“Dying and The Virtues” with Matthew Levering
Shownotes
The sobering thought of death stirs up tension and uncertainty within our souls. Oftentimes, we see life and death as two separate events, but our living and dying are intrinsically linked. In order to flourish as humans, we must lean into the God-given virtues that inform our perspective on a life well-lived and move beyond viewing death as defeat. Jesus exhibited this in His human life on earth, teaching us the importance of trusting God in the face of life’s greatest uncertainty. How do we talk about death in a way that isn’t demeaning to the end? How can we accept our limitations in humility and surrender?
Chris and Eddie are joined by Dr. Matthew Levering, author of Dying and the Virtues. In this book, Levering articulates the nine virtues that we need to die (and live) well: love, hope, faith, penitence, gratitude, solidarity, humility, surrender, and courage. Drawing upon his unique experience of faith, Levering explores how the reality of death draws us nearer to God in dependence and trust. He talks to Eddie and Chris about the significance of rituals within the Christian tradition, living a life of praise to God, and what the book of Job teaches us about our humanity.
Full Transcript
Chris McAlilly 0:00
I'm Chris McAlilly.
Eddie Rester 0:01
I'm Eddie Rester. And welcome to The Weight.
Chris McAlilly 0:03
Today we're talking to Dr. Matthew Levering, who holds a chair of theology at Mundelein Seminary, and he's a participant in conversations among evangelicals and Catholics. He is a scholar and a theologian. He's written a book called "Dying and the Virtues."
Eddie Rester 0:22
It's a fascinating conversation. You wouldn't think that talking about death would lead us in so many amazing directions. But the truth of matter is, and we talked about this early on in the conversation, is that all of us, at some point, have had a moment where we have walked those last steps to death with people that were close to, and that we love. And the questions and the difficulty are common to all of us.
Chris McAlilly 0:48
Matthew comes to faith in Christ through novels during college, which is a kind of an interesting path into faith. He didn't grow up as a person of faith, and reading folks like Dostoyevsky and and Walker Percy, and really he has this moment he talks about, that he was facing just the the shadows and the darkness of annihilation, that, you know, considering a world truly without God was something that was really, really difficult for him. And that also informs the way he approaches the topic of death, which would be the ultimate annihilation, not just for one person, but for all of us. And he allows that to kind of shape the beginning of the conversation, and then moves through nine key virtues that we need to die and to live well: love, faith, hope, penitence, gratitude, solidarity, humility, surrender, and courage. We talked about some of them.
Eddie Rester 1:46
We don't talk about all of them.
Chris McAlilly 1:47
We don't talk about all of them.
Eddie Rester 1:48
Take a deep breath, we're not going through all nine.
Chris McAlilly 1:50
But it was a good conversation. It was helpful for me.
Eddie Rester 1:53
I think one of the things I just kept thinking about, talking to him was that the original virtue is love and his understanding, as we think about the virtue of love is figuring out is God trustworthy?
Chris McAlilly 2:05
And is God a God of love? And then, is God lovable? And are we lovable? And can we connect and really, truly trust that God's love might extend beyond the moment of doubt?
Eddie Rester 2:21
Yeah, I'm gonna be thinking about this one for a while. And we hope that you think about it for a while, and maybe even it changes your conversation in your approach. Maybe this is something that's heavy on your mind right now, is the end of life for someone that you love, and so how to talk about it, think about it, and have courage in the face of it. So we hope, I hope you really dig into this one.
Chris McAlilly 2:43
Yep, share it with a friend. Let us know what you think.
Chris McAlilly 2:45
[INTRO] We started this podcast out of frustration with the tone of American Christianity.
Eddie Rester 2:52
There are some topics too heavy for sermons and sound bites.
Chris McAlilly 2:56
We wanted to create a space with a bit more recognition of the difficulty, nuance, and complexity of cultural issues.
Eddie Rester 3:03
If you've given up on the church, we want to give you a place to encounter a fresh perspective on the wisdom of the Christian tradition, in our conversations about politics, race, sexuality, art, and mental health.
Chris McAlilly 3:15
If you're a Christian seeking a better way to talk about the important issues of the day, with more humility, charity and intellectual honesty, that grapples with scripture and the church's tradition in a way that doesn't dismiss people out of hand, you're in the right place.
Eddie Rester 3:30
Welcome to The Weight. [END INTRO]
Chris McAlilly 3:33
We're here today with Dr. Matthew Levering. Thanks for joining us on the podcast today.
