Death Is Not "The Worst Thing About Life"

On this most difficult day I am thinking about death.

Last night, on my way out of my graduate class in Jersey City, a friend texted me to let me know our next door neighbor's infant son had died suddenly. I spent the long drive home talking to Ruth. When I got home at 11 p.m., I sat in my car in the driveway, crying and still talking with her and noting that all the lights were on in the family's home and all the shades drawn. My friend and I were grieving, trying to make sense of the unimaginable.

"On Heaven and Earth": a Pope and a Rabbi

(photo courtesy of http://www.vosizneias.com)

It's a measure of my attachment to this six-and-a-half-hour-long audiobook that would listen to it in my driveway when coming home from my commute, and I felt sad this morning when I finished listening it on my drive to my high-school teaching job. This book is for anyone interested in issues of faith, of history and culture and on a friendship that shapes the life of the current Holy Father. Indeed, I found echoes of one of my friendships in theirs.

"On Heaven and Earth," first published in Argentina in 2010, is a conversation between Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, and Rabbi Abraham Skorka, a Conservative Jew and a biophysicist. In their home country, the two religious leaders avidly promoted inter-religious dialogue and the book is a series of conversations the two dear friends had about issues ranging from abortion to fundamentalism to the Middle East.  I also learned a bit about the history of Argentina, which is my maternal grandmother's homeland.