From Essays After Montaigne
...to drive off the contempt of death to such a degree as to imploy it to distract and remove himselfe from honours, riches, greatnesse, and other goods and favours, which wee call the goods of fortune: as if reason had not enough to doe to perswade us to forgoe and leave them, without adding this new surcharge unto it, I had neither seene the same commanded nor practised untill such time as one place of Seneca came to my hands...
Saint Hilarie, Bishop of Poitiers, a famous enemie of the Arrian heresie, being in Syria, was advertised that Abra, his only daughter, whom hee had left at home with her mother, was by the greatest Lords of the countrie solicited and sued unto for marriage, as a damosell very well brought up, faire, rich, and in the prime of her age: he writ unto her (as we see) that she should remove her affections from all the pleasures and advantages might be presented her; for in his voyage he had found a greater and worthier match or husband of far higher power and magnificence, who should present and endow her with roabes and jewels of unvaluable price. His purpose was to make her lose the appetite and use of daily pleasures, and wholly to wed her unto God. Also which, deeming his daughters death, the shortest and most assured way, he never ceased by vowes, prayers and orisons, humbly to beseech God to take her out of this world, and to call her to his mercie, as it came to passe; for shee deceased soone after his returne, whereof he shewed manifest tokens of singular gladnesse.
I've started reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Ethics. His poem "Stations on the Way to Freedom" appears as its preface, and reads in part:
Come now, highest of feasts on the way to freedom eternal,
Death, strike off the fetters, break down the walls that oppress us,
Our bedazzled soul and our ephemeral body,
That we may see at last the sight which here was not vouchsafed us.
Freedom, we sought you long in discipline, action, suffering.
Now as we die we see you and know you at last, face to face.
Though I am trying to learn to die--to drive off the contempt of death as far as possible--I'm not seeking to do so to such a degree that I welcome death. People trying to comfort me against my fear of death have good-naturedly painted the afterlife in such wonderful terms that I've been tempted to ask them why they put such effort into staying alive. In some visceral sense, I'm disturbed by the view that life is an illusion before the deeper reality of the afterlife, the view that only at the moment of our death do we enter into eternity. Surely life has more meaning than a wait in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles; and surely it should be clear that, just as today is the first day of the rest of our lives, today is also a day in eternity (which has already started), the same as every other day in eternity. As the child that we were lives on in us, the person that we are in life must live on in us in our afterlife, or it won't be our afterlife.
I don't regret this world or my life in it, nor do I wish to escape them. To feel that way would seem vain and ungrateful. I don't believe myself to be better than my life or my world, nor do I believe myself to be apart from them. I tried to transcend the world in which I grew up and who I was there, and that led to nothing but misery. Having failed in that effort, I'm now seeking to return myself to that place and that person and to transfigure them into what they can be rather than denying what they are. I'm coming to believe that our goal should not be to transcend our lives to reach the divine--it should be to transfigure our lives to become divine.
It is here that I feel the greatest affinity for Buddhism. I'm more comfortable with the idea of being part of an ongoing chain of arising and cessation seeking toward nibbana (despite the significant logistical complications of reincarnation), than I am with the idea of the briefest moment of life preceding and determining my eternal state. When I first encountered Gnosticism, I was bitter. Its portrayal of creation as the botched effort of a demiurge that the divine spark in us is seeking to escape thrilled me. But my subsequent struggles with my psyche have shown me the extent to which my self is of this world, the degree to which my mind and even my soul are organic.
When God cast Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, He didn't cast them out of themselves--He didn't give them bodies or take their souls. Except for their transfiguration through their knowledge of good and evil, they remained the same outside of Paradise as they had been in Paradise. So perhaps we need only transfigure ourselves rather than transcend ourselves to return to Paradise.
7:44:21 AM 
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