I'm very sad to report that Kerrie Fulton's mom, Carole Fulton, passed away last night after a long illness. Kerrie and Nick appreciate all the prayers that have been and will offered for them in this time of grief.
Death is a familiar visitor in most homes, including God's home, the church. Paradoxically, the more alive we are--that is, the more connected to other people and engaged with our world--the more we will experience death. None of us are getting out of this alive, it seems, and so as the years pass and friends and family go ahead of us into their eternal reward, we become more aware of our own impending mortality.
Spiritually wise people throughout all the traditions (not just Christian) have commended thinking about one's one death. It's a profound thing to think about how we, too, will pass away like the grass in the field. What's unique about the Christian meditation on this subject, however, is the special promise that God makes to us through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. By linking ourselves too Christ in Baptism we hope to share not only death in common with him, but resurrection as well.
The exact nature of this resurrection is still a mystery to us, but the Bible does make it clear that our resurrected selves will have a kind of fullness of life not possible now. Further, that in our resurrected bodies we will continue to know and love each other. And yet our new existence is perfected, in some sense that God knows, and made whole. The best image of this is the resurrected Body of Christ when he appeared to his disciples: his wounds were still there, only they had been made glorious.
A friend on mine, Donald Schell, recently wrote an article reflecting on the death of his father. He noted how much of what our society has to say about death misses the point. He found that the most spiritually satisfying truth evident in the death of his father was the simple finality of it. "One morning after my dad’s death, Ellen said that she was grateful that psalms said so plainly that death was death. It matched her experience of seeing my dad laid out on the floor after the paramedics had stopped CPR. He was gone. There was his body, but the life we’d known in that body, the man we’d loved was gone."
Gone. Dead and gone. That is our experience and it doesn't need to be coddled or denied. The hope we have in the resurrection is not to be found in the mortician's expertise in making the dead appear to be "sleeping." Our hope is something much grander and more difficult to imagine. It is a hope that we receive in the Gospels and know by revelation, not euphemism.
It's when we face up the reality of the certainty and finality of death in this life that we can begin to open our hearts to the promises of Christ. I know that for many people it is difficult to look at a realistically rendered crucifix. The sight of Jesus dying on the cross ought to be disturbing to us--it's purpose is to show us that suffering is real and death is real and that God can go there, too, to be with us. God died. Jesus was burried. And after three days he rose again.
So even at the grave me make our song: Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.
I'll close with one of my favorite old prayers from the Prayerbook. I used it often in the hospital and still find it can move me to tears when I think of it:
Depart, O Christian soul, out of this world; in the name of God teh Father almighty who created you; in the name of Jesus Christ who redeemed you; in the name of the Holy Spirit who sanctifies you. May your rest be this day in peace, and your dwelling place in the paradise of God. Amen.
-t
No comments:
Post a Comment