William Blaine-Wallace, Water in the Wastelands: The Sacrament of Shared Suffering, Cowley, 2002, 102 pp

A review by Georgianna Henry

There is a tradition in Japan that, when a beautiful piece of pottery is broken, the person who mends it adds gold to the glue, embellishing and highlighting the path of the break, thereby adding to the beauty and true value of the piece. When I asked, friends told me that there are several words for this: anagama, kitsungi or shibui. I can believe there are three names for this process because I think the idea is beautiful and wonderful. Blaine-Wallace describes the spiritual equivalent to the Japanese process of embellishment, the acknowledgment of our frailty and brokenness.

Dying people and those who love them, are forced to face their helplessness, their powerlessness, their frailty, their insufficiency, their need for relationship. Others can learn much about living from those near death.

Unfortunately, our society demands that we ignore death and dying as thoroughly as possible. It wants us to believe that we can be young and vital forever and that, if we somehow become old or ill or frail, if we dare to die, that we're the bizarre exception, that we've done something wrong. We haven't taken the right vitamin pill, or we haven't exercised enough, or we didn't read the right self-help book, or we chose to live in the wrong place.

Well, there is. We're mortal. We will all die. We will all meet our Maker. The important question is, how will we die? Will we die believing that death is some sort of disgraceful personal failing or will we die with grace and acceptance, eager to be held in the arms of our Creator, understanding that death, like life, is a gift from God?

Through his years of work with the dying and grieving, Blaine-Wallace has learned much and shares it beautifully. The antithesis of a self-help book, and completely devoid of platitudes, Water in the Wastelands shares his understanding of holy death.

In The Great Divorce, C S Lewis described the transformation of our body after death, our frail, little, soft body is transformed into something bigger and better and stronger and more beautiful. I like to picture our post-death bodies embellished by God, showing where we suffered. With heavenly anagama, kitsungi, shibui.

[COVENANT, Number 16, December 2003]

Georgianna Henry, an Episcopalian for a decade, teaches mathematics at Northern Illinois University, De Kalb.

[COVENANT, Number 16, December 2003]