life as best as i remember it…

A few nights ago I began reading The Undertaking by Thomas Lynch. A co-worker of mine thought it would be my kind of book, called it a must read. For not knowing him very long, he was right. This is my kind of book and so far I’m engrossed.

On the surface the book seems disturbing, even the subtitle is “Life stories from the dismal trade.”

Yep, that sort of undertaking.

The stories have this memoir feel to them as they deal with the life of faith when all that surrounds seems to point towards more questions than answers.

I’m not sure that Kelly new my background with anxiety when he recommended the book. I even told him after a day or so into the book that reading essays about death and dying this would surely be therapy for me. I will admit that there are moments where I’ve wanted to shut the book and give up, but Lynch’s writing is just too good.

In the first chapter, he writes, “…the meaning of life is inextricably tied to the meaning of death.” And he’s absolutely right. How we live has no other choice then to be tied to how we think or fear about death. I’ve experienced and lived my life with death looming over me as the object of my anxiety. Life was hell in those moments, literally. I’m thankfully passed the worst of it and being healed one day at a time.

In The Undertaking, Lynch focuses much of his discussion on the living. Lynch understands and eloquently describes that there is so much more to life than focusing on its end. To you, this may sound like one of the most obvious statements you have ever heard, but to those of us with a panic disorder, the end of life can pretty much preoccupy our minds so much that we become debilitated. But the hope is that in the end there is redemption and return to life. In one of my favorite passages Lynch writes,

“and of all God’s gifts, the best is language-the power to name and proclaim and identify, to fashion from the noisy void of our lexicons for birds of the air, fishes in the seas, what grows in the greensward; and for contempt and affection, pleasure and pain, beauty and order and their absences. In a world where Someone’s in Charge, all of the endings are not happy ones, more is every utterance a benediction. But for every death there’s some redemption; for every loss, an Easter out there with our name on it, for every woe a return to wooing.”

“For every loss, an Easter out there with our name on it…” I love that. I’m finding more of Easter every single day. And while I’m not finished with my battle against anxiety, I find life and healing in my faith, in my wife and kids, and in those who walk the journey with me. There remains so much life yet to be lived and embraced. I don’t want to miss a single moment.

I’m only about a third of the way through the book; I look forward to the rest of this and the other Thomas Lynch book sitting patiently on my dresser.

So enough about me, what book is rocking your world right now?