Death: The Way Out

It was September 16, 2017. I finished the last note of my song and stepped off the stage. Everyone was in black. Quite a few people were crying, including my aunt and grandmother. It was the day of my grandfather’s funeral. This is the first time I’ve written about it.

On Sorrow

I didn’t cry at the funeral. That is not to say that I didn’t grieve. I love my grandfather. But I don’t deal with emotion by showing it openly; I deal with it privately – and thoughtfully. I did a lot of thinking that day. I don’t understand how people grieve without knowing what, exactly, has been lost, and if it can be regained.

There has been a great deal of tragedy and heartache in the world since last year. I have lost multiple family members. The two states I currently call home – Texas and Florida – have seen devastating hurricanes and tragic mass shootings. As a friend from Beaumont told me a few days ago, “nothing’s been the same since Harvey.” And it seems that every day I hear from friends of fresh tragedies – not only external hardships like diseases and natural disasters, but still harder things: suicides and fatal mistakes and willing self-destruction. The world grows weary of itself this Easter.

As I look within me and around me and find the same brokenness and grief over and over and over again, a conviction grows in my mind. Every ordeal makes it stronger, like a blowtorch tempering steel. And the conviction is this: Death is not woven into the fabric of reality. It was never meant to be.*

On Joy

I do not have space here to rehearse the entire history of the universe and our place in it, to explain the coming of evil and death into the world, or the mystery by which all suffered for the sin of one man so that another man could suffer for the sin of all. For now, I will only say that death was not always a part of the world; it was the result of a terrible choice and cost a terrible price to make right. But made right it was. That is why the events of this weekend, Easter weekend, are the pivot-point upon which all of history, human or otherwise, turns.

The world is, at bottom, joy and goodness. Sorrow can only go so deep. We have the idea in our heads nowadays that joy is a shallow thing, that in order to be truly profound or mature, you have to be pessimistic and grim. But this self-important sorrow has a shallowness of its own. We must go deeper still, to the joy of the love at the very core of the world, the goodness by which all was made.

True, it has been marred, but only as the wind ruffles the surface of the sea or a mist blocks the sun. At the breaking of the earth and the rending of the sky, when all things are remade and the world is renewed, glory and goodness will overwhelm our evils as a mighty torrent of the sea wipes away our footprints on the shore. I know this because of Easter.

The Second Death and the Second Birth

Christianity talks of two births and two deaths. When we start off in this world, we all have physical birth, but we also all already have physical death. We are born already dying, our bodies already beginning to decay, to corrupt, to collect flaws. We are all the living dead. Death is not something that happens to you; it is a part of you.

But there is a far worse death going on inside of us. Our souls, too, are being corrupted; they are eating away at themselves, gathering flaws and failures, sowing the seeds of our destruction even as we build. We are slowly dying a second death, a death far more subtle and terrible than the first – a death of the soul. We are wedded to death and corruption in body and spirit.

But there is a way out, a new sort of life that came into being when the one man not wedded to death took death into himself anyway, and so destroyed it with the intensity of his life. A new sort of being was begun, and this is the life that is offered us if we choose to partake in it – for this is what Christianity means when it says we must each be born again. We must take hold of this new kind of life to escape the second and worse kind of death.

The Way Out

But even after we start this new life, we are still mired in all the physical corruption and death around us. We still bear the remnants of our old spiritual corruption and death; we are still not perfect. We are chained to this decay, and it must be severed if we are to be released fully into this new kind of life. And how is it severed? Through physical death. Like a caterpillar dissolves in a chrysalis so that a butterfly can come out, we must let go of our physical life so that a new and perfected life may begin. That is what death, for a Christian, is all about.

After I stepped off the stage at the funeral, my aunt came up and gave a eulogy. Near the end, she said that she knew my grandfather was in heaven, sitting in an armchair watching TV. Now, I do believe that heaven is a physical place, but I can only say that if I’d been in the hospital for months and I finally had a renewed body, I would not be sitting in an armchair; I would be sprinting up a mountain or wrestling a lion. To view death as merely a nice epilogue to life is to cheat oneself of joy. This life is the prologue. It is this life that must end so that true life may begin.

So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power… When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:

“Death is swallowed up in victory.”
“O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting?”

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

*I realize that the idea of life not being intrinsically pervaded with death puts me in direct conflict with some very prominent theories. I have not finished all my research on these issues, and I do not have space to examine the evidence here. I will only say that all the evidence I have found depends heavily on whatever assumptions you start with. And I start with the assumption that the universe is, at its core, one of life, not death.

“Sorrow” by Michelle Bradley is licensed under CC BY 2.0