Matthew Levering 3:38
Thank you so much for having me.
Chris McAlilly 3:39
Yeah, we want to talk to you about your book, "Dying and the Virtues." But I thought we might begin just by maybe having you talk a little bit about your background, a little bit about your faith background.
Matthew Levering 3:53
Well, so now my mother was very important influence upon me. She died last year, I guess, two years ago now in 2019. But her faith development was important in two ways. And one of the ways was that she lost her Christian faith, at least in any strong form, she lost her faith in the late 60s over--she'd been raised Southern Baptist and she lost her faith over the segregation issues and other things that she saw in her small town. And so when I was born then in 1971, you know, she didn't really have faith. And that then had an influence on me as I was growing up, and I was seeking questions.
Matthew Levering 4:50
As a kid, I had some, I have a orthopedic condition, and I was always a very sensitive soul and I understood, you know, about death in the mysteries of death. But there wasn't any god or certainly no Redeemer that I knew. I did not know Christ. So I think that had an impact on on me. And then also another thing that had an impact on me, though, was her efforts when I was in my teens, she began to make an effort to reclaim faith. And she eventually came to Christ in a very deep way. She remained a Quaker and so she was the only Christian that I knew of in our Quaker meetings, which essentially was a liberal--by liberal I mean some like classical liberal like Unitarian, something like that. That was what it was like. Very political. So anyway, I feel like I owe a lot to my mom as she tried in my teenage years to come back to a faith in Christ. I mean, it wasn't until, I would say, in college that she fully did so.
Chris McAlilly 6:04
And what about for you? How did you come to Christ? How did you come to faith?
Matthew Levering 6:09
Well, you know, so I would have these surgeries and there's nothing like good surgery for a young kid who--orthopedic surgery; it was just orthopedic surgery, but it's so you go into the knife and everything. Anyway, for me it was, you know, I would be seeking, whether God, his presence. I would begin to seek, and so this--especially during college. You know, college was a crucial time for me. I found I didn't have any teachers who are Christians, but I did read novelists like Walker Percy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and these novelists pointed me in the right direction and I began really to seek the Lord, to seek Christ.
Matthew Levering 6:55
And then I tried to become a novelist after college. So I was busily writing sort of Walker Percy-like novels, but then, and of course, they were terrible. The worst ever. Anyhow. But long story short, I wrote a few of these drafts and then I realized I didn't care about the dumb novel, I just want to know whether God existed, you know, like, no storytelling mattered to me, unless God really existed and unless God really cared for us. So this was... I had a three-day period of where I really entered into sort of an atheism ascent. I mean, by atheism, not an intellectual atheism, but a deep sense that what the world would be like if there were no God. And so that was a very profoundly moving experience, because in that time, I sort of saw the world as a place of sort of shadows or like a shadow land, the bad kind of shadow land. You know, because everything is teetering on the edge of complete annihilation. And so there's no meaning in anything. It's just fragile screens or something and behind them, it's just pure annihilation.
Matthew Levering 8:15
So I had three days of that and then I went to the Duke Divinity School Library. My wife was getting, after college, she was getting a Master's in Public Policy. So I went to Duke Divinity School Library, and thanks be to God I found, I began to read on the question of whether God exists and who Jesus is, and I found the right books, and I'm very grateful for that. And grateful for Duke also.
Eddie Rester 8:42
Well, in that's an interesting way, that it wasn't through experience or preaching yet through finding the right people, I guess, and their experience and their their writing. That's an interesting way. And you landed in the Catholic Church, if I'm not mistaken. So how did that?
Matthew Levering 8:59
I did. It just happened that way. So of course, I was reading CS Lewis, who always struck me as quite, um, you know, Catholic, and at least in a small c way. And then I found also the books by Hans Urs Von Balthasar. The little Ignatius Press books were being bought by the library at the time, the Duke library. So little books by Balthasar and then other writers like Chesterton. But the truth is, I didn't think about it all that much. You know, I read Ignatius of Antioch. I mean, I'm a super fast reader. So I read a tremendous amount, but it does seem I just felt a call, an interior call to the Catholic Church, and I didn't have to think about it too much. I didn't wrestle with... I didn't have any background to wrestle with.
Eddie Rester 9:48
Right.
Matthew Levering 9:48
You know?
Eddie Rester 9:50
Which can be helpful sometimes if you're not fighting what was in order to go towards what can be
Matthew Levering 9:57
That is right. Yeah, I think that's important. Yeah.
