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COMMENTARY/CATHOLIC SCHOOLS
November 7, 2017 | The Valley Catholic
Moral Theology: Kathleen Dowling Singh, RIP
By Rev. Ron Rolheiser, OMI
Theologian, teacher, award-winning
author, and President of the Oblate
School of Theology in San Antonio, TX
No community should botch its deaths. That’s a
wise statement from Mircea Eliade and apropos in the
face of the death two weeks ago of Kathleen Dowling
Singh. Kathleen was a hospice worker, a psychothera-
pist, and a very deep and influential spiritual writer.
She is known and deeply respected among those
who write and teach in the area of spirituality on the
strength of three major books: “The Grace in Living;”
“The Grace in Aging,” and “The Grace in Dying.”
Interestingly, she worked backwards in writing this
trilogy, beginning with dying, moving on to aging,
and finally offering a reflection on living. And she
did this because her grounding insights were taken
from her experience as a hospice worker, attending to
terminally ill patients. From what she learned from
being with and observing the dying taught her a lot
about what it means to age and, ultimately, what it
means of live. Her books try to highlight the deep
grace that’s inherent in each of these stages in our
lives: living, aging, dying.
I want to highlight here particularly the insights
from her initial book, “The Grace in Dying.” Outside
of scripture and some classical mystics, I have not
found as deep a spiritual understanding of what God
and nature intend in the process we go through in
dying, particularly as is seen in someone who dies
from old age or a terminal illness.
Singh encapsulates her thesis in one poignant line:
The process of death is exquisitely calibrated to bring us
into the realm of spirit. There’s a wisdom in the death
process. Here’s how it works:
During our whole lives our self-consciousness
radically limits our awareness, effectively closing
off from our awareness much of the realm of spirit.
But that’s not how we were born. As a baby, we are
wonderfully open and aware, except, lacking self-
consciousness, an ego, we aren’t aware of what we are
aware. A baby is luminous, but a baby can’t think. In
order to think it needs to form an ego, become self-
aware, and, according to Singh, the formation of that
ego, the condition for self-awareness, is predicated on
each of us making four massive mental contractions,
each of which closes off some of our awareness of the
world of spirit.
We form our egos this way: First, early on in a
baby’s life, it makes a distinction between what is self
an