Believing, Behaving and Belonging

Belonging comes before Believing

Richard Rice:

Believing, behaving, and belonging are all essential to the Christian life, but belonging is more important, more fundamental than the others. Believing, Behaving, Belonging: Finding New Love for the Church

Brian McClaren:

Phyllis Tickle’s book The Great Emergence ends with the note that emerging churches are changing the context in which faith is being lived. Whereas the traditional formulation is one of “believing-behaving-belonging”, the new movement points to “belonging-behaving-believing. ”

Karen Armstrong:

I say that religion isn't about believing things. It's ethical alchemy. It's about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness. People have such clear ideas of what God is you know: creator, father, personality watching over me. It's not what I believe in, even though I like to use the word sometimes. So people will ask, "Is traditional faith wrong?" And I say, "No." It doesn't really matter what you believe as long as it leads you to practical compassion. If your belief in a traditional God makes you come out imbued with a desire to feel with your fellow human beings, to make a place for them in your heart, to work to end suffering in the world, then it's good. Nobody has the last word on God, whether they're conservative or liberals.

Marcus Borg:

(I offer) a vision of the Christian life that is not very much about believing at all. Rather, the Christian life is about a relationship with God, as mediated to us by the Christian tradition as a whole. The Bible, of course, is foundational to that tradition. But the Christian life is not about believing. It’s about living within this tradition and letting it be a mediator of the sacred – letting this tradition, critically, have its way with us, shaping our identity, shaping our sense of what is real, shaping our sense of what life is about. It is a relational, a sacramental vision of the Christian life….

I see the Bible not simply as a lens through which I see God, but I also see it as a sacrament. Here I’m using the word sacrament in the broad meaning that it has in religious studies. A sacrament is a mediator of the sacred, a means whereby the Spirit comes to us. In this broad sense of the word sacrament, virtually anything from time to time can become a sacrament. Nature can become a sacrament. Another person can be a sacrament. A sacrament is a mediator of the sacred. I see the Bible as a means whereby the Spirit of God continues to address us, to speak to us in this day most obviously in the devotional and meditative use of scripture, but also sometimes in the use of scripture in public worship.

Philip Clayton:

We would have thought that mass communication would take away the need for the basic experience, but it’s actually the other way round — democratized social media depends on shared core experiences, in religion no less than in all other forms of human community. In Transforming Christian Theology I describe it as putting Belonging before Believing…

A beautiful Shavuot Teaching

This evening I got to study with Rabbi Mira Regev at Germantown Jewish Centre as part of a Tikkun Leil Shavuot. We read a piece of text from the Zohar that was incredibly beautiful. I will blog more about it tomorrow.

Sources for Art Green and Neil Gillman

Mordecai M. Kaplan

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Green is clearly following in the footsteps of his teacher Abraham Joshua Heschel, while Gillman is better understood as continuing the legacy of Heschel's colleague Mordecai M. Kaplan. ." Green often speaks of the school of "Neo-Hasidism," a loosely defined group of thinkers including Heschel and, of course, Green himself. Gillman, for his part, has publically stated that although he is institutionally connected to the Conservative movement, in his thinking he is a "Kaplanian." After looking at how these two approachs to theology , I will introduce Judith Plaskow, who comes at the questions from a different angle entirely, and ask the group to figure out which ideas are most congruent with their own way of understanding the issues.

Niles Township Shabbat Study

This weekend I will be conducting a Shabbat Lunch Study Session in a synagogue in Niles Township(Skokie), Il. The topic will be Three Contemporary Theologians. We will be looking at the thought of Arthur Green, Judith Plaskow and Neil Gillman, three of my favorites.(Although, come to think of it, I actually like all the theologians I teach in Contemporary Thought class.)