Eddie Rester 10:00
I'm thinking about the Duke library. You and I were at the Divinity School at about the same time and thinking about the book you wrote, "Dying and the Virtues." And one of the interesting things about the library back when we were there in those days is that when you walked in, you walked by the John Wesley death mask. Do you remember that?
Matthew Levering 10:20
I remember.
Eddie Rester 10:21
Which I always thought was a strange thing to walk by when you went into the library.
Chris McAlilly 10:26
I don't know a lot of death masks that are being made these days.
Eddie Rester 10:29
Not these days.
Chris McAlilly 10:30
I think that sense of death as a kind of a shared experience of those three days that you're talking about, where you're kind of seeing the world as, you know, what would be if there was no God or that we... You know, that there is a sense of nothingness that's there, that really pervades the tone or the questions at the beginning of the book. You definitely strike me as a person that is asking the deep questions. There's not a question that's any deeper than the question of death and what comes on the other side of it. What led you to this topic? And why did you spend so much time kind of diving into death?
Matthew Levering 11:12
Well, it is very personal for me because, you know, I still wake up... It's like the sinner who still has... The sinner who has... Or not the sinner. Maybe think of someone who has a problem with alcoholism. And they've recovered but they still, every now and again, get a desire for a drink. Well, so in my case, I wake up in the middle of the night or have trouble going to sleep because I'll be--this will happen occasionally, that I'll have the sense of profound annihilation fear or that type of thing will happen to me. And it's not a rational thing. It's it's a sort of, like, the boogeyman under the bed. So I know it's not real, but it definitely makes me sensitive to be, especially I feel, I think other people feel this.
Matthew Levering 12:14
It's a very miserable thing to be preparing for annihilation. It changes the whole way that one would live and think. And so you're right. So the book comes out of that very personal desire to help others and also to help myself prepare. I've also, remember, I didn't mention this, but as you would expect, I've seen some of my older relatives die. And fortunately, my mother had a wonderful death. But, my grandpa, he just told me he wasn't afraid in that sense. He just was in despair. And he told me that he was on the brink of annihilation. And I also was very close to my grandma. And she would talk to me about, you know, just that she knew she was about to be annihilated. And it was, I mean, just these conversations that I would have when I was around 18. You know, these conversations, you know, were important to me. I mean, I still think about them. So that's behind the book.
Eddie Rester 13:31
Yeah, I mean, I think about my very first experience with death and dying was my grandmother who had suffered with Parkinson's for years and years and years. And I was with her alone one evening. It was while I was in seminary, I was home. And she just looked at me and asked me, "Why is God doing this to me?" I think everyone struggles with how to place death in the midst of life, and how do we talk about it in a way that's not just capitulation to annihilation, or it's just this, the meaning of the end, that life was really good when someone was 40 or 50, or having kids in their 20s and 30s? So how do you frame a conversation about death that is hopeful and hopeful for all of us? What would you say to that?
Matthew Levering 14:25
Well, for me, the way was to begin with faith, hope and love, and then to think about repentance and gratitude. And so the more that I thought about this, the more I thought, you know, these are the virtues. And so then I thought, by gosh, I better get started praying to God, begging for these virtues. But I also wanted to learn more. You know, and as a theologian, I get to try to do that, you know. And so then I thought, well, I could try to write a book. I mean, that was sort of the motivation.
Chris McAlilly 14:56
Talk about what you mean by the word "virtue." What are the virtues?
Matthew Levering 15:03
Well, what I mean is sort of God-given ways of enabling us to flourish as humans, to really live, you know, to live in a full way that is not frozen by fear, that's not weighed down by unjust anger or any sort of despair. You know, so these are, essentially to live toward God, and therefore, to be open to our neighbor, to be someone who can who can live well and die well. Yeah, that was what was on my mind.
Chris McAlilly 15:43
That places the book in a really long tradition of Christian meditation on on life and death and life beyond death. It's kind of, you know, had it's hey day back in the medieval period, under the phrase "ars moriendi." Talk about that tradition for folks who are not as familiar with some of the resources within the wisdom of the Christian tradition, in thinking about our mortality.
