Little children used to go to bed praying, “If I should die before I wake, I pray Thee Lord my soul to take.”
Contemporary Christians worry that the story of the crucifixion may be too intense for children.
Death is uncomfortable to our consumer driven and decadent popular culture. There is nothing we can buy on late night television to cure it. It is the end our choices and our pleasures. It cannot be defeated . . . and deep down we suspect that it would be bad if it were. We know that we can only put off the end.
If somehow, science were to allow us to live to the end of the cosmos, then the end would come just as surely. As heat death or a big crunch approached from which science herself could find no future for the residents of this cosmos, the words of Hamlet would take on, after a billion billion years, stunning urgency:
“To be or not to be.”
Those last men would understand the unavoidable nature of death.
We do not. Every death is a tragedy to us . . . which it is not. If I died tonight, before I wake, it would be sad for my family but no tragedy. Forty-four year old men die every die. We cannot predict it. We can do little to avoid most of it. No amount of bubble wrap or litigation can make a life both interesting and fully safe from accident.
It was not always so. Recently, at the Victoria and Albert Museum (officially my favorite in London), I looked at “funeral art” with which our fathers and mother surrounded themselves. One wax image stands out. It shows the stages of decay of a man presided over by the Grim Reaper. It is an image without pity to the viewer. Not a single ray of religious sunshine is in it, but it is produced by a faithful Christian.
There is no hope in death.
At first, I thought, “My Goth friends would get this . . . ” but then realized that even the black wearing Goth subculture did not picture death so realistically. Their vampires are not Stoker-like, but Whedon-ish. They are far too hopeful, even in their angst. The Medieval and Victorian art was more stark and less hopeful. Rats were eating our bones in one. There was no hope and no mercy in death.
It makes everyone ugly.
Good lesson, because death is the end of pity.
Our only hope, and for many moderns it is a faint one, is in divine mercy.
The end is coming. This makes me sad of course. I am quite happy and have no desire to die, but die I must. It is more certain than taxes. After that?
After that best reason, divine Revelation, and experience says that after that comes the judgment. The universe has not been nice to humankind, but just. The universe is not fair, but fiercely good. The other side is not going to be Disneyland with fully effective safety devices, but full of goodness, truth, and beauty.
That means full of awe and terrible with splendor.
And I have mucked up and muddled through far too often to trust in my own good works or have confidence that my soul is, in itself, ready for such unadulterated joy. My wiring for pleasure is to little and the current of goodness too great for any such easy hopes.
My hope is in God. I really might die before I wake. These few paragraphs may post after I am no longer around to edit it. I hope not, but I do not know. This much I know:
The small and safe little world of secularism which pretends that this life is all there is cannot be for me.
Would that I could believe that this were true!
Would that death were sleep . . . but perchance we dream . . . and what dreams may come! Instead what evidence we have suggests that this life is not the end, but the beginning of a bigger reality. There is no reason to think our experience of this reality is not (as Plato would say) more intense than that one in which we find ourselves now. Our little fences and moral compromises would be blown away like prim fences in a cyclone of goodness.
Best to have learned to be one with that powerful coming wind.
Hope?
There is none in our certain death or in the mere fact of an afterlife. (No exit! What a dreadful thought!) There is hope only in the greater fact of a good God.
This I do know. If I should die before I wake, I pray Thee Lord my soul to take.