As spiritual growth depends wholly upon the grace of God, and our consent and developing trust through the gifts of faith, hope and love, it occurs to me how this is seen in the process of dying, or at least what one can glean in spending time with those who are leaving this world and have before them the urgency of spiritual formation like perhaps nobody else faces.

The saints show us with much unanimity that God's primary work in us is beyond the grasp of our faculties. We can be gifted with knowings in being known via His Son, as they indwell our hearts and yearn to make His blessed presence known to us. But His knowing is so uncreaturely, yet incarnate/intimate, that we seldom can understand this intercourse of the eternal Holy Spirit within our created souls.

The dying undergo a gradual dissolution of the sense faculties, where the soul seems to be slowly disconnected from its bodily orientation, or at least from the grosser expressions, even though it can still re-animate those faculties in a seemingly miraculous way, such as when a dying person waits to see an estranged or distant loved-one, with a body that from a medical pov simply shouldn't be functioning any longer.

This gradual loss of orientation, iow, isn't simply dementia, but re-orientation to the spiritual world, with a good deal of encounter with the archetypal realm along the way, such as is drawn out in those dying more slowly of primary dementia.

But the gradual loss of the faculties among the dying is not, it seems, completely unlike the re-orientation we go through as we consent to God's yearning to re-fashion us as His living temple on earth.

For instance, the loss of the affective ego, which Phil and Grace and Stephen describe, seems to occur in the dying. And just as in spiritual conversion one reaches the point, and often, where one clearly cannot meditate any longer, or contrive in an even gentle way the course of that which is simply beyond creaturely knowledge. The dying discover they belong to God, or at least certainly not to themselves, and this is simply a matter of trust and faith previously unknown in many of us. But as they relent and are drawn in beyond their wills, there is an almost predictable unfolding of grace and peace that one can feel, almost taste, within the room, blessing everyone, although family members are often only occasionally aware of it as it is such a bitter-sweet indicator of the final contact. Sometimes this occurs earlier on, and always in degrees, where the dying person can communicate their joy and its meaning, often through images that require a certain kind of listening to appreciate, although more direct or explicit communication/nearing death awareness is not uncommon either.

And so the dying often reach a place where they are more other-oriented than self-preoccupied, another similarity with those on the spiritual path who have passed mostly through the Dark Night of the Spirit.

We are called to lose our lives in this faith only He can give. And so little surprise the path of faith seems to leave us with more in common with the dying than the living, or so it seems at times.

Death and dying and devotion remind me that we are called to let go of all creatures, finding them again as restored to wholeness only through the divine indwelling.

When I think of "creatures," these are not only the typical distorted attractions to images of others (rather than their true personhood as fully known only by God), but also the faculties of the soul that we attach to in our dealing with the common existential crisis.

And yet we can no more entirely let go of this struggle than we can be in charge of our own dying. Although through the intellect, will and intuition the soul can recognize its need for surrender to supernatural grace, it cannot procure its own freedom, as the faculties simply cannot release themselves while remaining familiar to us. Neither can the true self, via its endowment of natural grace, completely realize its true function as intimate service to others.

So as in death, where contrivances are stripped away with no remainder, meditative techniques, should they be our primary focus, objectify us and make genuine consent to Him impossible. How can the intimate other, or the Intimate Other, reach us when we're treating ourselves in this way?

We know we're not in charge of dying, yet persist in the illusion we're in control during living, as though the two were events seperated over long stretches of time.