Dying Religions

We all sit on the edge of a mystery. We have only known this life, so dying scares us - and we are all dying. But what if dying were perfectly safe? What if you could approach dying with curiosity and love? What if dying were the ultimate spiritual practice? Walking Each Other Home: Conversations on Loving and Dying reunites lifelong friends Ram Dass and Mirabai Bush, who speak on the spiritual opportunities in the dying process. They share intimate personal experiences and timeless practices for every aspect of this journey.

In these extended talks, Ram Dass speaks at length about truth and divine love as direct experience rather than belief. He examines how the search for meaning often becomes entangled with ego, identity, and fear, and how those same obstacles can become the doorway to awakening when met with awareness. Love, in these reflections, is not sentiment or morality, but a state of being that arises when resistance softens.

Past and present civilizations failed and fail for many reasons, but the number-one predictor of a civilization’s survival is its sense of religion—or lack thereof. So argues David Goldman in How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam Is Dying Too). The strength of a civilization’s religion affects its purpose, its fertility rate, and ultimately, its fate, says Goldman—who then argues that, contrary to popular belief, Islamic countries are in the last throes of death while Christian America is in a position to flourish.

For a modern culture that does not highly value life, it is paradoxical that we don't want to talk about the dying process or the possibility of an afterlife. Catholics sometime suffer from the same hesitation about talking about death. Yet the Roman Catholic religion and culture are a constant preparation for that moment when we must trust Jesus for our salvation. All the rituals and sacraments, prepare our minds and hearts for that thing from which there is no escape.