Barry's Blog

In HEAVEN: The police will be British, the cooks will be French, the mechanics will be German, the social directors will be Italian, and the Swiss will run it.

In HELL: The police will be German, the cooks will be British, the mechanics will be French, the social directors will be Swiss, and the Italians will run it.

There was a time, not too long ago, when there was little debate about the afterlife, or for that matter, the reality of Heaven and (shall we say that dirty four-letter word?), Hell.  But in our present day, mankind has, as Bonhoeffer observed over fifty years ago, "Come of Age," he no longer sees God to account for human existence. And if we deny God in our origin, it is little wonder that we deny Him in our demise.

This truth could not be more apparent than by what we see in the contemporary view of death, the "view from a hearse," if you will. In a recent article in USA Today, "Secular 'Celebrants' Lead More Funerals," the growing trend of celebrating a loved one's life at a funeral or memorial service sans clergy, sometimes even without God is now a normal feature. And the trend is only growing.

John Reed, Sr., president of the National Funeral Directors Association, observes that 50% of Americans today say they don't belong to a church and don't see value in a religious funeral. But "they still want ceremony and celebration at the end of life." People who checked "none" when asked their religion "don't see the need to be ushered into another world. There's no 'personal God' they expect to meet," says Ariela Keysar, co-author of a survey conducted in 2008 by researchers at Trinity College's Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture in Hartford, Conn.

Anderson-McQueen Funeral and Cremation Centers in the St. Petersburg, Florida area, reflect this secular trend. Gone are the "chapel" signs, replaced with Heritage Hall and Remembrance Hall. Mourners can take a quiet break in the "Legacy Cafe," with free Starbucks coffee and cookies!

Which leads me to Tom Wolfe, the American journalist, novelist, and sometimes social critic, and his essay, "Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died," first published in Forbes ASAP in 1996. Wolfe is quite fond of quoting from the German philosopher Nietzsche, best known for his late nineteenth-century declaration that "God is Dead." But in the article, Wolfe explains that Nietzsche was NOT making a declaration of atheism (though he was an atheist), but was essentially saying that modern man had killed God in his own consciousness. And when you do away with God, you essencially do away with sin, guilt, and morality. And as a culture you live as though God no longer exists, so he certainly has no place at funerals. This is a bit layered and complex to follow, but listen to Wolfe's own words in explaining what Nietzsche saw coming, and his influence on our twenty-first century:

"(We come to) the second most famous statement in all of modern philosophy: Nietzsche's 'God is dead.' The year was 1882. (The book was Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft [The Gay Science].) Nietzsche said this was not a declaration of atheism, although he was in fact an atheist, but simply the news of an event. He called the death of God a 'tremendous event,' the greatest event of modern history. The news was that educated people no longer believed in God, as a result of the rise of rationalism and scientific thought, including Darwinism, over the preceding 250 years. But before you atheists run up your flags of triumph, he said, think of the implications. 'The story I have to tell,' wrote Nietzsche, 'is the history of the next two centuries.' He predicted (in Ecce Homo) that the twentieth century would be a century of 'wars such as have never happened on earth,' wars catastrophic beyond all imagining. And why? Because human beings would no longer have a god to turn to, to absolve them of their guilt; but they would still be racked by guilt, since guilt is an impulse instilled in children when they are very young, before the age of reason. As a result, people would loathe not only one another but themselves. The blind and reassuring faith they formerly poured into their belief in God, said Nietzsche, they would now pour into a belief in barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods: 'If the doctrines...of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal, doctrines I consider true but deadly'-he says in an allusion to Darwinism in Untimely Meditations-'are hurled into the people for another generation...then nobody should be surprised when...brotherhoods with the aim of the robbery and exploitation of the non-brothers...will appear in the arena of the future.'"

Wolfe further adds about our own day: "Nietzsche said that mankind would limp on through the twentieth century 'on the mere pittance' of the old decaying God-based moral codes. But then, in the twenty-first, would come a period more dreadful than the great wars, a time of 'the total eclipse of all values' (in The Will to Power). This would also be a frantic period of 'revaluation,' in which people would try to find new systems of values to replace the osteoporotic skeletons of the old. But you will fail, he warned, because you cannot believe in moral codes without simultaneously believing in a god who points at you with his fearsome forefinger and says 'Thou shalt' or 'Thou shalt not.' "

A bit hard to follow, but brimming with profound insight for our world. Today's funerals tell us a lot about death, but even more about how our culture sees life, and God, or rather, the absence of God.

The link to Tom Wolfe's article, "Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died," can be found at:

http://orthodoxytoday.org/articles/Wolfe-Sorry-But-Your-Soul-Just-Died.php