I had a dread experience this weekend taking communion at my grandfathers funeral. I practiced a new meditation to rid myself of fear and connect with the divine. I’ve spoken before about how all fear is irrational and boils down to one thing, fear of our own mortality, but I I have more to say on the matter.
Fear of death is the underlying current that charges western society. Everyone is trying to live longer, to run away from death, but more than that there is also a rejection of the natural processes of dying. The human body goes through cycles and when we get old, as Joseph Campbell muses, the physical body begins to wilt away like an aging plant. Western society judges this process and rejects it, devising ways to cover up the aging body and to reverse the natural processes. It all boils down to the fact that we are trapped in our ego-identities and we fear our own mortality.
This fear blocks us from experiencing two fundamental joys in our daily lives: unconditional love and peace that surpasses understanding. In order to truly liberate our beings we must liberate ourselves from our ego-identities, and our fear of death. The crucifixion of Jesus and the act of breaking bread and drinking wine to symbolise the body and blood of Christ gives us an opportunity to contemplate our own mortality, and at the same time our interconnectedness to the oneness of life.
A friend of mine told me a story the other day about some Buddhist monks during the Vietnam war. The invaders came to attack their village and as they were approaching with their guns and torches the monks went to the centre of the village and sat in a meditative pose. They doused themselves with oil and started a fire to emblaze themselves. They walked themselves to the cross, bodies blazing, mind and spirit free, with peaceful and loving acceptance of the will of the Creator.
So when I took communion on Saturday, I meditated on the bread, the body of Christ, as a symbol of my own mortality. I broke the bread of death, which is the same act in traditional cultures that was labeled cannibalism, where to symbolise respect for their own mortality, traditional peoples offered human sacrifices, some of which they feasted on afterwards. Every time Christians partake in communion it is the same so called cannibalistic ritual they are acting out.
At the same time I meditated on my life and my connection to the divine. I broke the bread of life, which is the interconnected thread running through me, Christ and the Creator. When I drank the blood of Christ, I meditated on the fact that the blood running through my veins is the same blood of my grandfather, now departed, and the same blood of my ancestors. It was a dread realisation that we are one body, one blood, not just with the Christian Christ, but with the entire universe.
To be liberated from the ego-identities that separate us from ‘the other’ and to be liberated from the fear of our own mortality is to experience unconditional love and the peace that surpasses understanding in the moment. It is to be the ‘I am’ for which we truly are.