Why I Teach Listening to the Divine Song:

Death and Life

Tasting Death

Have you ever felt like you were dying? Not a fleeting fearful moment, but an extended time when you knew, “I’m going to die.” When I woke up suddenly at four in the morning several summers ago, my journal records, “I feel weird. . . like I’m losing consciousness . . . oh my God, my body is shutting down, I’m going to die!”

The feeling of dying is not entirely foreign to me. For readers that have lived over a half-century like me, you probably have encountered a brush with death. But this experience does not feel like a brush with death that passes. Instead, it feels more like permanently losing consciousness. Perhaps you are acquainted with the uncomfortable tingling sensation creeping over the top of your head when giving blood on an empty stomach? When this happened to me, the Red Cross phlebotomist asked, “Are you okay? Your face is turning blue.” Am I turning blue now? I’m terrified. I face the question . . . Am I dying?

Eventually, I found myself in bed at the hospital’s emergency room, hooked up to an intravenous fluid device. I look at my partner sitting across the foot of the bed and whisper, “I don’t want to leave you . . . I want to live.” She smiles with quiet confidence and whispers, “It’s okay, you can let go . . . I love you.” My face is wet with tears. I mumble a short prayer, “Okay, if this is my time . . . I’m letting go.” A few minutes later, I realize, “I’m still here. I’m feeling a little better.” Was it the intravenous fluids? The prayer? Maybe both of them have me hoping. I tasted death and am gifted with another chance at life.

Clinging to Life

Since that time, I sometimes experience milder fading-out episodes. During these times, I cling to a rosary given to me by my great-grandmother Elizabeth Snell-Fleck. I fell asleep fingering the maroon-colored beads while audibly mouthing the prayers I’ve repeated since childhood, “Hail Mary full of grace . . . Our Father who art in heaven . . . Glory be to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit . . .” When I awoke some hours later, I felt better . . . I was not dead, but alive!

My Mother and I visited great Grandma Fleck in the nursing home once a year during our annual family summer vacation trips to North Dakota. At that time, she was a woman in her late eighties, spry and filled with Divine energy. I felt loved when she hugged me tight. Did she know she was dying when, in her nineties, she placed that precious, maroon-colored rosary in my hands and clutched both her hands around mine? She looked intently into my eyes, perhaps hoping that I, a middle-aged teenager, would begin to understand the spiritual significance of such a gift.

I treasure my great-grandmother’s memory by gazing at a black and white photo near my writing desk. In the photo, I sit comfortably in the lap of my Great Grandma. My mother stands behind me on my right side with one hand on my shoulder as if to guide me, and my grandmother stands next to my mother as another support figure. When I gaze at the photo, I intuitively know that the Divine maternal love from these three women flowed into, nurtured, and protected me as I grew up. Looking at the photo as I write these words, I feel this Divine flow of love and am ever so grateful.

I pray great Grandma’s rosary every time someone in my close circle of personal relationships dies. And I pray the rosary for myself when I feel like I’m dying. I cling to the rosary as a lifeline to the Divine, a way to listen to the Divine speak through the prayers as I make my way around the circle of beads. It is a life rosary, a death rosary, and a resurrection rosary.

Connecting Death, Life, and Teaching

Tasting death and praying the rosary when I feel like I’m dying realigns my priorities and inspires positive change. This vitality of death is something I intellectually understood over thirty years ago from a college course in Existentialism taught by Peter Koestenbaum.^[1] The personal experience of approaching death gives heart to my intellectual understanding and renews my life. It is from this place of the heart that authentic and life-enhancing changes take root. These changes include my academic life, specifically what and how I teach.

Death tells me that life is a precious gift and that what I teach should be life-enhancing. Teaching and learning about listening to the Divine is not an academic exercise for me. It is a matter of life and death. As a teacher and person of faith, listening to the Divine through experiential activities can be moments of grace for both the student and the teacher. Such Divine experiences cannot be standardized into a set of vocabulary words to memorize for a test. Instead, such experiences are to be cherished, affirmed, and explored through journal writing and dialogue. Death led me to invest my remaining life energy in teaching students how to listen to the Divine song within the greater SONG of life.

For Reflection

Consider a spiritual object that connects you with the Divine. Ric Masten narrates a poem about a blacksmith who, in his final days, is taken to the hospital and struggles with the nurses over a hammer that he clutches with both big hands.^[2] The nurses finally give up and let him keep it. He dies with the hammer in his hands resting upon his heart. The blacksmith’s hammer, and my story of the rosary, raise profound questions about listening to the Divine. What do we cling to in life? What will we cling to in death?