New Torah Commentary from Women of Reform Judaism

The URJ is about to publish a new commentary on the Torah that is written entirely by women. I believe each parasha will have four commentaries. The final one will be "contemporary reflections" and I have written a piece for the parasha "Tzav." I chose to focus on the sacrificial system and the exclusively male priesthood. I trace the way the sacrifical system was replaced in Christianity with the mass(note the continuity of the priests) and in Judaism by the famly meal(note the role of women as presiding ritual specialists). It was fun to write. I got to read Susan Sered's study of elderly Jewish women in Jerusalem, Women as Ritual Experts, Elizabeth Ehrlich's Miriam's Kitchen: A Memoir and the cookbook compiled by women in Tereizenstadt, Cara de Silva's In Memory's Kitchen. I also had the occassion to quote one of my favorite teachings from Hayim Soloveitchik's piece "Rupture and Reconstruction in Contemporary Orthodoxy." In it he claims(and who am I to argue?) that there is an old Yiddish expression that "A yiddishe bala-busta takes instruction only from her mother." The editor of the whole series, Tamara Ashkenazi, a Bible scholar whom I deeply respect, seemed to like my piece. I hope others do as well.

Kaplan on Gratitude for the Daily Miracles

The Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association list-serve has been discussing the question of "grace," the unearned goodness we experience in our lives.

It brought to mind a quotation from M. Kaplan's Diary that is a favorite of my father, the economist.(for more on my father's views, see the post below this one.)

From the Kaplan Diary
November 12, 1930As I sat alone and ate the lunch I said to myself, “This is a fair quid pro quo.” I gave the world three hours of homiletics and the world gave me back a nourishing lunch. I can never cease marveling at the miracle of exchange of goods and services. Not all the Ten Plagues of Egypt with the dividing of the Red Sea thrown into the bargain can compare in marvelousness with the miracle of exchange that makes it possible for me to get asparagus on toast in exchange for the homiletic interpretation of a few paragraphs of Leviticus Rabbah. It is for this marvel of marvels that I thank God whenever I say grace, and I say it quite often with cap on or without a cap.

Mordecai Kaplan as Spiritual Pragmatist

Spiritual pragmatism is a phrase I thought I invented. I wanted to have a phrase that captured William James' approach to religion that distinguished it from the strictly humanistic or post modern pragmatists. After coining it and using it for awhile, I subsequently "googled" the phrase and found, to my disappointment, that it is used(albeit not extensively) and worse still, it usually mean something quite different from what I am after. It is used by authors to describe either 1)the particular opiate the author is peddling-- the new age meets commerical America or 2)what the author, a "real" religious person, is opposed to(see 1). Naturally, I agree with the #2 folks, which means I should probably find a better phrase than spiritual pragmatism.

Nevertheless, I find the best way to read Kaplan is through the lens William James, a pragmatist who held the door open for faith. In my view, Kaplan's legacy is not a set of theological conclusions, but rather a spirit --one that recommends itself(at least to me) as a way of conducting conversations about matters often called "theological." Evidently, Kaplan studied and was influenced by both James and Dewey. It is my hope that we can build upon the Jamesian legacy in Kaplan.

William James and Mordecai Kaplan came out of the same intellectual universe, hoping to mediate Darwinism for an intellectual audience in a way that would keep the door open for faith. Their twin enemies were orthodoxy on the one hand and secularism on the other.

In Varieties, James is not attempting a theological argument to prove anything in particular about God. In fact, of the whole history of such arguments he notes that “If you have a God already whom you believe in, these arguments confirm you. If you are atheist, they fail to set you right.”

James had no use for the reductionist materialsm, the agressive scientism of his day.(For a contemporary best-selling example, see Richard Dawkins.)In James' era, the materialist claim took the form of reducing religious experience to pathology. Long before contemporary neuroscience, the theory was suggested that St. Paul, Dostoevsky and others who reported intense religious experiences in fact were suffering from a medical condition. James' response was clear.

Immediate luminousness….philosophical reasonableness, and moral helpfulness are the only available criteria. Saint Teresa might have had the nervous system of the placidest cow, and it would not now save her theology, if the trial of the theology by these other tests should show it to be contemptible. And conversely if her theology can stand these other tests, it will make no difference how hysterical or nervously off her balance Saint Teresa may have been when she was with us here below.

James is far more sober than much contemporary spirituality in his insistence on evaluating religious experience by results. “If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.” James revels in accounts of a great variety of human experiences of the divine, but he also suggests evaluating religious experience by its fruits for life, or as he put it, “By their fruits ye shall know them, not by their roots.”
In the end religious experience must meet the test.

In other words, James and Kaplan share a commitment to experience as the basis and pragmatism as the judge. Although Kaplan is often called a rationalist, in fact, that does not seem quite right. He did not want Judaism to live up to rational truth. He saw it not as a form of truth but as a form of life. And his deepest interest was not, finally, philosophical abstractions but rather, experience.

