To meet with Richard John Neuhaus is to be in the presence of a man who has come back from the dead. In his latest book, “As I Lay Dying,” Father Neuhaus tells of lying in a coma and being ready to depart this world, when he heard a familiar voice calling his name.
“Richard, wiggle your nose,” was the message coming from his friend, Cardinal John O’Connor, the late archbishop of New York. Breaking out of his utter immobility, the patient managed to obey and eventually, against all odds, to recover.
This near-death experience has transformed the life of Father Neuhaus. He now lives “against the horizon of death,” a way of life that may not sound attractive to the average person. However, to this man of the spirit it comes as liberating.
Thanks to his faith in God, Father Neuhaus has found peace through confronting death. He considers living without illusions as the best way to live and he values death as “the last encounter when you have no illusions.”
For him, death also brings believers like himself to share the experience of Jesus on the cross. Through faith, a person enters into the same dark night of suffering in order to pass over into new life. “Letting all that happen,” he says, “if you don’t enter in you’re always going to have the suspicion that you’re kidding yourself.”
Though he considers death a humiliation when “all the things that you thought were your projects of consequence are brought low,” facing it can give a person enormous freedom. Those who have accepted it and yet, like him, have returned from the brink, “have a much more electric and heightened sense of the mystery of existence.”
If what this priest says about death suggests a dour personality, it is misleading. This is a man who laughs and enjoys life in other ways.
He readily admits sometimes losing the intense focus connected with his experience of death. “There are days and moments when I am not living on the cutting edge of spiritual and psychic consciousness,” he says lightheartedly. “I want to relax, have a drink before dinner, and enjoy idle chatter with friends.”
The difference is that he has gone through an experience that has transformed everything. In fact it has made life more precious than it had been before. In “As I Lay Dying,” Father Neuhaus details what it was like to undergo several surgeries for cancer and to come so close to dying.
Two days after he was moved out of intensive care, he had a startling experience that still carries great meaning for him. During the night he saw blue and purple drapery and near it two “presences.” Whoever these presences were (possibly angels, he thinks), they then delivered a message to him: “Everything is ready now.” Since that time this sober and thoughtful man continues to reflect on this mysterious experience, sifting it for meaning.
What anchors him in his new life is his confidence in God. “We are loved unqualifiedly,” he says of the Creator’s regard for him and every other human being.
As to the rest of his life, he feels that God has not yet finished with him. “There are all kinds of things I think I want to do,” he explains. For the problem of not having enough time, he takes as guide what William Temple, an archbishop of Canterbury, heard from his father: “William, you have all the time there is.”
Father Neuhaus believes in taking each of his days as they come, finding God’s love for him at each step. He loves a saying of Pope John XXIII: “Every day is a good day to be born and a good day to die.”
The prayers that Father Neuhaus offers at the end of each day are two in particular. The first, “Now I lay me down to sleep,” expresses a childlike confidence in God. The second, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit,” suggests an abandonment of self such as Jesus made on the cross.
The theology of abandonment, neglected by the Christian churches in recent times, can prove a rich source of spiritual blessing, this priest believes. Instead of denying death, the person praying recognizes its inevitability and finds this fact the entrance point into truth and new life.
Richard Griffin