A saint is a person who practices the keystone human virtue of humility. Humility in the face of wealth and plenty, humility in the face of hatred and violence, humility in the face of strength, humility in the face of your own genius or lack of it, humility in the face of another's humility, humility in the face of love and beauty, humility in the face of pain and death. Saints are driven to humbling themselves before all the splendor and horror of the world because they perceive there to be something divine in it pulsing and alive beneath the hard dead surface of material things -- greater and purer than they are.
What if your dying is an angel? And what if your dying job, should you choose to accept it,
is to wrestle this angel of your dying instead of fighting it? ...Wrestling isn't what happens
to you. It is what you do. And you will not be alone in it...Living your way of life wrestles
the way life has of being itself: That is how meaning is made...That is what the news of your
death could mean: It could mean the beginning, unadorned, common, and singular, of your
one true life and its work...
Come to your death as an angel to wrestle instead of an executioner to fight or flee from and
you turn your dying into a question instead of an edict: What shall my life mean? What
shall my time of dying be for? What is it going be like, that cottage of darkness?