Matthew Levering 16:11
Well, it's a beautiful, beautiful tradition. Allen Verhey, who taught at Duke but after our time, he has a wonderful book on death and dying. And he really goes into that tradition, I think, in a very helpful way. And it's essentially, you have Christian writers who are theologians, but also spiritual writers. And they remind us to prepare for death and to be present to the fact that we are going to die, that the key thing is this: it's that death tends to feel you know, you're just like, you were saying, you've had a family or you've done all your things on your bucket list or whatever, or you've had a career, and death seems to feel like a defeat. Death seems to feel like a pure... like, it doesn't make sense. It doesn't. There's nothing positive to it, right? But the point of the art of dying books are to remind us that our whole lives are intended to be learning what I call the virtues of dying or learning self surrender, learning love, learning hope, so in other words our dying really should be very much linked with our living. It's just another part of our living, you know?
Eddie Rester 17:32
Yeah, I think about how, in the old days, I mean, Wesley, one of the things they did after his death was make this death mask. In the old days, you wouldn't be pushed off into a hospital room and isolated or you wouldn't be in a nursing home. You would die among family and friends at home. And I think there's something about our modern world that has created this sense that death is other than life, that death is not a part of life. So how do we begin to reclaim it? As you talk about it, it's not this separate thing. It's actually a part of what we do, a part of how we live.
Matthew Levering 18:14
Mm hmm. So for me, you know, you've got to begin by loving God and kind of knowing that God is lovable, and that God loves us. You know, so that's sort of your basic, to me, that's the basic foundation. And to do that, I found the book of Job very helpful, because as I reread the book of Job, it struck me that that Job is worried about God destroying Job's flesh, and Job is beginning to think that even a tree is better than Job because at least a tree can sort of live again, in a certain sense. Whereas Job is going to be completely demolished and ripped apart as were by God. And so, Job is challenging God. Job is saying, "God, are you trustworthy?"
Matthew Levering 19:06
You know, because it's as if, Job is saying, to God, "You know, we've had this great relationship. We had all sorts of great times together, but now you're sitting by and you're even colluding in letting me be ripped apart physically, so that I'll never have any personal communion again." And so Job is really challenging God and God responds to Job and God says, essentially, God says to Job, "You don't know my plan." But God makes it clear that God loves Job and that God has a true plan. That includes Job and so Job repents at the end, you know, and is able to be restored to love of God and to trust. Anyway that's kind of a parable as well that I tell at the beginning of the book.
Chris McAlilly 20:00
It's interesting that you kind of came to faith through the novels, like kind of existentialist novels of folks like Walker, Percy and others. I think about "Love in the Ruins." I think about the kinds of questions where our love seem to... Either are we lovable? Can we love? The dimension of God's love as being something that would extend beyond the experience of death or annihilation, I think it's just a really provocative way to begin the book and one that was surprising to me. But it makes sense in context. I guess, Job is almost like a, you know, a modern existentialist parable for some of these questions. I thought that was a really interesting way to begin the book.
Eddie Rester 20:45
So as you think, you talk about other virtues, you list nine virtues, or you use nine virtues. Faith, faith is one. Hope is one that I think people expect. I mean, you want to cultivate hope in the face of death. But another one you talk about is gratitude. How does gratitude impact us and how we begin to approach our understanding of death?
Matthew Levering 21:12
Gratitude is so important. I mean, Peter Leithart has a very valuable--Peter Leithart, the reformed theologian--has very valuable recent book on gratitude. You know, I find that there's two key things that I want to be doing on my deathbed. But that means I want to be doing them right now, today, as I share in Christ's dying, and as I become configured to our Lord in that way. And so the two things are, repentance and gratitude. The repentance is just kind of obvious. But gratitude, I find gratitude is more, can be more difficult. It involves a real praise of God, for what God has allowed to be, what God is allowing to be. So of course, gratitude is rooted in that profound trust in God, that God really is caring for us.
Matthew Levering 22:14
So, to me, gratitude is one of those things that you just can't have enough of. It's a complete praise, complete praise of God for what God has given and is giving. And it's like you offer--it's liturgical, you know, you're offering your life. Everything you are, you're offering it up to God as just complete praise. Not demanding anything of God, but just offering praise.
Chris McAlilly 22:43
I thought it was interesting in the chapter on gratitude that you put in conversation the work of a Yale surgeon who writes from an atheist perspective with one of the great saints of the church, Gregory of Nyssa's a book about his sister, "The Life of St. Macrina." Could you talk about that? Why did you decide to put kind of Sherwin Nuland, "How We Die," in conversation in this way around the topic of gratitude with Nyssa's work.