James is so helpful to us because he is more consistant than Kaplan. Whatever experiences you may have about the ultimate nature of things still leave you poised on a knife blade. Faith is a choice No research will prove or disprove God. But a pragmatist philosophical stance toward that experience can leave the door open. Jeffrey Stout defined philosophical pragmatism as “never having to say you are certain.”

Reading Kaplan through the lens of James, we can focus on the moments in Kaplan’s work where he abandons his claim to be rational and adopts a what I call a spiritual pragmatic tone, in the spirit of James. At certain points, Kaplan clearly states that he does not really expect his claims to be accepted, except through faith.

Kaplan ultimately bases his ideas of soul, morals and hope not on assertions but on experience, experience that he chooses to interpret in a certain way and toward a particular goal. He is not, in fact, interested in dissolving the idea of God into high-sounding ethics and spiritual values. Kaplan’s purpose in writing "definitions of God" is to help people focus on spiritual experiences in their own lives. Even more important than naming something God is what happens next. As James put it, you must "set it(the word God, for example) at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed.

Both James and Kaplan wanted to hold on to the “plus” element in life, the possibility of faith, and for much the same reason, although it took two different forms. In James’ case, he saw that religious experience provided important energy for healing. James was impressed with the possibility of the soul being born again. In Kaplan’s case it was the Jewish people that was the sick soul in need of rebirth. He wanted to harness religious faith for “Without religion the energies of the Jewish people are bound to be those of fear, with it those of hope.”

Students of Kaplan today frequently note that he spoke with clarity and depth about the condition of the Jewish people but insufficiently honored the inner world of the individual, precisely the focus of James’ interest. Some suggest that Reconstructionism is now seeking to redress the imbalance—to give the individual and his or her inner life its due. Another way of putting it: Reconstructionism had attended to philosophical reasonableness and moral helpfulness but needed more work on immediate luminosity. This is why James seems so helpful to me.

What is Mussar?

Since I now know that some people are reading my blog who are not my blood relatives, I feel compelled to offer a brief explanation of the title. Midlife--that's the age I am right now(too old to do something completely new, too young not to). As for Mussar, I offer the definition posted on the website of my Mussar Teacher, Rabbi Ira Stone of Philadelphia.
What Is Mussar?
Mussar is a literature, a philosophy, a movement and a practice. Beginning in the earliest periods of Jewish experience various spiritual masters have addressed the problem of internalizing the central values of religious teaching. They have addressed the difficulties involved in resisting the tendencies we are all born with which act against our accepting the responsibilities inherent in the grandeur of our humanity. Care for ourselves, care for those closest to us, care for the world itself. Despite our possession of a record of Divine and human encounters which have expressed these obligations, and sometimes because of it, we tend to "fall asleep" rather than face the full demands these obligations. Mussar can be characterized as "a road to insomnia:" A way of staying awake to these obligations. A literature has grown up which exhorts and explains in detail the philosophy of paths to this "insomnia" and that is called Mussar literature. In the 19th Century Rabbi Israel Salanter began a movement which used this literature, but developed independently a variety of specific practices and life-skills aimed at moving, so to speak, from the book to life. To describe practices that would be effective in addressing the complexity of the human psyche and soul so as to effect lasting change.

By the way, the website for Rabbi Stone's Institute is www.musarinstitute.org

*Please note that musar/mussar is spelled differently in the name of the website than it is in the body of the website!(go figure.)

Also..and this is the most important part, Rabbi Stone has his own blog
http://bicycle-musings.blogspot.com
where he chronicles his latest passion--bicycling.

cynthia ozick on romantic religion

This is a great piece!
(I have only included the beginning, but you get the idea)

December 10, 2006 New York Times

ESSAY; A Youthful Intoxication

By CYNTHIA OZICK

In my late teens and early 20s I was a mystic. It was Blake and Shelley who induced those grand intoxications, and also Keats and Wordsworth and Coleridge. At New York University, where Thomas Wolfe had once taught freshman composition, his shade -- O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again! -- sometimes still flickered. Dylan Thomas, not yet in his cups and not yet renowned, came to a handful of students in an ordinary classroom and chanted, as if to a hall of hundreds, The force that through the green fuse drives the flower, syllables instinct with divine afflatus. Meanwhile I was writing an undergraduate thesis on the Romantic poets, and though I knew neither the word nor the concept, I was at that time seriously antinomian. Nothing was distinct, or of its own indivisible nature, nothing was fixed, nothing was demanded: all was wavering spirit and intuition. Rapture and ecstasy, ecstasy and rapture! -- these were imagination's transports, abetted by the piercing sweetness of melancholy. The sage was withered from the lake, and no birds sang; or else they chorused thrillingly, like celestial choirs.

