The prophet Jeremiah witnessed the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of Solomon’s Temple at the hands of Babylon. Even after being allowed to remain with his people in Judah instead of being taken to Babylon, he had to flee to Egypt where he eventually died, never having returned home.

A tragic sequence of events for a prophet of Israel who understood full well that the very prophetic tradition of which he was a part had started back with Moses and the Exodus out of Egypt. For Jeremiah, to be stuck back in Egypt would have felt like a cruel joke.

If you open the book of Jeremiah and jab your finger down on any given line of text you’re more than likely to find gut-wrenching grief, lament and gruesome descriptions of human mortality/death. But why focus on death and dying?

Lydia Dugdale is the director of The Center for Medical Ethics at Columbia University, having first established The Program for Medicine, Spirituality, and Religion at Yale School of Medicine, and is also the author of a book, "The Lost Art of Dying: Reviving Forgotten Wisdom."

Lydia is an exemplar of what it means to actively practice hope, AND look into the darkness and explore human mortality and what she calls, "The Good Death". She is adamant that working to form a healthy concept of "The Good Death" is what informs our ability to live "The Good Life."

Lydia says that she wishes everyone, regardless of youth or health, might internalize the fact that they have a death diagnosis.

People are given 3-6 months to live, and all of a sudden feelings of jealousy, attachment to material possessions, the pursuit of success, all begin to subside; all the ‘Imperial Consciousness' stuff falls away and what remains is The Prophetic Imagination - the hope for a mended world, longing for resurrection and understanding that time is precious and people matter.

Like Lydia, Jeremiah wasn’t gazing into the darkness from a place of overwhelming despair but rather from a place of hope. Through his art, Jeremiah points us towards the fragile beauty of life, mines our universal longings for resurrection, and unearths what often feel like our absurd hopes for a restored, mended world.
 
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