Barry's Blog

"It's not that I'm afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens." -Woody Allen

The late Joseph Bayly was  flying from Chicago to Los Angeles some years ago and found himself engaged in conversation with an articulate, middle-aged woman. "Where are you from?" he asked. "Palm Springs," she answered. Knowing Palm Springs to be a city of the rich and famous, he asked, "What's Palm Springs like?" "Palm Springs is a beautiful place filled with unhappy people." Curious as to her answer, he posed the question, "Are you unhappy?" "Yes, I certainly am." "Why?" queried Bayly. "I can answer it in one word: mortality. Until I was forty, I had perfect eyesight. Shortly after, I went to the doctor because I couldn't see as well as I could before. Ever since that time, these corrective glasses have been a sign to me that not only are my eyes wearing out, but I'm wearing out. Some day I'm going to die. I really haven't been happy since."

This woman from Palm Springs captured in this brief conversation the feelings and angst of most of us. We really don't want to be reminded that death will one day greet us, as it will everyone else in the human race. As bad as things may sometimes be, we don't want to lose this precious commodity called "life." Even for many of those whose faith characterizes their lives, death is something we prefer not to dwell on. I'm reminded of the English vicar who was asked by a parishioner what he expected after death, to which he replied, "Well, if it comes to that, I suppose I shall enter into eternal bliss, but I really wish you wouldn't bring up such a depressing subject!"

The words of the vicar accurately express the prevalent sentiment of our modern culture toward death. In a word, it is denial, or better yet, trivialization. For culture at large, having lost its sense of the sacred, and a belief in an afterlife, hates and fears death, and strives to "wish it" away. The trivialization of death takes on various guises in culture, and a most common expression of this is through humor. Woody Allen typifies this sentiment, as when he was interviewed by Rolling Stone magazine some years ago:

"Someone once asked me if my dream was to live on in the hearts of my people, and I said I would like to live on in my apartment. And that's really what I would prefer...You drop dead one day, and it means less than nothing if billions of people are singing your praises every day, all day long..."

Malcolm Muggeridge, the British journalist and satirist, who came to faith late in life, spent  many of his remaining days writing on the shortcomings of contemporary culture. In his spiritual autobiography, Confessions of a Twentieth-Century Pilgrim, Muggeridge observed: "It is, of course, inevitable that in a materialistic society like ours death should seem terrible, and even inadmissible. If Man is the very apex of creation, with nothing greater than himself in the universe; if his earthly life exhausts the whole content of his existence, then, clearly, his definitive end, his death, is too outrageous to be contemplated, and so is better ignored."

While our culture seeks to dismiss and trivialize death, we can be sure that for each of us, our mortal existence will, some day, come to an end. For the moment we are born, we begin to die. Samuel Beckett declared, "We give birth astride a grave." Alexander the Great is said to have directed that he be buried with his naked arm hanging out of his coffin, with an empty hand, to signify that even the man who had conquered the world left it as he had entered it. Job declares, "Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked I shall return there" (Job 1:21). 

But wait. There is hope. For if Christianity has anything to say to this dying world, it is that there is Life on the Other Side. The apostle Paul goes so far as to make the audacious statement that if we have only hoped in Christ in this life, then "we are of all men most to be pitied. But now Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who are asleep." (1 Corinthians 15:19-20).

"At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendors we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in."

-C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
 

For FinishingWell,

Barry Morrow