Dennis Prager and a guest discuss how faith and reason help manage the fear of death. Prager recalls seeing Anne Frank's diary at 17 and choosing reason over overwhelming emotion. A story about an Irish dressmaker named Eleanor, whose mother died of cancer, shows how believing in an afterlife gave her peace.
I am so emotional that I had to figure out how not to have it overwhelm me.
Wow.
Yeah, I know it is a wow because I'm so rational. And so I'll give you an example. I watched The Diary of Anne Frank when I was 17 on television. And it choked me up beyond words. And I said, how am I going to deal with this? I'm overwhelmed with sadness about the Holocaust. And not just the Holocaust, evil and unjust suffering generally. And so what I decided already in high school, I made most of my big decisions in high school. Interestingly, I decided that what I would do is channel my emotions into action, and that way I feel I'm doing something about what I feel so strongly about. Does this all make sense?
Absolutely.
And, and so it was a very conscious decision to substitute reason for passion. The passions are still there, but I have channeled them— it's the best term, I guess— into fighting and into reason. So I just wanted to say that, that, that's— I really I did fear, to a certain extent, I did fear that my emotions would get the better of me. And I'll tell you what emotions, sadness over human suffering. That's the emotion.
I've come to see death a little differently and it's because of my faith in God. When I was in Europe this summer, I was in Ireland for a little bit and I met this beautiful girl, 23 years old, named Eleanor. She's a dressmaker. She's just stunning, so dignified and beautiful. And she told me that her mother died 2 weeks before I met her of cancer. And she handed me a little prayer card, which is very common in Ireland to have a little prayer card, of her mother. And she had these tears sitting on the edge of her eyes, her beautiful blue eyes, and they were— I was just so captivated by her because she never let them fall down, but you could just see her heart was broken. And I said to her, Eleanor, how are you functioning right now? How are you leaving your house? How are you out in the world after your mother died? And she said, my faith. And I said, what do you mean by that? And she told me that a priest came into the hospital with her mother shortly before her mother passed. And the priest sat down with her mother and said, I know that this is terrifying and deeply sad for you, that you're going to leave your family and you want to watch your kids grow up and continue living your life. But this priest said to her, the human lifespan is so short. Think about the span of eternity. Think about all of the thousands of years that human beings have been on this earth. And then we each individually come for 50 to 70 years. Let's hope 50 to 100 years. And this priest said, that is a blip on the radar screen of time. That is a— our earthly minds can't conceptualize it, but it is a tiny, tiny bit of time in the span of eternity. And this priest said to her, it will be faster than the speed of light in the span of time. Until you're reunited with your family again.
I believe that.
I really believe that too. And it was this girl telling this to me, and I could see that she really believed it. And it was what allowed her mother to have peace in her death. It's allowed— it was what allowed her to have peace through her mother's death. And that permanently changed the way that I view it. Is that, is that how you view it?
Oh, totally. I, I said the— my sanity preserver is the afterlife.
Well, you know, I—
not just for my— for my reconnection with loved ones, that God judges the bad and rewards the good. That's my sanity. That's what I meant by my sanity keeper, not just my resurrection or whatever it will be.
Life, Legacy, and a Dangerous Mission in the Soviet Union | Sunday Fireside Chat
