Every Good Thing Dies...
...but death is not the end.
In the hit TV show Lost, every time someone lives or dies the music that is playing is an adapted version of Paul Cardall’s appropriately named Life & Death. It is a stunning, hopeful, haunting melody whose full version I only discovered years after everyone took their disgruntled swipes at Lost’s controversial conclusion.
On his album New Life, Cardall’s composition has provided a fitting soundtrack to a lot of my living and dying. It is a song I listen to often when I need to re-center myself. More than once I have told myself while meditating on the instrumentation, dynamics, and contrasts — I want to live a life that sounds like that.
And I have done plenty of living and dying in recent years.
Starting at the end of 2016, what I now call the unravelling (language borrowed from a wise spiritual director who told me it was, in fact, a grace) began. I have only ever chronicled the twists and turns, rises and falls, and deaths and births at a more abstract, subtle level. But you don’t need to know the gory details to know that it has been arduous, because you’ve likely been through your own unravelling.
In 2017, I left student ministry. Nearly 20 years of work, accumulated expertise, and emotions just (poof!) ended. There were fissures in my life personally. Hurricane Harvey hit Houston. We all tried the best we could to recover. I wrote once that I felt like my life at the end of 2017 was similar to hurricane clean up. You better do it right, or the problems return. Sure enough, in 2018, just as some folks who didn’t dry out their homes properly found that mold and trouble had returned, I discovered unresolved issues of the soul were back. It was the hardest year of my life. Some of it was self-inflicted. Some of it was stuff I’d just delayed dealing with for too long. Some of it was pain caused to me by others.
But it all just felt like death.
In 2019 my mother died. In 2020 COVID hit and racial injustice rocked America. In 2021 I found new work and thought I was turning a corner, along with the rest of the pandemic-struck world. But it turned out, like Cardall’s song so beautifully depicts, that every rise gives way to a fall. Every life gives way to a death. While optimism abounds in my heart, I could not avoid the stark reality that there are things that I loved that had died, and things that I loved that needed to die. Inside me. Outside of me.
Every good thing dies. It’s true. I wish it was just the bad things. But the good stuff does, too, if you live long enough and keep growing.
In the past couple of years, I have grappled with this truth with great stubborness with pastors, counselors, trusted friends, spiritual directors, and in the silence of my heart at day’s end. All past unraveling seemed to happen to me. I knew to keep transforming I was going to have to consciously pull the thread myself.
How do you choose death when you hate death so much? How does one muster the courage?
The only answers I could find were in the words and ways of Jesus. When he instructed his followers to follow him, they were signing up for a crucifixion. He was clear that the payoff was not immediate. That suffering was coming. Life would bludgeon them if they walked his path, because that is what life does. Most people think Jesus was showing us what being God is like — and he did. But he was also showing us what being human was like.
If we live full-hearted and if we are paying attention, we will not escape the sting of death. The big one, and all the little ones along the way.
But I also learned this, and importantly: death is not the end. The Gospel is a story of resurrection, not death. Unraveling is a reality, but so is the grace that inhabits it.
I can tell you where I was driving in the summer of 2018 when I was at, up until then, my absolute lowest point in life. A tree-shaded street in my neighborhood, early evening, approaching the elementary school on the corner. My gut was tight and hot with anxiety and I had no idea what was next. I was so sad. I felt so lost. I was in full unravel mode. And the thought, out of nowhere, hit me like a bolt of lightning:
Unless you go down — all the way down — you’re not really living.
Did I have the courage to do it? I didn’t know then.
I know now.
It is nearly the end of 2024. I look back to this time eight years ago and see how it all started. I didn’t know it then, but it’s clear now. I can find in my journal an entry from this time of year six years ago. In the top left-hand corner, there is a starred comment, said to me by a spiritual director in a convent I was seeing once a month or so.
“This is just the beginning.”
It was just the beginning. Of a lot of things. Grief. Loss. Death. Yes, all those. The kind that paralyzes you with fear, gnaws at your bones, and makes your heart weary with fatigue. And also — joy, growth, and life. Those too. Stuff that makes you smile unexpectedly, your shoulders fall back with healthy pride, and a deep sense of knowing that everything will be okay in the end.
Every good thing dies.
But if you keep going, that death gives way to new life. Every time.
Resurrection is a real thing that actually happens. I’d bet my life on it.
I did bet my life on it.
May we experience all the necessary death and suffering it takes…and may we rise again.
Be well. — tjb