ON LIVING AND DYING AND LIVING AGAIN.
I can only write what my memory allows me to write. So, the better my recall-capacity, the more I can remember, the larger is my repertoire of recollection.
I know: with increasing age the past suffers, and, perhaps, events become selective with the favorable retained, and the not so good experiences suppressed. I admit: Homo sum: I am a fallible fellow.
Yet. I find myself in a somewhat more advantageous position than most of my contemporaries. I am grateful that my body, soul, and spirit are in good working order, and my capacity to think back, seems unimpaired. To me, anyway. Perhaps I am deluding myself, as there are few witnesses alive to repute my past events, so you have to take my word for it.
Why do I live?
I believe that I am alive to live. LIVE in capital letters. Jesus emphatically stated this truth, recorded in John 10: 10: “I have come to bring LIFE and that to the full.” Only an alive person can fulfill that pledge, alive meaning a full orbed existence: not only in good physical shape, but in full accordance with the Latin dictum: Mens Sana in Corpore Sano, a sound mind in a sound body. We are a unity. I enthusiastically endorse the totality of the human: we are not only a body: we also are a soul. The whole human soul is in the whole human body and thus in every part of the body, just as God is present in the entire universe.
The body dies, the soul lives on.
Jesus never mentioned ‘death’: he always corrected the mourners by calling ‘death’ by its proper name: ‘Sleep’.
This connotation has theological implications, because this sleep is not permanent. As a believing Christian I confess that there comes a wake-up call. That awakening comes for all who ever lived. And then there is that dreaded conclusion: Judgement.
Here is what Google tells me:
Depending on the translation, the word spelled “judgement” (with an “e”) appears approximately 100 times in the Bible (e.g., in the King James Version, it appears 112 times). If you include the American spelling “judgment” (no “e”), the word appears over 400 times in standard concordances.
There is no escape. One of the laws of ecology states: Nothing comes free.
There always is a final reckoning: That’s the wake-up call. The Bible is totally unambiguous on that score.
More about death.
The first time I saw ‘death’, was in the summer of 1940, when my mother’s farther, my Opa, suddenly died at 70. Heart attack. All his life he had worked on his farm, burning off his rich in cholesterol diet and continued this same regime in retirement.
I still can picture him in his glass-covered coffin, in the church hall where he had been an elder. A big fly buzzing about his face. He was ‘at rest’, and so was his spirit.
My wife of 67 years died close to 6 years ago, in her 93d year. Not died, but asleep. I know. In my dreams she often is a silent presence. Always in the background. It will be different for me when I will meet her again in eternity. Changed, as I too have changed physically and mentally. In eternity, men and women will be totally equal: Both of us being totally human, totally reflecting our full humanity. No more sexually different, yet distinct female and male. Any further description is mere speculation, except, in Jesus’ words, we all will be like the angels in heaven. Yes, sex-less.
And then there is hell……
Back to the ‘spirit’ angle, and more speculation: Where does hell enter the picture? With the fading away of going to heaven – the renewed earth being our eternal habitat – so a physical hell too has disappeared. Where is hell?
I am starting to believe that – in our soul-saturated afterlife – we all will rehash, recollect, be forced to review in intricate detail, the totality of our lives from beginning to end, from birth to death, and nakedly face the consequences of our actions, such as that cup of drink to a thirsty person, but also our refusal to do so. We will see where Jesus touched us, but also where we brushed him off.
I know, there also are the Hitlers, the Stalin sort, the Mother Teresa type, the God-fearing pious and the Goddam deniers.
These times from death/sleep to awakening/judgement will, for many, be a frightening intermission, confronted with their genuine self.
Jesus saw all this, and said, “Many are called, and few are chosen” (Matthew 22:14). He also said, looking to our times, “when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18:8).
Paul writes: ”Continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling”. (Philippians 2: 12). “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith–and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God”. (Ephesians 2: 8).
ETERNAL LIFE IS A GIFT.