Matthew Levering 23:12
Hmm, well, because um, Nuland is very interesting. He believes that when we die, we are annihilated, which means we just become dirt forever. But Nuland, he interests me because he did have a sense of gratitude that he wanted to include in his perspective, and the gratitude was essentially that in dying, we sort of express a certain gratitude. We give ourselves back to the earth processes, the cosmic processes, you know, sort of--I don't know what those processes would, how he would describe them. I can't remember--the evolutionary and cosmic flow of being, you know, that's going to churn on forever in his vision.
Matthew Levering 24:07
And essentially, it's sort of like, you could call it sort of a cosmic or Mother Earth perspective, you know, we go back to the dust and share in the rhythms of the flowers and so on, that type of perspective. And I think that's actually fairly common among our contemporaries, at least those who do not have faith. But so I wanted to compare that kind of gratitude to the kind of gratitude that Macrina is able to have and the key difference is that Macrina is caught up in this personal, liturgical communion. So her gratitude, her giving praise comes through, it's it comes from the praise that Christ has given. You see, so there's a really groundedness and a personal communion, a deep personal, communion with The Lord and with Christ's own work of praise. So it was essentially a comparative study of say two ways, two ways to think about gratitude in our contemporary society.
Eddie Rester 25:15
So, in order to practice gratitude before the moment of death, we want to practice it now. I think that's a significant point that you made. But for those who may be listening, "Well, that's nice, but I don't know what that really looks like." What would a practice of gratitude look like for someone who wanted to ground their life in Christ? What is that? What does that really mean?
Matthew Levering 25:39
Well, of course, as you can expect, for me writing as a Catholic, I'm going to see this in liturgical terms. But I think that the same is true for the Methodists. You know, when you look at the great revival movement, which I still think is the heart of Methodist practice, the tremendous sense of God's presence as Redeemer, and the tremendous sense of gratitude and praise, you know, in these periods of praise that would burst forth in the great hymns of Charles Wesley. And so anyway, so the liturgy, really, where we get together to worship, we worship to praise God, and to be part. Not to praise God just simply because it's you and me getting together because we want to praise God. It's more that we're gonna share in Christ's praise that Christ gives to God.
Matthew Levering 26:36
In other words, Christ is our Redeemer, so we're united to him as he gives that glorious praise of giving everything to God in love. And so we're caught up into that, through the liturgy, through the hymns, through the breaking open of the Word, the Word of God, the scriptures. Those scriptures are praise, or they're filled with... The whole scriptures, really, are our way of praising God, as we open up those scriptures, and then as we celebrate the Eucharist. To me, that's the life of praise right there.
Chris McAlilly 27:15
I think one of the things that distinguishes those two perspectives on gratitude, the one that the Yale surgeon, Sherwin Nuland, offers in how we die, and the one of Macrina or other forms of, I guess, more Christian forms of gratitude that are really rooted in a future praise, sharing in the praise of Christ eternally, is that one is kind of more retrospective, you know. Nuland's perspective really looks backward and can look backward over the course of life and see gratitude unfolding in memory. The other one is not just kind of what will happen in the future. But what happens beyond death is. For folks who are... I think that that question of life after death is one that comes to us as pastors a lot. It's something that if we put out a questionnaire, "what do you want to talk about?" it's something that people ask a lot. How do you think about that? How would you begin to articulate for a person who may not have faith or a Christian, who is really struggled their whole life to understand life after death, begin to kind of put some shape to those questions and how you think about them?
Matthew Levering 28:38
Well, I think that's wonderful. Now, in this book--I'm actually hoping to, and God willing, I'd love to write a book called "Looking Forward," where I talk in more detail about life after death. But you're right, that as Macrina looks back on her life, everything that she looks back upon, is not her own achievement. Nothing is her own. Although it is her own. It's her own by God's gift, and really everything, as she looks back, it's all about praising God for this and praising God for that, you know, with this deep sense of gratitude. And so then as Macrina is dying, she hears the call to attend liturgy, which is just simply the nightly praise--essentially think of it like nightly prayer, or prayer and praise meeting.
Matthew Levering 29:32
So everything about Macrina's life and as she looks back, she just... That gratitude is not just like, "Gosh, I'm glad that I did that. I'm glad I achieved that." She doesn't think like that. She thinks like gratitude means is, "I praise God for that. I praise God for making that possible." So everything becomes praise of God and really, there's a great joy in realizing how praiseworthy God is, you know, how much God is a giver, and how we can trust God to be that giver, and so that's what she is doing as she is on her deathbed. She is praising the giver and she's contemplating the giver as this tremendous giver that God is.
