June 08, 2025
Dear Friends,
Arguably, the most famous text in world literature, surely more famous than the Bible, is William Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet. In act 5, scene 2, when Hamlet is dying after drinking poison, his best friend, Horatio, wants to drink the same poison to die with him but Hamlet says to him, “Horatio, I am dead. Thou livest. Report me and my cause aright to the unsatisfied.”
In other words, Hamlet does not want Horatio to die because he doesn’t want his life would be forgotten, he is concerned that what he did would not be known to those who come after him, and he relies on Horatio to tell of him, just like all of us, I presume, rely on people to tell of us.
We want to know, (know? How would that happen?) or believe that we have mattered in our lives and that somehow, we or the memory of our words and deeds, persist after we are “gone”. That is why we have cemeteries and church yards with grave markers, even though an ancient tradition in communities of Catholic men and women requires that at death they are buried in unmarked graves with only shrouds covering them at best in part symbolizing solidarity with the millions and millions of humans who likewise lie in death unmarked, unnamed, and unknown but to God.
In ancient classical literature the gravest evil that one could inflict on another was to deny burial to your corpse because in denying burial you were essentially intentionally erasing the existence of a person.
Ancient peoples were terrified of dying at sea or drowning in a lake as they feared that the body would be forever lost rendering the person as a non-existent.
In the Christian Bible, Book of Revelation, chapter 21, we read/hear. “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea,” because it was hoped that only the earth could hold us all alive and dead.
I know many people, some of whom I love dearly, who entertain no notions of anything or anyone beyond our life while alive and sincerely believe that death is the finality of any identity and that eventually there will be no one who knows their name nor anything about them.
If you drive the roads and lanes of rural America, you cannot help but notice long unused graveyards and church yards and family plots that will sooner or later all return to the ignominy of dust that thousands have already succumbed to. How many of our American forbearers not to mention the indigenous people who held these lands thousands, millions, of years, before we arrived lie in the earth under our homes and industries and highways.
One of the greatest, if not the greatest, American play, in my opinion, is, Our Town, by Thorton Wilder, where the dead speak from their graves overlooking the town where they once lived.
Europe is filled with the dead almost everywhere in places known and unknown given all of the deaths in war and violence that have accompanied our, so called Western Civilization. Paris has two relatively modern cemeteries, Pere Lachaise and Montparnasse, where many famous people have spent thousands of dollars to have themselves entombed with elaborate grave markers and where ordinary people are laid one on top of another, unembalmed in simple wooden coffins decomposing into the ashes of their ancestors for generations and generations and, again, thousands of cenotaphs, grave markers with no bodies buried, because they were lost in the smoke of the concentration camp ovens.
What has motivated these words for the wind is that I have been thinking a lot about what I actually believe, what is my Catholic Faith who and how do I experience what I name as my hope, my, love, and my faith apart from my occupation, my background, my education.
I said last week that, I still believe that the Catholic Church has something important and ‘necessarily unique’ to offer the people of this world and I believe that to be an alternative to the idea of annihilation at our deaths or an artificial kind of wishful thinking fantasy land where we are just like we are now but with no bodies which is ultimately irrational and thus not capable of real belief.
Our approach to the language that we use to bring the Good News to this world about death has to be careful and hesitant and humble and kind and cautiously hopeful, otherwise we are just doing more ego massaging of ourselves and, God knows, we have more than enough of that afoot in our midst.
I hate to mention sources that you probably do not have access to, but a non-believing friend gave me the 2000 book, notes of a desolate man, by CHU T’IEN-WEN. It is an English translation of the original text which was written in many languages that explores what I might consider my traditional beliefs in very untraditional language, drawing on a wide variety of literary sources notes of a desolate man, raised the questions in my mind about the impermanence of everything and what it means or might mean to be “gone” as we are when we die and what a world without us in it might be like. I see the world through my own story as I think we all do but there is a larger story being told, much larger and older and longer and unfinished and my story is simply one of the many as Abraham was assured that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the heavens, “Look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.” Then he (God) said to him, “So shall your offspring be.”
I have also seen/heard the plays both produced by The Goodman Theater in Chicago this spring, BUST and The Antiquities, neither of which have scripts available at this time that I am aware of.
BUST is a play that explores the possibilities of realities that are always present but usually not noted especially when we are in times of great stress or we are under extraordinary duress, possibilities that I believe are what our doctrine of the Resurrection tries to contain and make possible, which is to be clear beyond totally bodily resuscitation in a kind or Walking Dead sort of thing.
The Antiquities is an ambivalent play about modern human accomplishments like computers, cell phones, and other technological inventions in the late 20th nearly 21st centuries and the realities that are developing in the area of what we call Artificial Intelligence and the possible dangers that potentially might make human life another extinct species on this earth. It is ambivalent because it simply gives us glimpses of what is, what has been, and what might be, not the certainties that many of us crave.
The Antiquities does not simply appreciate technology as a series of successes but includes the essential human ability to make laughter, joy, sadness, grief, pleasure, and compassion uniquely necessary to life.
I reference these as examples of the Spirit breathing where it will, bringing forth fruitful hope and love and forgiveness in accord with Jesus’ injunction to his disciples in Luke 9:50, “Do not stop them! For the one not against you is for you.”
There are assumptions that the Holy Spirit operates only in what we generally call religion or among people who self-identify as religious people but as we see/read above, Jesus didn’t seem to believe that.
So, on this feast of Pentecost, another word that we have very little understanding of BTW, we celebrate the presence in our midst of a Presence that gives peace, calls for forgiveness, and allows for hope in a world that is desperately in need of love, wisdom, and gentle touches.
This Presence that many of us call, Holy Spirit, raises questions, not answers, so much, important questions, soul questions, that more often than not do not have answers that we know yet, questions that can lead us in places we would never venture to on our own but should.
Peace,
Father Niblick
P.S. Arguably Edward Hopper’s most famous painting, Nighthawks, hangs in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Go visit it and see for yourself. You can easily Google many of his paintings and look and see what you have never seen before.