Evening meditation: “Lazarus.”
As many of you know, David Bowie died last night. What you may not know is that shortly before his death he released a meditation on life, death and, it seems to me, resurrection, in a song (and video) entitled “Lazarus.” Mr. Bowie had been suffering for the past 18 months from cancer, and so when he made this video, released a few days ago, he knew death was imminent.
Most Christians, even many non-Christians, know the story of the Raising of Lazarus as told in the Gospel of John. Mary and Martha, two of Jesus’s close friends, who live in the town of Bethany, near Jerusalem, send word that their brother is ill. But they don’t say “Our brother Lazarus is ill,” or even “Lazarus of Bethany is ill.” Instead they say, “He whom you love is ill.” It’s a sign of the deep affection that Jesus has for the man. Jesus waits several days before traveling to Bethany, where he is confronted by the two sisters who say to him, separately, “If you had been here my brother would not have died.” Jesus then is brought to the tomb, where he weeps openly. Then he stands at the tomb, asks for the stone to be rolled away, and calls out, “Lazarus, come forth!” The dead man emerges, “his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth.” And Jesus says to the crowd, “Untie him, and let him go.”
In his video, David Bowie, who like Lazarus is bandaged, sings, “Look up here, I’m in heaven. I’ve got scars that can’t be seen. I’ve got drama, can’t be stolen. Everybody knows me now.” In the first part of the video, Bowie writhes in his bandages in a hospital bed; in the second part “another” Bowie stands and dances, freed from his bandages, in the same room. At the close of the video he enters into a dark closet.
The video is rich with imagery, and will speak to people in various ways.
For me it’s a complex image of life, death and the afterlife. (As well as sight and blindness: as he lays in bed, his eyes are covered by small metal bolts, which may call to mind stories of Jesus’s healing of the blind.) Much of the video resonated deeply with me. On the one hand, one will indeed enter into God’s presence carrying with us all the “drama” of our lives. One will also be welcomed into the presence of those who know us, and into a place where we will be known fully, by God. And one will be freed of the limitations of physical pain and of the confining “bandages” of our existence.
On the other hand, the “scars,” I believe, will be seen by those in heaven, God included. For nothing is lost to God. We are welcomed, scars and all. Remember that when Jesus returns from the dead he shows his disciples his physical wounds, his scars. The Risen One carries in himself, and on himself, the experiences, visible and invisible, of his humanity.
At the close of the video, Bowie recedes into a dark closet. It’s a reverse image of conclusion of the story of Lazarus, who, in the Gospels emerges from a dark tomb into the light. (Needless to say, it may be a Johannine image, a nod to Bowie’s sexuality, or something else entirely.)
It’s not surprising that someone would struggle with issues of illness, death and the afterlife. Even believers do. And I’m not sure what Bowie’s religious or spiritual beliefs were. But it’s a gift when an artist shares himself or herself with the world in so personal and creative a way, particularly in the midst of the final struggle.
“Oh I’ll be free/Just like that bluebird,” he sings. “Oh I’ll be free/Ain’t that just like me?”
As an artist, David Bowie always confounded expectations. Perhaps, like most of us, he struggled with a God who confounded him near the end. Now may that same God surprise him. With new life.
May he be untied and let go.
Very interesting…I like it…
I found the video to be frightening at first. I watched it again and I found it to be his way of controling the process of dying.
I liked Fr Martin’s interpretation.
Very nice.
If Bowie died outside of communion with the one, true, catholic (universal) and apostolic church, his soul has been lost. If he anticipated death, he needed to end his confusion, confess his sins and reconcile himself to God. Instead of holding him out as some sort if modern John the Baptist, Martin should be lamenting Bowie’s apparent failure in his adult life to think these issues through and learn the truth of the Catholic faith before dying.
How do you know that Bowie died outside of communion? Wouldn’t that information be between Bowie and his priest?
Religion is a private issue for many of us.
Did I try to help others ?
Nothing else matters.
8:21. You cannot judge him,
7:59 – do you understand the meaning of the word “If”?
This is an MLK sermon that relates to this topic:
Jesus [also] called the rich man a fool because he failed to realize his dependence on God. He talked as though he unfolded the seasons and provided the fertility of the soil, controlled the rising and the setting of the sun, and regulated the natural processes that produce the rain and the dew. He had an unconscious feeling that he was the Creator, not a creature.
This man-centered foolishness has had a long and oftentimes disastrous reign in the history of mankind. Sometimes it is theoretically expressed in the doctrine of materialism, which contends that reality may be explained in terms of matter in motion, that life is “a physiological process with a physiological meaning,” that man is a transient accident of protons and electrons traveling blind, that thought is a temporary product of gray matter, and that the events of history are an interaction of matter and motion operating by the principle of necessity.
Having no place for God or for eternal ideas, materialism is opposed to both theism and idealism. This materialistic philosophy leads inevitably into a dead-end street in an intellectually senseless world. To believe that human personality is the result of the fortuitous interplay of atoms and electrons is as absurd as to believe that a monkey by hitting typewriter keys at random will eventually produce a Shakespearean play. Sheer magic!
It is much more sensible to say with Sir James Jeans, the physicist, that “the universe seems to be nearer to a great thought than to a great machine,” or with Arthur Balfour, the philosopher, that “we now know too much about matter to be materialists.” Materialism is a weak flame that is blown out by the breath of mature thinking.
