. People have “anticipation that this tsunami, or epidemic, is going to overwhelm us.” And that means real worries about mortality, both ours and others’.

“I could be taken by this pandemic. You could be taken by this pandemic. It threatens our very being,” Loughry said. And that results in a feeling of “loss of safety. A lot of us don’t feel safe anymore.”

Now is the time for “naming and claiming” grief.

Specifically, now is the time to share and name what is being lost and what is happening in the world and to ourselves. Loughry noted that people throughout history have established commemorations and memorials for collective tragedies, like the Holocaust. At the root of those is the need for naming.

“To hold it in and not to share it is actually something that can overwhelm us,” Loughry said.

Ask what worked.

At an individual level, this is perhaps the moment to ask what helped us in the past when we grieved.

“We need to go back to that again,” she said. “Who did we reach out to? How did we respond? What was helpful, what wasn’t helpful?”

Be conscious of others’ vulnerabilities right now.

That’s especially important in religious communities, where such vulnerabilities may be more visible right now. Perhaps some have not grieved past losses and are doing so now.

Loughry said leaders of communities need to be aware of “what you can do and what you can’t do,” noting that they need to be aware that they and the members of their leadership team are “also impacted” and “are a part of the collective grief and the anticipatory grief.”

Be aware of another dynamic.

Some people — Loughry was speaking specifically of sisters — will be in denial, constantly saying they are fine. But that is often a barrier. Loughry advises not to raise that concern now. This is the time of affirmation, affirming “that people are moving at different stages,” she said. That is especially true at a moment when “people are in confined spaces.”

Loughry added: “It’s a time at the moment for compassion, not for challenge.”

At the same time, don’t be afraid of emotions.

“It’s OK at the moment to be emotional” and allow raw, unfiltered feelings to rise to the surface, Loughry said. That could mean being “teary, because that’s exactly what your body and your emotions need.”

That may be uncomfortable, particularly in a community setting, because it shows your vulnerabilities. But there is no reason to hide such emotions because “it’s not something that can be easily covered up.”

Advice for communities.

When asked how communities should deal with discussing grief and experiences, Loughry said that “each community is different.”

She did suggest that discussion about grief might be better done in small groups “rather than a big setting, where they might be asked to say something they are nervous about saying.”

Another idea is to allow people to write down thoughts and place them in a communal bowl without people being named.

Whatever is decided, it is important to affirm people’s comfort, as “we don’t know how much longer we’ll be in lockdown and you don’t want to increase their vulnerability.”

Loughry also affirmed the need some will feel to remain silent and not to share.

Faith is important.

Sisters’ religious faith is “a real resource” right now, Loughry said. First, there are the biblical and historical anchors: Church forebears experienced drought, famine and other calamities and got through them.

Sisters, who are fortunate “to have an identity, security, and we have supports,” are in a position to offer compassion to those seeking it. And that can help sisters at this difficult moment with their own grief.

“We feel good when we minister to someone.”

A sense of hope.

Loughry noted the pandemic has unfolded during Lent and Easter, with the attendant echoes of death and resurrection.

“We do know that we are going to get out of this, and that there is another side,” she said. “We know this time will pass. We don’t know when, but we know it will.”

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Pastors talk a lot about death around Easter.

Now covid-19 is forcing more to prepare for their own.

The Rev. Michael Curry is the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church.

By Sarah Pulliam Bailey

The Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor will spend a portion of Good Friday planning her death. The Episcopal priest hopes to outline the music she would like to hear as her life comes to an end, the floral scent she hopes to smell and which of her 12 hand-pieced quilts she intends to hold.

Taylor is not ill, but at 68, she falls squarely into the age range especially vulnerable to covid-19. While the coronavirus has sickened people of every age, 80 percent of those who have died of covid-19 have been over 65.

So before Taylor speaks in virtual gatherings about the death and resurrection, she will add to her list of what she has already prepared: advanced care directives, who has power of attorney over her affairs, and plans to be buried — by her parents and sister.

“Few people are up for this conversation,” she said. “You won’t believe how many people walk away from me when I bring this up.”

Death is ever present in church sermons in the days and weeks that lead up to Easter. On Ash Wednesday, pastors remind parishioners, “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” On Good Friday, they preach the crucifixion of Jesus.

But even as many pastors lead funerals regularly, many admit they haven’t made end-of-life care decisions or planned for their funerals.

The Rev. Michael Curry, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, said he has planned his funeral, but covid-19 has pushed mortality to the forefront. He and his wife have had to make plans for what happens if they get sick with the coronavirus.

“Holy week is about hardship and suffering and death, that Jesus didn’t avoid it and dared to die … to show what love looks like,” said Curry, 67. “This is not a sweet sugarcoated Easter.”