Matthew Levering 30:30
So eternal life, then, is being caught up into that mystery of the giver where we're going to see fully and know as we are known. And so we're going to share in that life of exchange of gift. You know, I think I'm putting it in a little bit academic terms. But basically what she's talking about is a gratitude that is joy. So that's what it's gonna be.
Eddie Rester 31:03
And I wonder if we've somewhat lost that sense of joy that exists beyond our current mortal lives. I think about the book "Homo Deus" a couple years ago by Yuval Harari. And you know, he's a secularist, very much. He's not a fan of people who have faith at all. But one of the things that he talks about, our current human condition is how much control we have over everything, and even the assumption that all illness will be defeated by our own powers, our own methods. I think even the frustration that people have felt during the pandemic has been, "we should be able to fix this. We should be able to solve this quickly." You know, which is very different than how humans have approached pandemics and plagues over the centuries.
Eddie Rester 31:55
One of your virtues is, well, two of them, I think of alongside that kind of attitude that "We can fix. We can push death back. We can control," two of the virtues you talk about our humility and surrender. So what would those virtues say, to kind of this mindset that we all, I carry it around, "We can we can push that back, if not completely undo the power of death, on our own human terms?"
Matthew Levering 32:25
Mm hmm. I mean, I have to laugh, because, you know, those are two virtues I really need to have, you know. So I'm preaching to myself, you know, to try to. Humility that I'm talking about here is not just the humility of where you kind of say, you know, "I'm not as successful as Bill Gates," or something. It's not that type of humility that people sometimes think about. It's the humility I'm talking about in this book is recognizing that we are a creature, you know. And so, that's kind of the key thing is that we are creatures, and we are fallen creatures also. And so, for fallen creatures, we are subject to decay. And our lives are not long, you know.
Matthew Levering 33:30
I find myself very easily rebelling against that. Some days, I think I would want to be an angel. Now, other days, I think that God owes me--why can't I be an athlete, you know, and going to the Olympics or something? You see my point? I'm joking, somewhat, but the main thing here is accepting that we are creatures, that we are fallen creatures, that we are creatures, and therefore, our bodies are decaying, and really accepting this. You see?
Eddie Rester 34:09
I think that's hard for us to do as we talk about life expectancies and all those things, it's hard for us, in humility, to say, "My body will decay." I mean, I think that's a virtue. I think, in our day and age as I look at the list of virtues, that's one of the harder ones right now for humans to really wrestle with.
Matthew Levering 34:30
Well, I think so. I think it is. How is it that we can understand how other people's bodies are going to decay and die, that usually doesn't bother us too much. Unfortunately. Unless they're our loved ones, but for our bodies, it's how could God do this? As you were saying earlier in our conversation, you know, how could God do this to me? How could this happen? You know, how is it that I've come to this point, where my body really is now?
Matthew Levering 35:06
One person described to me that, as they were aging, and as they felt, began to have some diseases that were mortal, basically, it felt like living with an IED. IED, with an explosive device. You know, your body is like this dangerous explosive device, it's gonna go off at any moment, you know?
Eddie Rester 35:30
Yeah.
Matthew Levering 35:30
And there's some truth to that, but so how do we accept the kind of creatures that we are while still realizing that God has a plan and a purpose in this? How do we accept being creatures, you know, mortal creatures?
Chris McAlilly 35:50
Yeah, I feel like that acceptance of our proper place, and then kind of the limitations it can be, that can be demoralizing. It could be the kind of thing that makes it difficult to get out of bed. But on the other hand, it's a way of understanding the unique beauty of creatureliness, or the unique beauty and of the contingency of our lives. And how wondrous it is that we've been given this short time to live.
Chris McAlilly 36:22
I still think that one of the difficult things to get your mind around for the Christian vision and kind of the wisdom of the Christian tradition around these things, it's just the extent to which paying attention to mortality is kind of an antidote to a lot of the things that would ail us. That actually attending to the fact that we're going to die, and then preparing ourselves in that direction, can make us the kind of people, the kind of creatures that we're uniquely meant to be.
Chris McAlilly 36:55
I think, you know, kind of moving through the virtues, another one that you talk about is courage. And I wonder if you, you know, because I do think that preparing to die, it does take a kind of courage to stare at the unknown of that reality, but it's something that we can prepare for in advance. Could you just flesh out courage for us a bit more?