Another attempt to make God irrelevant is found in non-theistic humanism, a philosophy that deifies man by affirming that humanity is God. Man is the measure of all things. Many modern men who have embraced this philosophy contend, as did Rousseau, that human nature is essentially good. Evil is to be found only in institutions, and if poverty and ignorance were to be removed everything would be all right. The twentieth century opened with such a glowing optimism. Men believed that civilization was evolving toward an earthly paradise.
[The Catholic Faith defines this error as utopianism and pseudo-messianism.]
Herbert Spencer skillfully molded the Darwinian theory of evolution into the heady idea of automatic progress. Men became convinced that there is a sociological law of progress which is as valid as the physical law of gravitation. Possessed of this spirit of optimism, modern man broke into the storehouse of nature and emerged with many scientific insights and technological developments that completely revolutionized the earth. The achievements of science have been marvelous, tangible and concrete. …
[But] Man’s aspirations no longer turned Godward and heavenward. Rather, man’s thoughts were confined to man and earth. And man offered a strange parody on the Lord’s Prayer:
“Our brethren which art upon the earth, Hallowed be our name. Our kingdom come. Our will be done on earth, for there is no heaven.”
Those who formerly turned to God to find solutions for their problems turned to science and technology, convinced that they now possessed the instruments needed to usher in the new society.
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Then came the explosion of this myth. It climaxed in the horrors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima and in the fierce fury of fifty-megaton bombs. Now we have come to see that science can give us only physical power, which, if not controlled by spiritual power, will lead inevitably to cosmic doom.
[Atheists are forever noting how many lives were lost in the name of religion. Frankly, those numbers are not even close to those claimed in the bloodbath ushered in by atheistic materialists.]
The words of Alfred the Great are still true: “Power is never a good unless he be good that has it.” We need something more spiritually sustaining and morally controlling than science. It is an instrument that, under the power of God’s spirit, may lead man to greater heights of physical security, but apart from God’s spirit, science is a deadly weapon that will lead only to deeper chaos.
Why fool ourselves about automatic progress and the ability of man to save himself? We must lift up our minds and eyes unto the hills from whence comes our true help. Then, and only then, will the advances of modern science be a blessing rather than a curse. Without dependence on God our efforts turn to ashes and our sunrises into darkest night. Unless his spirit pervades our lives, we find only what G.K. Chesterton called “cures that don’t cure, blessings that don’t bless, and solutions that don’t solve.” “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.”
[Note that Dr. King has called upon two Catholic intellectuals (St. Alfred the Great and G.K. Chesterton) to be his witnesses.]
Unfortunately, the rich man [in the parable] did not realize this. He, like many men of the twentieth century, became so involved in big affairs and small trivialities that he forgot God. He gave the finite infinite significance and elevated a preliminary concern to ultimate standing. After the rich man had accumulated his vast resources of wealth–at the moment when his stocks were accruing the greatest interest and his palatial home was the talk of the town–he came to that experience which is the irreducible common denominator of all men, death.
d.
The fact that he died at this particular time adds verve and drama to the story, but the essential truth of the parable would have remained the same had he lived to be as old as Methuselah. Even if he had not died physically, he was already dead spiritually. The cessation of breathing was a belated announcement of an earlier death. He died when he failed to keep a line of distinction between the means by which he lived and the ends for which he lived and when he failed to recognize his dependence on others and on God.
May it not be that the “certain rich man” is Western civilization? Rich in goods and material resources, our standards of success are almost inextricably bound to the lust for acquisition.
The means by which we live are marvelous indeed. And yet something is missing. We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers. Our abundance has brought us neither peace of mind nor serenity of spirit.
An Oriental writer has portrayed our dilemma in candid terms:
“You call your thousand material devices ‘labor-saving machinery,’ yet you are forever ‘busy.’ With the multiplying of your machinery you grow increasingly fatigued, anxious, nervous, dissatisfied. Whatever you have, you want more; and wherever you are you want to go somewhere else. You have a machine to dig the raw material for you, a machine to manufacture [it], a machine to transport [it], a machine to sweep and dust, one to carry messages, one to write, one to talk, one to sing, one to play at the theater, one to vote, one to sew, and a hundred others to do a hundred other things for you, and still you are the most nervously busy man in the world. Your devices are neither time-saving nor soul-saving machinery. They are so many sharp spurs which urge you on to invent more machinery and to do more business.”
…The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided man. Like the rich man of old, we have foolishly minimized the internal of our lives and maximized the external. We have absorbed life in livelihood.
We will not find peace in our generation until we learn anew that “a man’s life consists not in the abundance of the things which he possesses,” but in those inner treasuries of the spirit which “no thief approaches, neither moth corrupts.” Our hope for creative living lies in our ability to re-establish the spiritual ends of our lives in personal character and social justice. Without this spiritual and moral reawakening we shall destroy ourselves in the misuse of our own instruments. Our generation cannot escape the question of our Lord: What shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world of externals–airplanes, electric lights, automobiles, and color television–and lose the internal–his own soul?
James, do us all a favor and find another picture for “Father” Martin. This one, with the smirk he has on his puss, is just too much to take. He is actively and intentionally corrupting the Church and the faithful and from this picture it seems as if he is having a damn fine time doing it.
Father,
Would you pray for David’s soul and possibly remember him when you say Mass?