The Nature of Death and Life (Resurrection) – Contemplating on the Prairies

 

The Nature of Death and Life – Contemplating on the Prairies

Most of my life has been spent on the Prairies of Southern Manitoba, save for a few months up North. It is from this place that I sit and think prayerfully about life, my lived reality through God in whom I live, and move and have my being. I literally walk this Contemplative path in this environment. Being on this Contemplative journey leads me to new ways of thinking and living in relationship with the rest of the world. This path is not straight, nor easy. The journey has been a painful process of dying small deaths. And it’s only now, as I look back along the trail that I see all the resurrections.

I’ve observed the Prairie soil, not as a farmer or soil scientist, maybe as a gardener, although a very poor one, but more so as a Contemplative. By being a part of the Prairies for decades and learning a bit about how they were formed and knowing a bit about plants I began to ponder over the nature of creation. Knowing that the Prairies are composed of compost, layers and layers of dead plant and animal life mixed with the debris of rocks rubbed together, has changed my understanding of death.

It is through contemplating in and through my surroundings, that the truth of the pattern of everything has emerged, which is that only through death can new life emerge. That all of creation has been, and is, and will be in a process of birth, life, death and “re-newal.” Without death, there is no possibility for new life, for resurrection. Death has lost its “victory” because we come to know that it is part of the natural order of all things. Death has lost its “sting” because we come to know that new life emerges as the old life passes away. Death is not the “end” because we come to know it as “transition.” This doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck, that it isn’t difficult to go through. All transitions are hard. But as the Mandalorian code states, “This is the way.”

The Prairies didn’t just spring up overnight. They were created through a very long, thousands of years (or more) process of life and death. Minerals from rocks broken down through retreating ice shields. Lake beds whose waters have receded reveal the accumulation of centuries of plant and water creatures’ carcasses, their body bits laid to rest. It is a land where death is everywhere and feet deep. It is the place where seeds, finding enough footing, grow into small plants, to live and then to die. The body of each plant housing the energy of the sun, the nutrients of the rocky minerals and the decayed matter of life that had come before. Each plant and creature giving up its life to lie on death’s floor. But each time is not the end but the opportunity for a new beginning.

The plant lives on through its seed and in returning to the earth from which it sprang. Inside each seed exists the source of the life lived by the plant as well as its future life. Everything exists within it to re-create itself and live again in new but similar form. Through the next season of warming, when watered, the seed is resurrected, is given a new body. It is not the plant that is brought back to life. But it gives up its life by becoming one again with the soil, giving life to the new plant through its own death.

Without all this death, we would not be able to live. Death brings us life. In the planting of seeds in soil, the corpses of deceased vegetation, the crushed husks of insects, and animal refuse, provides the opportunity for the life force waiting to emerge to grow, ultimately providing other living creatures, food. Most everything consumed was once alive but in consumption, dies. Creatures can only live by consuming death. And by so doing, we transform death into life in our own bodies. The only way that I can continue living, is by the sacrifice of other living creatures. Life from death.

On the Prairies, death and life co-exist in “symbiosis;” they are in relationship with each other, operating in harmony. This is a very different way of approaching the subject than the general Western and Christian dualistic idea that “death is bad and life is good.” I have long thought that death itself was somehow evil, wrong, and was against what God was doing in the world/universe. If death is actually the source of life, then what God is actually about doing is not what I always thought it was. If death isn’t inherently “wrong” or “bad” or antithetical, that is, opposing the “will of God,” then it is actually intrinsic to the “shape of the universe.” Nothing is outside of God, even death.