Today, St. Patrick’s Day, the first joke I received was about an Irishman reading about his death in the newspaper. In the Irish culture, I understand death is a sad occasion, a traditional wake is seldom solemn. It is full of sharing memories, lots of humor, food and drinking. The Celts and Catholic traditions of Ireland both believe that when a person died they were moving on to a better one in the afterlife and that this was a cause to celebrate.

As I noted before I have felt the last few months that I was walking in the ‘shadow of death’. Although I feel tired and sad about dying there are some benefits to this feeling of death. It certainly inspired me to work harder locally to stop money and training for the killing war brings. In our Pray and Peace hours at Marquette University we have made large pictures of victims of death in Afghanistan trying to make the issue of supporting killing more real and personal to students, faculty and administrators at the Only Jesuit Catholic University to host military training schools for Army, Navy/Marines and Air Force.

This sense of death has also made me more understanding to the suffering and death of peoples all over the world, especially in Iraq, Afghanistan and our own American soldiers. The featured article on this web page is The War is Killing Afghanistan’s Children. Enough!

I have come to understand that living with a sense of death does not automatically mean that one is going to die in the near future, at least I hope so. However, it does make one more sensitive to relationships and apologetic for any harm one might have done.

When one feels like they are dying, following one’s conscience and prioritized actions seem very important. It is harder to live in the present with a sense of death but it is necessary.

When I was in Guatemala, (see Buried in Guatemala) the largest celebration of the year was on Good Friday, the day we remember the death of Jesus. It was bigger than Easter or Christmas.

Maybe the Irish and Guatemalans have something we can learn from in their celebration of death.

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