Matthew Levering 37:19
Well, yeah, okay. And for me, and I'll go back to humility, just one second, that's to prepare for courage. You know, remember, for me, being contingent, and so on, and God giving me however many years of life and all that, I've never liked it too much outside of Christ, you know. In other words, I feel that what God has made me for, he's made me for eternal, personal communion. I've been made for knowing and loving, and not just for... I'm someone who is made to be a friend, made to be someone who is loved and loved others. And so I've always felt like I have an eternal vocation to know and love and that it would be a tragedy if God were, or if simply natural processes were to annihilate and destroy someone who is a knower and the lover. So I feel that way about all humans.
Matthew Levering 38:22
Anyway, the point there with humility, is that Jesus, he really does teach us how it is to understand and to live this process of giving up our life. And so he teaches us why dying is good. And the reason it's good is that for fallen creatures such as ourselves, we would never be able to really have life, to give over our life, to truly be lovers, if we didn't learn how to be lovers. And one way to learn how to be lovers is actually to give up our life to God.
Matthew Levering 39:05
Now so I go into that now, but unfortunately, give up your life to God takes courage and so now to answer your question, is like, as we're in Christ, and we're gonna give up our life to God, you know, again, you have that question of trust, but also we don't want to... It's like the country music songs. You know, we might say we want heaven, but certainly not yet.
Eddie Rester 39:30
Right.
Matthew Levering 39:33
The only heaven that we want is just like a repeat of what we have now. We don't want to lose anything we have now. We don't want to lose our dog. We don't want to lose our car, our house, anything that we have. So the thing is, is that the courage that we have to face is that we're headed into something immensely, immensely greater and immensely something that we can't control.That it's just, it's just so much greater than what we have ever lived our lives. You know, our lives on earth are wonderful. But we're headed into an absolute mystery that is so far beyond our control and so much greater. So I think then we have to learn from Christ again, you know, to really have that have that courage to sort of let go, you know, and sort of let God give us what he's going to give us.
Chris McAlilly 40:36
I love that you quote the the poet and essayist Christian Wyman, who observed, "It's not that conventional ideas of an afterlife are too strange. It's that they're not strange enough."
Eddie Rester 40:49
Wow.
Chris McAlilly 40:50
I think that's wonderful, because I think the best that we can imagine is a repeat of what we already have.
Eddie Rester 40:57
A linear moving on of, yeah, our life.
Chris McAlilly 41:01
It seems that what you're suggesting is that if we're made for an eternal vocation of knowing, and loving, and that that would, you know, it appears that the tragedy would be that natural processes would annihilate and destroy all that we have known and all that we have loved, to be offered an invitation, or kind of an opportunity to follow Christ through and beyond death into spectacular and splendor, like, I don't know... I'm, you know, losing the language, the ability to kind of articulate this vision that you could extend in that vocation, personal communion, in Christ, with God eternally, is an exceptionally beautiful and yet, it's not sentimentalized, you know.
Chris McAlilly 41:55
And I think you kind of do a good job, kind of a pastoral dance in your scholarship of trying to not take anything. I think that's one of the things that's really difficult as a pastor, so you don't want to take anything away from someone in the face of death. When folks are grasping for hope in the immediate aftermath of death, you don't want to take any of that away. And yet, it seems to me that there's a dimension of your book that you're trying to both say, it's a little bit better than you can imagine. Can you just talk about that, kind of the dance that you're doing there, and then also kind of, for yourself, as you continue to contemplate the mystery of what is to come? Kind of how you're trying to, I guess, train your imagination to see more.
Matthew Levering 42:47
That's right. You know, I think, of course, it will be a new creation. And so you know, there will be all sorts of realities that will be transformed and that will be given to us, and we will recognize. So it won't be alien to us what God has in store for us. It won't be alien to us, but there will this element, you know, of, I mean, I have, I can't really imagine... I mean, I think about, I'm just thinking about my mother, for example, who, as I mentioned, died a couple years ago. And so in some way, God willing, you know, she would be in the presence of God. But how to be in the presence of God, sort of, how could that not awe us, give us a deep sense of awe or holy fear? And in fact, if I were invited in the presence of God, at this moment, I might sort of crawl under the table. So that's the kind of courage that I'm thinking about.
Matthew Levering 43:56
You know, it's like, who am I to stand in the presence of God? I mean, I couldn't even bear. I mean, I think I would crawl right on the table because God is so infinitely love. And who am I to be part of that? It seems impossible. It seems frightening. It seems uncomfortable. And yet, of course, it's not because of who God is. You know, and so that's why, of course, our Lord Jesus Christ is the heart of everything. And so, you know, Christ is the heart of all the virtues.
