Coming
Home
January
14, 2022
I am seventy-five
years old. I have various chronic health problems, but none of them is life
threatening at the moment. Yet it simply is true that as you get up into your
later years death, your death, comes to seem more and more real. Of course I’ve
known my whole life except when I was very young that people are mortal, and
unlike Lina Lamont in Singin’ in the Rain, I am people. When you’re younger you
know death is a reality including your own death someday, but it seems more
abstract and distant than it does as you age through your seventies, or at
least it did for me. I suppose that thanks to modern medicine seventy-five isn’t
as old as it used to be, but it isn’t exactly young either. For the last couple
of years I have been struggling to come to terms with the reality that I will
die and that that day is a lot closer than it used to be. I’m hoping that
writing this post will help me do that.
People sometimes
ask others if they are afraid of death. I am afraid of the process of dying. Of
course unless we have received a terminal diagnosis we don’t know how we will
die. Death can come quickly and relatively painlessly. It can also come at the
end of a long, miserable process of dying. I’ve never had perfectly healthy
lungs, and I’ve heard a physician say that pulmonary deaths are the worst. Of
course I don’t know that I will die of pulmonary failure, but it is perhaps
more of a possibility for me than it is for most people. I fear a long, slow,
miserable process of death. I wouldn’t say that I fear death itself. Sometimes
I resent it, but I don’t fear it. I don’t believe in hell. I don’t believe that
God, who is after all love, would ever sentence anyone to the kind of torment
Christians have so often associated with hell. So I don’t think I fear death
itself.
I want to ask,
however: What is death? It is the end of life. Medical professionals can monitor
bodily functions as they shut down—blood pressure, heart rate, blood oxygen
levels, respiratory rate, and so on. The most conclusive evidence of death is,
I suppose, the cessation of a heartbeat. Yet it seems to me that there is
something else that happens when a person dies. The body that once had life no
longer does. More significantly, I think, the person’s spirit, once located in
the body, is no longer in the body. I once walked into a hospital room just as
a parishioner of mine died. The nurse who was there pointed up to the ceiling
in a corner of the room and said, “There she is. Right up there.” He knew her
lifeless body was in the hospital bed in the room, so surely he meant that her
spirit or her soul is right up there. I can’t say that I have ever sensed the
continuing presence of a deceased person’s spirit like that. I was present when
my first wife died, and I was present when my mother died; but I can’t say I
ever experienced their spirits continuing on the way that nurse did that day.
From the very
beginning the Christian faith has asserted that there is life after death. It
has been a core Christian belief for a long time (though not at the very
beginning of the faith) that a person’s soul survives the person’s physical
death. I tend to be a bit of a skeptic by nature. I’ve always said that I am
agnostic about life after death, which doesn’t mean I’ve ever tried to talk
someone out of a belief in an afterlife, especially not when that person is
saying that they or a loved one is going to be with deceased loved ones, as people
often do. People speak of having had a “near death experience,” but those are near
death experiences not death experiences. I’m not convinced that they prove the
reality of life after death.
And yet. There
are a couple of “and yets”. Once, when I was an emotional wreck driving to the
vet’s office to have my beloved but dying Irish terrier put down, my late first
wife appeared to me. That terrier had been her dog too before she died. As I
drove, for just a very few seconds I knew that she was there in a way I find
hard to describe. I had sensed her presence with me a couple of times before
closer to her death, but this was different. It wasn’t that I could see or hear
her in the usual way, but there she was. She was a slight disruption in my
field of vision. She spoke, though not in the usual human way. I heard her say,
more with my spirit I think than with my ears, “It’s all right. I’m here
waiting for him.” Then she was gone. I had that experience over ten years ago,
but it feels to me like it happened yesterday.
Do that
experience and similar experiences other people have had prove that there is
life after death? I wish I could answer that question yes, but I can’t. I can’t
because I can’t explain the experience. It felt as real as any experience I’ve
ever had although it was of a different kind than any other experience I’ve
ever had. All I can say that it proves is that the experience felt as real to
me as any other experience I’ve ever had. I can’t prove the reality of life
after death, but I can live trusting that there is life after death. I can and
do say to God, “I don’t know what happens when we die, but I know that whatever
happens, even if nothing happens, it is right because it is what you have
ordained.” I live in trust that that is true, and it is enough for me.
Here's the other “and
yet.” I’ve titled this piece “Coming Home.” I mean by that title that the image
of death as coming home to God works for me. When I think of death as coming home
I remember an exegesis I once did of the story of Jesus calming the storm on
the sea of Galilee. You’ll find that story at Mark 4:35-41. Here are a couple
of paragraphs of that exegesis taken from my book Liberating Christianity.[1]
Like all great Bible stories however this
story comes to life and gains power to change our lives when we see that it
isn’t just about something that happened a long time ago to other people in a
place far away. The story comes to life and gains the power to change our lives
when we see that it is also about us, right here, right now. In other words the
story comes to life and gains the power to change our lives when we see it as
myth, as a story about God and God’s relationship not just to Jesus but to us.
To demonstrate that point let’s take a closer look at this story.
This journey begins where all journeys
begin—at the beginning. Jesus initiates the journey. He says to his disciples
“Let’s go.” He invites them to leave the place where they are and move across
an open expanse of water to another place on the distant shore. That’s how it
is with our life journeys too. Our life journeys begin with God, who in the
story Jesus clearly represents. God starts us and sends us out across the open
expanse of our lives headed toward the far shore of return to God.
I didn’t
use the image coming home in that piece. I did say that life is a journey that
begins with God and ends with our returning to God. That’s what I mean when I
call death coming home. In his great hymn Bring Many Names, one of the
images for God composer Brian Wren uses is “everlasting home.” To that image I
say an enthusiastic “Yes!” That is exactly who God is, our everlasting home. I
take more comfort from that image and from the thought of death being returning
to that everlasting home than I do from any other image of death. Is that image
factually correct? I don’t know. I do know that it is mythically correct. It
correctly indicates our relationship to God and God’s relationship to us. I may
struggle some with the reality of my death; but can face my death in peace when
I think of it as coming home to God, and that is enough.
[1] If
you want to see everything I said about this story in this exegesis you’ll find
it at Sorenson, Thomas, Liberating Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to
Faith in the New Millennium, Revised Edition, 46-49.
No comments:
Post a Comment