"When a person dies, his deeds are cut off, save for three things: a righteous child who makes supplication for him; a charitable deed that continues [to bear fruit] after his death; or knowledge [he has imparted] from which people benefit."
Muhammad, Hadith
This is a very famous hadith, or saying of the Prophet, and in this case I borrowed it from the Nasr commentary from the 55th surah, al-Najm, here rendered as "The Star." It was part of a discussion of the first Quranic reference, chronologically, of the notion that "none shall bear the burden of another," which is a key Islamic concept. One of the points here is that you own your deeds, for good or bad, and that you have a set amount of time to make things right (or wrong). In the end you might live on, but almost certainly not in the way you think. We, in a vain attempt to either place an exclamation mark on our lives or maybe redeem them, spend way too much money on a fancy funeral (and, of course, I'm thinking of the Lucinda Williams song) when we should have devoted more time to living our lives. What I like about Muslim funerals is that there's very little fancy, or, for that matter, funeral, about them. At the same time, there's another side to this. I was recently in Indiana and stayed at my father's house for several days. On one of them I was talking to my dad and his wife and the subject of his funeral came up (to be fair, it wasn't that organic because I raised the subject) because I think it's important that we're all on the same page (my mother passed a couple years ago and my siblings and I are still talking/arguing about what she wanted). I know my father wants to be cremated and have his wife or youngest daughter spread his ashes in Hawaii, but I wanted to sound him out on the ancillary parts. He made clear that he didn't want a funeral or service or even an announcement in the paper. On the one hand I get it: growing old really sucks, and he, obviously, has a couple decades on me. It's rare when anyone pops into my office to talk (or even see if I'm still breathing) and increasingly the only reason that I know I'm alive is because of the physical pain I feel. My father's words sounded like a man who was angry with life, the bitterness we feel at the pain and humiliation that come to dominate our existence and the frustration that our lives haven't turned out like we wanted. It's one thing to quote Marcus Aurelius's admonition that soon "you will have forgotten the world and the world will have forgotten you" and another to be facing it up close. It's not a mystery to me why Woody Allen's characters talked about death consistently in the moves he made when he was in his 40s and not at now. While I have a problematic relationship with my father he's led a life where he did a lot of good for a lot of people, and I would argue that he could check off the boxes of this hadith, and in that way his deeds will outlive him.
Muhammad, Hadith
This is a very famous hadith, or saying of the Prophet, and in this case I borrowed it from the Nasr commentary from the 55th surah, al-Najm, here rendered as "The Star." It was part of a discussion of the first Quranic reference, chronologically, of the notion that "none shall bear the burden of another," which is a key Islamic concept. One of the points here is that you own your deeds, for good or bad, and that you have a set amount of time to make things right (or wrong). In the end you might live on, but almost certainly not in the way you think. We, in a vain attempt to either place an exclamation mark on our lives or maybe redeem them, spend way too much money on a fancy funeral (and, of course, I'm thinking of the Lucinda Williams song) when we should have devoted more time to living our lives. What I like about Muslim funerals is that there's very little fancy, or, for that matter, funeral, about them. At the same time, there's another side to this. I was recently in Indiana and stayed at my father's house for several days. On one of them I was talking to my dad and his wife and the subject of his funeral came up (to be fair, it wasn't that organic because I raised the subject) because I think it's important that we're all on the same page (my mother passed a couple years ago and my siblings and I are still talking/arguing about what she wanted). I know my father wants to be cremated and have his wife or youngest daughter spread his ashes in Hawaii, but I wanted to sound him out on the ancillary parts. He made clear that he didn't want a funeral or service or even an announcement in the paper. On the one hand I get it: growing old really sucks, and he, obviously, has a couple decades on me. It's rare when anyone pops into my office to talk (or even see if I'm still breathing) and increasingly the only reason that I know I'm alive is because of the physical pain I feel. My father's words sounded like a man who was angry with life, the bitterness we feel at the pain and humiliation that come to dominate our existence and the frustration that our lives haven't turned out like we wanted. It's one thing to quote Marcus Aurelius's admonition that soon "you will have forgotten the world and the world will have forgotten you" and another to be facing it up close. It's not a mystery to me why Woody Allen's characters talked about death consistently in the moves he made when he was in his 40s and not at now. While I have a problematic relationship with my father he's led a life where he did a lot of good for a lot of people, and I would argue that he could check off the boxes of this hadith, and in that way his deeds will outlive him.
No comments:
Post a Comment