#261 A Crack in Our Certainty: Sarah Kerr on Death, Mystery, and What We Believe

Well, you know, to go back to this meeting death through a lens that's too small.

I think there are a couple of different ways to approach that.

One is, again, in dominant mainstream culture, we tend to meet death as a physical experience.

It is about the end of the body.

And we have lots of great hospice and palliative care to support our body, to support us emotionally as the body ends.

And the understanding is that when our body ends, we end.

But a more expanded lens, I would say a soul-based approach, includes the soul.

And the soul is less predictable in the body.

The soul is energetic.

The body is physical.

So what happens in the soul's journey, if body and soul are together and as we die, they separate, this is where I think some of the things we're talking about, the mysteries come in.

These dreams we may have, these ways of experiencing our dead, things that happen when people are dying in the deathbed where they say or do or see things.

Even people's innate experiences of intuition, perhaps connection with our dead, it expands the lens.

And I often talk about the fact that in Western culture, we have this box that we say is real.

And everything that's outside that box, we label as unreal or non-ordinary.

extrasensory, supernatural, transpersonal.

We have all these ways of saying it's not really real.

And so the box is quite predictable.

Anything that becomes mysterious, we put outside the box.

And so sacred death care and meeting death from a more expanded lens that includes the mystery, includes all of those things.

And at the heart of it all, death is a mystery.

We cannot predict it.

We cannot predict when it happens, why it happens, how it happens.

Sometimes it happens in such horrible ways, heartbreaking ways.

That's the mystery in the bigger lens, just death.