Eddie Rester 44:29
I think that's one of the things for me, as I was reading the conclusion to the book, I mean, you just keep pointing back to Christ that there's not love for us, or right understanding of love, or hope, or penitence, or humility, or any of that, without the risen Christ continuing to live in us.
Eddie Rester 44:55
One of the things that you say is that, "dying is something that humans, without losing themselves, can rightly do." You know, thinking about I was raised Catholic and then became Methodist. And one of the gifts I think of the Catholic Church is that one of their sacraments is last rites. Claiming that moment, I think that that's something that Protestants, when we were trying to get rid of everything Catholic, we lost some things in that move, in that jump. What role would you say last rites continue to play for us or for your tradition now in understanding and in dying well?
Matthew Levering 45:41
Mm hmm. And I love last rites, I do. And then it's also true that a number of, there's a recovery among certain--and I think the Methodists could be part of this--there's a recovery of sort of rituals or, you know, if not last rites, if not the Anointing of the Sick, if not a sacrament, then certainly rituals. You know, Mennonites or Presbyterians. I quote different theologians who are calling for something like this, who are not Catholic or Eastern Orthodox.
Matthew Levering 46:24
So but you're right, in terms of the Catholic sacrament, well, the funny thing about the Catholic sacrament, is that, because people became sort of afraid of the sacrament-- this is the tragedy of it, you know. The tragedy is that people really do often, they're still fighting death as the time to die comes on. And so, I mean, if there's a great tragedy, great sadness, and of course, who knows why it is an individual cases. But the main thing is, what happened was, is that last rites came to be sort of feared. And so the idea right around the Second Vatican Council, was sort of let's remember that Anointing of the Sick, it pertains to any sort of very grave illness. And so let's extend it and expand it, not to simply to the moment of dying, but in fact, to dealing with any kind of grave illness that you might have.
Matthew Levering 47:23
But for me, that was well-intentioned, but probably a mistake, because there's nothing better than looking forward to dying, to receiving that send off. But by a send off, I mean, that deeper configuration to Jesus Christ. You know, in other words, as we're dying, to be anointed, to be touched, to be given that sense of being brought into the life of the Lord, brought into life of Lord's body, the church, and touched and prepared for that journey, for that journey of dying, that we are right then involved in. So to me, there's nothing better.
Matthew Levering 48:08
If I can look forward to dying, if I get to have the last rites, the Anointing of the Sick, the sacrament, because it's not about a sacrament. It's about... You know, the Catholic understanding of the sacrament here would be a configuration to our Lord Jesus Christ of really being caught up and ever more deeply into him. That's the key thing.
Chris McAlilly 48:31
Yeah. And I think that the whole book, the trajectory of all the virtues, for me lead to to a good death. And a good death would be being capable, having the capacity to give your life away. In fact that, you know, that's what you see in Christ, in Christ's life and death and life after death. And it's also what we can prepare to do now, is by engaging in this kind of trajectory, and kind of growth in the virtues, they all kind of move us in the direction of giving our life away now, in interpersonal communion, and love.
Chris McAlilly 49:04
The conversation, really, if you want to go deeper, you can pick up "Dying and the Virtues" by Matthew Levering. We are incredibly grateful for your time today. Thank you so much for taking time to share and to go deeper with us in this conversation.
Matthew Levering 49:22
Thank you so much. And I want also, the book is filled with gems of insight and quotations from all sorts of other Protestant and Catholic and Eastern Orthodox thinkers and others. I'm not sure that I added anything to the book, I just quoted, I quoted some really good people.
Chris McAlilly 49:39
Absolutely. You gather up the tradition. I think that's the way that I kind of saw the book. You really gather up the wisdom of the Christian tradition in these matters of life and death and life after death. So we'll look forward to your book on the afterlife, "Looking Forward." We'll have to have you back for that.
Eddie Rester 49:56
Absolutely. Thanks. Thanks for your time today, Matthew.
Matthew Levering 49:59
Thank you. It was wonderful. Thank you.
Eddie Rester 50:03
[OUTRO] Thank you for listening to this episode of The Weight.
Chris McAlilly 50:06
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Eddie Rester 50:17
If you have any suggestions or guests you'd like us to interview or anything you'd like to share with us, you can send us an email at info@theweightpodcast.com. [END OUTRO]