Besides being a mystic and an antinomian, I was also a believing monist: all things were one thing, watercolor worlds leaching and blending and fading into porous malleable realms. Yearning and beauty were the heart's engines, shocking the waiting soul (mine, anyhow) into a pulsing blur of wonderment. In Xanadu, where Alph the sacred river ran, you might actually see the Blessèd Damozel leaning over the bar of heaven! As for where the Spirit of God dwelled ... well, where else but in you and me? (Primarily, of course, in me.) The Ten Commandments? In Xanadu nobody had ever heard of them.

At 24 I blundered, I no longer recall where or how, into ''Romantic Religion,'' a book-length essay -- or manifesto, or scholarly credo -- by Leo Baeck. His name, his stature, his personal history, his transcendent learning were all unfamiliar. That he was of that remarkable German Jewish generation which included, among many other humanist eminences, the historian Gershom Scholem and the philosophers Martin Buber and Walter Benjamin, I had yet to discover. Nor did I know that Baeck was a rabbi consumed, beyond the vastnesses of his own multifaceted tradition, by Greek and Christian thought; or that he was of that minute fraction of Jewish humanity to have come out of Theresienstadt alive. When I stumbled into the majesties of ''Romantic Religion,'' I was as one (so it seemed to me afterward) who had conversed with Socrates while ignorant of Socrates' origins and identity.

the middah of humility

I love this piece by Alan Morinis on humility


"Anyone who sets a particular place for himself to pray in the synagogue, the God of Abraham stands in his aid, and when he dies, people say of him, 'this was a humble person'" (Brachot 6b).

Humility is limiting oneself to an appropriate amount of space while leaving room for others.

Where is the humility in sitting in the same place in the synagogue whenever you come to pray? The answer is that by fixing yourself to one spot, you thereby free up all the other space for others to use.

This example helps us frame a Jewish definition of humiliy as "limiting oneself to an appropriate amount of space while leaving room for others." Sitting in a predictable place, you make room for others to occupy their own spaces too. Zechariah ben Avkulas gave up too much of his "space," considering that the space a person can occupy can be physical, emotional, verbal, or even metaphorical.

funeral musings

I did a funeral today for a 49 year old woman. She was diagnosed 12 years ago with a rare and fatal disease. She decided to slow down and to treasure every day, every hour. I can't even imagine....
It never fails to move me...this honor we give the body even after death.
In a passage from the talmudic Tractate Megillah, page 3b, which Rabbi Ira Stone selects in his book Reading Levinas, Reading Talmud, we learn that reading the Megillah takes precedence even over the ancient Temple service. Then we are told that attending to a dead body, that is, showing honor to the remains of a human being, takes precedence over reading the Megillah.
What is this mitzvah, this sacred commandment, about? Respect is due a human being, so much so that even the body that once housed a human soul must be treated with dignity, with kavod. How much the more so a living person!

the luz bone

From David Grossman, Be My Knife


Listen, though — I once read that Our Sages of Blessed Memory had the idea that we have one tiny bone in the body, above the end of the spine — they call it the "Luz." You can't kill it, it doesn't crumble after death and can't be destroyed by fire. It is from this that we will be recreated at the Resurrection. I used to play a little game with myself — I would try to guess the Luz of the people I knew, divine the final thing that would be left of them, that indestructible thing from which they'll be reborn. And, of course, I searched for my own Luz as well, but nothing within me met all the necessary conditions. So I stopped asking and looking, I gave my Luz up for lost, until I saw you in the playground. All of a sudden that forgotten thought arose from the dead, and along with it the sweet and crazy notion came to me that maybe my Luz isn't in me after all, but in someone else.

dvar torah: Shelach

I read a midrash with Julie that led me to write the following dvar torah.
**************
A friend of mine works in a nursing home. One day, she was helping a 92 year old woman who was just moving in that day. After many hours of waiting patiently in the lobby, the room was finally ready. As they walked slowly to the elevator(the woman used a walker) my friend enthusiastically described the room. "I hope you like it." My friend said.