Three weeks ago, a diagnosis for pneumonia prompted the Rev. Tony Evans, a popular megachurch pastor based in Dallas, to think about the details of his own funeral. (He tested negative for covid-19.)

“It’s always hard to hear about death but no better time to deal with it than when it’s staring us in the face right now,” said Evans, 71.

People used to imagine their own deaths more because they witnessed death more regularly, said Lydia Dugdale, director of the Columbia Center for Clinical Medical Ethics and a physician who has spent the past few weeks caring for covid-19 patients in New York City.

And although the church offers comfort to those dealing with the death of a loved one, Dugdale said it hasn’t been at the forefront of helping people face death. In her forthcoming book “The Lost Art of Dying,” she points to a 2013 Harvard University study found that clergy knew little about palliative and other end of life care. It found that pastoral zeal to encourage faith in God enabled congregants to choose treatments associated with more suffering.

Dugdale said laypeople haven’t wanted to hear about death, and clergy have stopped preaching about it. “From my own experience, I can count on one hand the number of sermons I’ve heard on the need to prepare well for death,” she said.

Covid-19 has changed that for some. The Rev. Carrie Call, who provides spiritual care to pastors and parishioners in the Penn Central Conference of the United Church of Christ, said more pastors have been seeking information on end-of-life care and do-not-resuscitate orders in the weeks leading up to Easter this year.

“It’s ironic, because our faith lives and message are about triumph over death and resurrection, but we come face to face with it on this kind of scale, it’s really challenging,” she said. “The challenge for pastors is how they cope with that in their own lives while maintaining a sense of calm to help parishioners in their lives.”

The Rev. James Martin, an editor at-large at America magazine, said he and his fellow Jesuits all have made funeral plans, including the readings, the celebrant and the music.

He said it’s human and natural to fear death, especially now. The way that people have died alone or been unable to hold funerals during the spread of the coronavirus has been especially sad. Still, some people might see it as an opportunity to change their lives.

“To plan out your own death is not always morbid,” said Martin, 59. “It’s a way to look at the kind of life you want to lead.”

Timothy Keller, the retired pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, said he does not have his funeral planned. He said he thinks that should be up to his family. He has no burial plot, but he has his eye on a small graveyard in Manhattan surrounded by wire fence and car repair places, describing it as in the middle of things, unpretentious and easy to visit.

Keller said he is less afraid of death now at age 69 than when he was diagnosed with thyroid cancer at 52.

“If we got the virus and died, as sad as it would be, we would both say, ‘We thought we had more to do on earth,’ and it’s God’s way of saying ‘Nope,’ ” he said. “That’s not a bad message for God to say, ‘You’ve done your work.’ ”

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How Does a Buddhist Monk Face Death?

If we learn to celebrate life for its ephemeral beauty, its coming and going, we can make peace with its end.

Geshe Dadul Namgyal

By George Yancy

This is the first in a series of interviews with religious scholars from several faiths — and one atheist — on the meaning of death. This month’s conversation is with Geshe Dadul Namgyal, a Tibetan Buddhist monk who began his Buddhist studies in 1977 at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics in Dharamsala, India, and went on to earn the prestigious Geshe Lharampa degree in 1992 at Drepung Loseling Monastic University, South India. He also holds a master’s degree in English Literature from Panjab University, Chandigarh, India. He is currently with the Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics, Emory University. This interview was conducted by email. — George Yancy

George Yancy: I was about 20 years old when I first became intrigued by Eastern thought, especially Buddhism. It was the transformation of Siddhartha Gautama to the Buddha that fascinated me, especially the sense of calmness when faced with competing desires and fears. For so many, death is one of those fears. Can you say why, from a Buddhist perspective, we humans fear death?

Dadul Namgyal: We fear death because we love life, but a little too much, and often look at just the preferred side of it. That is, we cling to a fantasized life, seeing it with colors brighter than it has. Particularly, we insist on seeing life in its incomplete form without death, its inalienable flip side. It’s not that we think death will not come someday, but that it will not happen today, tomorrow, next month, next year, and so on. This biased, selective and incomplete image of life gradually builds in us a strong wish, hope, or even belief in a life with no death associated with it, at least in the foreseeable future. However, reality contradicts this belief. So it is natural for us, as long as we succumb to those inner fragilities, to have this fear of death, to not want to think of it or see it as something that will rip life apart.

We fear death also because we are attached to our comforts of wealth, family, friends, power, and other worldly pleasures. We see death as something that would separate us from the objects to which we cling. In addition, we fear death because of our uncertainty about what follows it. A sense of being not in control, but at the mercy of circumstance, contributes to the fear. It is important to note that fear of death is not the same as knowledge or awareness of death.

