Life + Death.

We are a world obsessed with death.  Every funeral becomes an affair to stop traffic and bring out throngs and throngs of family and friends.  We’ve even created a TV show to further exploit our fascination of death.  For all this fascination, however, we understand very little about death.  This was explained by a well-known comedian, who quipped, “We show how little we know about death by giving the deceased a pillow.  Does he really need one?”

Do we really need a pillow where we are going?

We all want to live forever; we exercise until we collapse, we count our calories and trim our fat content, some of us shell out thousands and thousands for transplants to keep on living longer and longer.  The idea of death fascinates and paralyzes.  Many of us secretly wish we could be immortal, so that we could never die, never rust or decay, never cease.  But why?

Why do we want to keep on living in this world?  Why are we so worried to die?

A swift glance at any newspaper will tell you that our world itself is dying.  Earthquakes and tsunamis kill tens of thousands.  Wildfires ravage our country.  Epidemics like AIDS slay millions.  Morally, our world has collapsed.  Abortion kills millions, while madmen and would-be gods end the lives of many more.  Nothing is sacred anymore, and every day we draw closer and perilously closer to a world that denies the very existence of God.

And yet we want to live forever in this cratered landscape?

Someone once said, “Don’t take life so seriously.  You’ll never get out of it alive anyway.”  While humorous, it’s true.  The mortality rate for human beings is exactly one hundred percent.  No one lives forever.  Honestly, I don’t want to.  So why do so many people seek immortality?  Because we have lost sight of what lies just beyond.  Just beyond our field of vision, just out of our peripheral, lies eternity.  Where we will be immortal.

And who has seen God?  Not one of us.

The idea of the unknown terrifies most of us.  It’s why we crowned the men who walked on the moon as heroes, and why we pay tribute to fallen soldiers.  They have all done things that we can never imagine, things that bring wonderment and curiosity to our eyes.  The moon is far out of our reach; Iraq is a place we would never wish to be.  It is the unknown that keeps us searching for the Fountain of Youth.  The idea that there could be an afterlife, a God that is fair and just and will judge us for our fallen natures.

Security is within our grasp, but we would rather hug what is immediate to ourselves.

To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, one of my heroes, “We are much like a child playing in a mud puddle who is offered a cruise and island vacation.  He knows nothing but his mud, and the idea of a cruise has no appeal to him because he has no concept of it.”  Instead of unencumbering ourselves of our fear and hesitation, we would rather deal with what we can grasp to some extent: death.

We must look beyond death.  To end our gaze at death is to damn ourselves to eternal shortsightedness.

Instead of endlessly making much ado about death, we must focus on the life that lies after death.  The Kingdom of Heaven is here and now and coming.  We’d love to think that we will never die.  But we will.  So live.

Live.

~ by d3ovolent3 on May 25, 2009.