First of all, I just wanted to make sure to express to you, unequivocally, how much our recent conversations have meant to me. In my life I've met some humble people, some patient people, some caring people, some insightful people and certainly some funny and joyful people, but I've never met anyone who combines such a depth and fullness of each of those traits as you do. Put them all together, as you have, and it results in what we ought to call wisdom. True wisdom. And probably true generosity, true love. Those three things are probably, if you break them down, very close to the same thing. And personally, I don't find them (wisdom, generosity, etc.) in the pieties of many of the Church's fine and good representatives. Rather, I find them in the unaffected elementalism with which I think (hope) you and I both approach the mystery of life. If God gives men what they have, then He has given me an instinct to venerate and pursue honesty above all. Honesty and spiritual joy. I've found that I can share these things with you in ways that I can share them with very few other people I've ever met. And I'm indescribably grateful for that.
Second, and following from the above, I want to thank you for being someone with whom I can discuss questions, issues, ideas pertaining to the end of my own life. It's said that for the ancient Japanese samurai the first and last thoughts of every day should have been thoughts of death. But we don't live among samurai. No one, it seems, wants to think of death, or speak of death. And while it seems (for the moment at least) that I may not soon be asked to face death after all, I don't want to forget the moments of the past few weeks when the thought of my death was very much with me. I think it would be a mistake to slip back into the Western world's common obliviousness to and distaste for confrontation with death. I suppose that's easy to say at the moment, when I'm on an emotional upswing due to the relatively good outlook I took away from my first meeting with the oncologists at Georgetown earlier this week. But it seems as if it would be foolish, and lazy, and dishonest of me to live henceforth with little thought of death. And I recognize the paradox (well, what we in the West might call a paradox; in the East perhaps it's no such thing, perhaps it's perfectly straightforward) that the thoughts of death are precisely those thoughts which allow for the fullest engagement with life. Not morbid thoughts, of course, but clear-eyed contemplation of the fact that our lives will end someday, and surely too soon. I pray with all the vigor and life of my soul that whatever God may be, and whatever He may want from me, He allow me to live long that I may experience the fullest human joys and sorrows on the way to accomplishing it. But I also have no illusions of specialness, or of deserving that long life any more than the millions to whom it is not granted.
Instead, I focus on sources of inspiration such as the video posted below. I know, I know, it's a pop song, and pop songs are vulgar, and in poor taste for such high and astute intellectuals as we are, right? But I can't help it, I have giddy, excitable, unrefined tastes. And pop-rock though it may be, it's a song, in its way, about death, and when I hear the words sung, 'Bring on your wrecking ball,' I think, Yes. Yes! This is how a man must meet his Maker: as Jakob met the Angel, in a great loving, wrestling roar of life and death. And after all, the fact that one artist, a loudmouthed rock-star from New Jersey has given me this uplifting way to understand my own mortality is the reason I write books and letters like this one: because I want to give somebody something like that in return. In gratitude for everything I've gotten, I arrange my life around the hope that someone will read one of my books someday and hold some insight from it close to their heart as they pass into the crucible. Do you think that can happen? You think that might be what God wants from me? If so please ask Him, on my behalf, for a great deal of time on the planet, because I've got some work to do.
For your love and wisdom, Father, thank you.
SM
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