Yancy: You point out that most of us embrace life, but fail or refuse to see that death is part of the existential cards dealt, so to speak. It would seem then that our failure to accept the link between life and death is at the root of this fear.

Namgyal: Yes, it is. We fail to see and accept reality as it is — with life in death and death in life. In addition, the habits of self-obsession, the attitude of self-importance and the insistence on a distinct self-identity separate us from the whole of which we are an inalienable part.

Yancy: I really like how you link the idea of self-centeredness with our fear of death. It would seem that part of dealing with death is getting out of the way of ourselves, which is linked, I imagine, to ways of facing death with a peaceful mind.

Namgyal: We can reflect on and contemplate the inevitability of death, and learn to accept it as a part of the gift of life. If we learn to celebrate life for its ephemeral beauty, its coming and going, appearance and disappearance, we can come to terms with and make peace with it. We will then appreciate its message of being in a constant process of renewal and regeneration without holding back, like everything and with everything, including the mountains, stars, and even the universe itself undergoing continual change and renewal. This points to the possibility of being at ease with and accepting the fact of constant change, while at the same time making the most sensible and selfless use of the present moment.

Yancy: That is a beautiful description. Can you say more about how we achieve a peaceful mind?

Namgyal: Try first to gain an unmistaken recognition of what disturbs your mental stability, how those elements of disturbance operate and what fuels them. Then, wonder if something can be done to address them. If the answer to this is no, then what other option do you have than to endure this with acceptance? There is no use for worrying. If, on the other hand, the answer is yes, you may seek those methods and apply them. Again, there is no need for worry.

Obviously, some ways to calm and quiet the mind at the outset will come in handy. Based on that stability or calmness, above all, deepen the insight into the ways things are connected and mutually affect one another, both in negative and positive senses, and integrate them accordingly into your life. We should recognize the destructive elements within us — our afflictive emotions and distorted perspectives — and understand them thoroughly. When do they arise? What measures would counteract them? We should also understand the constructive elements or their potentials within us and strive to learn ways to tap them and enhance them.

Yancy: What do you think that we lose when we fail to look at death for what it is?

Namgyal: When we fail to look at death for what it is — as an inseparable part of life — and do not live our lives accordingly, our thoughts and actions become disconnected from reality and full of conflicting elements, which create unnecessary friction in their wake. We could mess up this wondrous gift or else settle for very shortsighted goals and trivial purposes, which would ultimately mean nothing to us. Eventually we would meet death as though we have never lived in the first place, with no clue as to what life is and how to deal with it.

Yancy: I’m curious about what you called the “gift of life.” In what way is life a gift? And given the link that you’ve described between death and life, might death also be a kind of gift?

Namgyal: I spoke of life as a gift because this is what almost all of us agree on without any second thought, though we may differ in exactly what that gift means for each one of us. I meant to use it as an anchor, a starting point for appreciating life in its wholeness, with death being an inalienable part of it.

Death, as it naturally occurs, is part of that gift, and together with life makes this thing called existence whole, complete and meaningful. In fact, it is our imminent end that gives life much of its sense of value and purpose. Death also represents renewal, regeneration and continuity, and contemplating it in the proper light imbues us with the transformative qualities of understanding, acceptance, tolerance, hope, responsibility, and generosity. In one of the sutras, the Buddha extols meditation on death as the supreme meditation.

Yancy: You also said that we fear death because of our uncertainty about what follows it. As you know, in Plato’s “Apology,” Socrates suggests that death is a kind of blessing that involves either a “dreamless sleep” or the transmigration of the soul to another place. As a Tibetan Buddhist, do you believe that there is anything after death?

Namgyal: In the Buddhist tradition, particularly at the Vajrayana level, we believe in the continuity of subtle mind and subtle energy into the next life, and the next after that, and so on without end. This subtle mind-energy is eternal; it knows no creation or destruction. For us ordinary beings, this way of transitioning into a new life happens not by choice but under the influence of our past virtuous and non-virtuous actions. This includes the possibility of being born into many forms of life.

Yancy: As a child I would incessantly ask my mother about a possible afterlife. What might we tell our children when they express fear of the afterlife?

Namgyal: We might tell them that an afterlife would be a continuation of themselves, and that their actions in this life, either good or bad, will bear fruit. So if they cultivate compassion and insight in this life by training in positive thinking and properly relating to others, then one would carry those qualities and their potential into the next. They would help them take every situation, including death itself, in stride. So, the sure way to address fear of the afterlife is to live the present life compassionately and wisely which, by the way, also helps us have a happy and meaningful life in the present.

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