“I love it,” the woman stated with the enthusiasm of an eight-year old having just been presented with a new puppy.

"But you haven't even seen the room yet!"

“That doesn’t have anything to do with it,” she replied. "Whether I like my room or not doesn’t depend on how the furniture is arranged; .I already decided to love it. It’s how I arrange my mind."



I would love to get to know this woman. She sounds wonderful, the kind of person I want to be when I grow up. And she is on to a profound truth here. It really matters far less how the furniture is arranged than how her mind is arranged. But I would like to challenge her idea that she can arrange her mind as she likes. In fact, her mind has been arranged for a very long time already and while she can certainly do many things to strengthen her positive attitude toward life, that arranged mind-- a small part of it under her conscious control--will indeed determine how she sees the room she is about to enter.



Edward Flannery, a Catholic priest tells the story of walking down a street with his Jewish friend and seeing up ahead a beautiful church with a large cross on top. Father Flannery commented to his friend how that image of the cross, gleaming in the sun, reminds him of love and forgiveness and makes him feel so good. The friend said, I see that cross and I think of blood shed, pogroms, people being beaten to death. Now, I could take that Jewish friend and put him through a course on Christianity, taught by the nicest Christian that ever lived. At the end of it, we might even get him to walk by that cross and say, "Wow. That's lovely." But take a picture of his brain(as scientists now can do) and I bet you'll find different action happening there than in the brain of his friend the priest looking at that same cross.


Recently, my hevrutah partner Julie Greenberg and I came across a wonderfully enigmatic text that relates to those stories, but you will have to bear with me a little to understand how.

Rava said in the name of Rebi Yochanan: Why does the [letter] Peh precede the [letter] Ayin in the alphabetical acrostics in the book of Lamentations? Because the spies spoke about that which their eyes did not see. (Sanhedrin 104b)

Do you feel like you came in the middle of a conversation? So did we. Let me back up and make sure you all know what we Julie and I knew going into this, and then I'll tell you about what we learned that we did not know. First: you need to know that in the Hebrew alphabet, the letter ayin comes just before the letter peh. Also, both of those letter names also have meanings as words. Ayin means eye and Peh means mouth. Second, you need to know that the Book of Lamentations is about the destruction of the Temple and is read on the ninth of Av when we mourn that destruction.

Finally, you should know that in the book of Numbers it is told that 12 spies were sent ahead to check out the Land of Canaan and that ten of them came back with a report of "giants in the land, next to whom we felt like grasshoppers" and two of whom said, "if we will it, it is no dream." The text tells us that the ten with the scary report were giving the people a false report, but it did scare the people enough so that they(and those ten spies) did not live to enter the land.

That's all Julie and I knew and we were full of questions. What does the story of the spies have to do with the Book of Lamentations? And what are those acrostics? And why did they flip the peh and the ayin?

Checking out the acrostics in the Book of Lamentations was easy. We just pulled a Tanach from the shelf. Turns out the book has five chapters, four of which are complete acrostics--each chapter having 22 verses, the first beginning with the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet and the last beginning with the last. The fifth and chapter of Lamentations also has 22 verses--but they are in no particular order. We were enchanted by that---utter destruction being mourned with the most organized form--as if the discipline was needed to hold on, especially in the chaos of the loss of the Temple. But in the last chapter, the building blocks of order are still there, but they have been scattered about.

Next, we tried to understand the connection between the story of the spies and the destruction of the Temple. It turns out another midrash explains it: the people believed the dire predictions rather than the optomistic ones and that night(which happened to be Tisha B'av) they cried. In the end, they did conquer the land, but their bad feeling about themselves and their inability to trust the upbeat report, set the whole project up for a kind of failure. God eventually disperses them from the land they conquered, as bemoaned in Lamentations.

So now to the heart of the matter. What did it mean they put their peh before their ayin? (Nobody knows if there is an actual answer to the author's intent. Perhaps at one time the peh and ayin really were reversed. But o comes before p in our alphabet and obsolon comes before phi so it seems more likely that ayin came before peh.) So, lacking historical insight, it is time for the midrash to have a field day.

