I can't understand this kind of thinking--if it can even be described as thinking rather than reflexive biological fear. Anthony lives on every time a woman exercises her right to vote or runs for office. My grandmother, who died at the age of 99, lives on in me; I often dream of her when I am wrestling with a particularly troublesome ethical dilemma, because she was the kindest person I ever knew. I don't have to ask, "What would Jesus do?" I ask what my gran would do. I suppose she would have found a way to prevent her son from getting into trouble in Jerusalem during Passover week, thereby interfering with the Christian salvation story. My dreams about my grandmother are not supernatural "visitations" but memories that will never die as long as I retain consciousness.

I have been lucky, having lost only three people--my grandmother, my father, and my
ex-husband--whom I loved deeply. Both my father and my former husband died at relatively young ages, and, as a result, I had unfinished business with them. The lesson I have taken from their deaths is that I should never again leave unfinished business with anyone I love. The knowledge of the finality of death--which one never truly assimilates at a young age--is what gives life its meaning. Say it now. Do it now. Show your love now, because you may never have another chance.

In 1860, Thomas Henry Huxley, the great popularizer of Darwin's theory of evolution, was stricken by the death of his three-year-old son. His friend, the pious Episcopal clergyman Charles Kingsley, suggested to Huxley that he would derive spiritual comfort if he could bring himself to believe in life after death. Here is Huxley's reply, an uncompromising classic of secular humanism:

"As I stood behind the coffin of my little son the other day, with my mind bent on anything but disputation, the officiating minister read, as part of his duty, the words, 'If the dead rise not again, let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.' I cannot tell you how inexpressibly they [the words] shocked me...I could have laughed with scorn. What? Because I am face to face with death and irreparable loss, because I have given back to the same source from whence it came, the cause of a great happiness...I am to...grovel in bestiality? Why, the very apes know better, and if you shoot their young, the poor brutes grief [sic] out and do not immediately seek distraction in a gorge....

"If at this moment, I am not a worn-out, debauched, useless carcass of a man, if it has been or will be my fate to advance the cause of science, if I feel that I have a shadow of a claim on the love of those around me, if in the supreme moment when I looked down into my boy's grave my sorrow was full of submission and not bitterness, it is...not because I have ever cared whether my poor personality shall remain distinct from the All from whence it came and whither it goes....

"I know right well than 99 out of 100 of my fellows would call me atheist, infidel, and all the other usual hard names...

"But I cannot help it. One thing people shall not call me with justice and that is--a liar. As you say of yourself, I too feel that I lack courage; but if ever the occasion arises when I am bound to speak, I will not shame my boy."

The death of a small child--so much more common in the past than today--must be the most painful sort of loss, because it deprives those left behind of the time needed to share the experience of parting. I hope that as I grow older, and inevitably lose more people I love to age and illness, I will never forget that my belief in the finality of death is an opportunity to shoulder the tasks of love now, and to leave as little as possible unsaid and undone. "Ghosts" are no more than the memories, and I hope that they will be good ones.

As Emily Dickinson wrote, "Parting is all we know of heaven and all we need of hell."

And now for something completely different....

MOST DISGRACEFUL RELIGION STORY OF 2007:

Actually, this isn't "completely different" because such stories make me wish that there really was an afterlife in which a deity meted out just rewards and punishments. It seems that the the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, which settled with victims of pedophile priests for $660 million, is evicting nuns from convents so that the property can be sold to pay for the settlement. Furthermore, the Archdiocese issued a gag order to prevent nuns from speaking publicly about this disgusting treatment.

A spokesman for the archdiocese, Tod M. Tamberg, told the Los Angeles Times that the archdiocese is also selling its administrative headquarters on Wilshire Boulevard. "The pain is being spread around," Tamberg declared, adding that "none of the employees got a pay raise this year...we all have to share in the process even though none of us--the nuns, myself--harmed anybody. All of us as a church have to pay for the sins of a few people."

Yes, I'm sure that the cardinal of Los Angeles is being evicted from his luxurious home to pay for the settlement. And this odious statement fails to take into account the fact that top church officials were, in fact, the biggest sinners, because the covered up the activities of pedophile priests for decades. They ought to sell their vestments. They ought to sell their rings. They ought to live in homeless shelters before they evict aging nuns from their homes. Fat chance.

One priest (surprise, surprise, there's no gag order on priests), the Rev. Ludo DeClippel, lamented that "these kinds of conflicts..are immediately throw into the public arena, creating, once more, a hostile public opinion."

You bet. And, by the way, it's a hostile Catholic public opinion. Once again, the laity is outraged by actions of the church hierarchy. And once again, this arrogant church thinks it can get away with anything. "They're still operating under the shroud of secrecy," said Denise d'Sant Angelo of Save Our Sisters, a group formed to resist the evictions of nuns. "And secrecy isn't going to be tolerated by Catholics anymore."

The Vatican is every bit as responsible for this infamia as the Los Angeles Archdiocese. It has awarded lifetime sinecures to cardinals, like Boston's Bernard Law, who were responsible for the coverups. But it can't do anything for the nuns, the foot soldiers of the church.

I feel a deep outrage about this issue because the nuns who are being evicted could be the young nuns who taught me in childhood. Many of them were inspired teachers, in an era when the convent was often seen as the only choice by young Catholic women who did not wish to marry. (At the time, there was no real place in lay American Catholic life for a single woman.) Many of these younger nuns left the convent in the late 1960s, when they began to see that it was possible to serve both God and humanity while being paid a living wage to teach. Those who did not leave, who truly had religious vocations, stuck it out through all the years of insults by popes who kept telling them that they could not become priests because Jesus didn't have any women among the twelve apostles. That this loyal, unpaid generation is dying out is the main reason why parochial schools are closing. And the church rewards these women by making them pay for the sins and crimes of pedophile priests.

One can only hope that the church hierarchy will be punished on this mortal plane where it hurts the most--in its pocketbook. I'd be willing to bet that quite a few practicing Catholics in Los Angeles will be letting the collection plate pass by.

The absolutely unaswerable question is why clerics who have built their careers on promising the faithful that death is not the end are themselves heedless of the penalties that (according to their professed belief) will await them on Judgment Day. I guess these church bureaucrats think that they will be able to negotiate out-of-court settlements (complete with gag orders) in the next world.