The spies did not lie, neither the ones who gave the dire reports nor the two that disagreed. They told what they saw. But they saw what they thought they would see. Simeon b. Yohai believed that the spies saw what they already believed they were going to see. They put their peh before their ayin.

This is true at the very physical level of vision, perceptual structures of the visual cortex.

How often do we do the same thing! We organize information that our eyes tell us, but we make it conform to our preconceptions.I am well aware that the very same brief answer to a question by a brand new student in my classroom will be heard by me in a different way if I have been told the student's SAT scores in advance. This has been studied in the simple matter of vision. We like our outside world to conform with our inside world so we see what will make the best consonance between what is already in our head and the world outside. It makes us feel better for outside and inside to conform. When we are young, the inside is still in flux. As we get older, it is harder to change our brains so we more often change how we see things. We like things to fit with what we know. Scientists call this neuro. When asked to judge something we see, our judgments are often related to the familiarity of what was seen.


One famous experiment showed groups of people Chinese pictograms, some people seeing certain ones more often than others as they were flashed in front of their eyes. Then everyone was asked which pictograms they liked the most. Consistantly, people liked the ones they had seen most frequently. Those very same characters were at the bottom of the list of the people who had seen them the least frequently. Nobody in this experiment knew any Chinese at all before they began. They "liked" what seemed more familiar to them.

Neuroscientists are interested in a result like that from experimental psychology. They wonder what brain function leads people to that way of seeing. Interestingly, this type of experiment has been repeated with people with brain injuries and Alzheimers who have very little short term memory. Yet, the same results come out, leading the scientists to guess that something goes on in the emotional realm, not the conscious frontal cortex realm. Edward Flannery and his friend would probably respond viscerally to that same symbol of the cross in that same radically different way even when they no longer could speak or think.

Of course, Chinese characters have no feelings and nothing much is at stake when we favor some over others. The issue gets more important when we react to people of different skin color or religious garb based on the way our brains predispose us to see them. White americans consistantly respond on an affective level more negatively to photos of African Americans than of whites. Korean Americans are more positive emotionally to Korean surnames than to Japanese ones. We are talking here about the amygdala being activated. This is not the part of our brains we control.

Back to our 92 year old friend in then nursing home. She has a strong will to be happy and I don't doubt that will stand her in good stead.(Some scientists are trying to take will away from us, but others are not buying it.)But the neurological research suggests that her will to be positive will have a lot more work to do the more that room she enters looks different from rooms she has ever lived in before. To the extent that it looks similar to arrangements already in her brain, to that extent she'll have less of a job to do to choose to be happy. Consonance between internal and external arrangements(even of furniture) is experienced as pleasurable at a level not within our concious awareness.

Putting our peh before our ayin is, in fact, inevitable. We see what we see because of what we have seen in the past and said to ourselves about it. Perhaps the best we can do is be mindful of what it is we put in front of our eyes on a regular basis, what we put on our tongues to say on a regular basis, knowing that will condition how we see things in the future. In particular, be mindful of what we put in front of our children's eyes and the words we put into their mouths.

Our portion ends with the admonition to where tzitzit so that we can "look at them" and remember. What do we reinforce everytime we wear a tallis and look at the tzitzit? And then how do we see the world with different eyes.

a story for hospice

I went to a lecture by Rabbi Naomi Levy and she told this wonderful story that she read in Netivot Shalom(a commentary on Torah and holidays by a relatively recent Hasidic scholar).
A man is walking in a dark forest and he has lost his way. He can't find the path. Suddenly an illuminated chariot comes by. The foolish man looks at the chariot and keeps watching it as it disappears from sight. But the wise man uses the light of the chariot to find the path. Then, though the chariot moves on, the effect of its light remains long after it is gone.(well, that is an approximate version of what I heard)
Naomi asked the group how they thought this might relate to death and dying. Some people noted that the people about to lose a loved one might be able to think about the light the loved one has shed and the way it will continue to illumine their journey after the loved one is gone. Naomi pointed out that it is also a possible comfort to one who is about to die, for the dying regret abandoning their loved ones. In this story, they see that they will never fully leave them.