4 posts tagged “death”
I heard a fascinating line of poetry yesterday, quoted by Maya Angelou, who is celebrating her eightieth birthday. The poet she quoted was Edna St. Vincent Millay, who fancied, in this composition, "Conscientious Objector," that though she couldn't avoid death, would only give it only what was due, and not a penny more:
The idea that we can have some measure of control over what we give to Death is part of the fabric of the human heart. After all, God has embossed Eternity there, and the soul's vector necessarily launches us into another, invisible world.I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death.
But St. Vincent Millay's words are, in the end, no more than wishful bravado. Ancient David has a more certain hope, and one more comforting as we think about the Tax Man's, or Death's, Approach...
I will not die, but live, And tell of the works of the LORD. (Psalm 118:17)
Death, as certain as taxes, takes its mortal toll from every man, woman, and child. But some pay Death more than they must, for they pay the pound of flesh from their own breast. Others find release from such payment in God's own offering of Himself to Death on the cross.
For such ones, death is all that is paid to Death, and not a penny more.
Reading the New Yorker recently, I came across a fantastic quote:
Doing a quick search online, I found that it is quoted nowhere else except here, by an actor and instructor of acting, on his blog. (Interesting blog, too.) I'd love to know the author of this quote, someone who is, apparently by the author of the article, a "philosopher."Without a killing, there is no feast.
But its significance to me goes beyond the field of acting or even philosophy.
Think for a moment: the Christian faith is compared to a feast. Themes of satisfaction, fullness of joy, and being filled (with the Holy Spirit, with grace, with love, etc.) abound.
What is remarkable is that this bounteous feast of grace has been prepared for us through the death (and resurrection) of Jesus. Even more remarkably, the one who prepared it, the Host, is the one whose death was required.
Reading elsewhere online, I came across this quote from Old Spurgeon, the famous 19th century Baptist pastor:
Gospel joys are elevating, they make men like angels. As in the gospel God comes down to men, so by the gospel men go up to God. I might also have shown you how absolutely peerless are the provisions of grace. There is no feast like that of the gospel, no meat like the flesh of Jesus, no drink like his blood, no joys like that which crowns the gospel feast. (Spurgeon on Isaiah 25:6)
In this fascinating video, we see a culture's habits on death, and the video itself is a proof of the opening quote from Ben Franklin, which suggests that studying cemeteries will reveal what kind of people we are.
It was a revelation for me (little "r") when I realized as a young believer that heaven isn't just the sky. Heaven is in fact the created realm in which God has condescended to dwell. Furthermore, this created realm is characterized less by vacuous and cottony clouds and more by mysterious metaphors like sapphire walls, golden streets, and nightless skies. (The image to the left is from a Chinese photoblog website.)
What is heaven really like anyway?
Belinda Carlisle's famous 1987 hit, "Heaven," was the song my Turnabout date, Lisa, and I danced to when I was a junior in high school.
I mention it is because the song was mentioned by my friend who led a group of university friends in a discussion about what heaven is like. My friend started out by asking, "What would you want heaven to be like?"
Good question.
One of my favorite movies, in the "disturbing" movie category, is The Black Robe. There's a great line from that movie where a First Nation Canadian Native was asked by a Catholic priest if he wanted to go to heaven. His answer went something like this: "Why would I want to go to a place where there is no sex, no earth, no trees, and sit on a white cloud and play a harp?"
My answer to the question, "What do I wish heaven to be like?" would fall out along these lines: feasting without fat, work without toil, love without regret, intimacy without danger, female companionship without fear of sin--true sisterly companionship, that is--and something like sex.
I add something like sex because I'm not prepared to say there is sex in heaven, though like the golden streets, if there is, its beyond whatever we can imagine here.
I was surprised in my friend's discussion that no one mentioned the seventy virgins of the Muslim hope. Martyrs, according to the Qu'ran, get the blessed hope of seventy black-eyed virgins in the great heaven. (Joking, I heard one woman say recently that seventy virgins would hardly be heaven--but that's a bit off topic.)
Back to Belinda. She says heaven is a place we make. There are two ways to make heaven, as I see it: either to get the good stuff now (as she implies) or to push the good stuff off into the future.
As an example of the latter, have you ever noticed how every hope, every aspiration, every dream, every wish gets stuffed into heaven like a messy closet? Heaven is after all where we'll see our dead goldfish and beloved Fido again, where we'll be reunited again with friends and loved ones, where we'll get the equivalent to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory's rivers of chocolate milk and whipped cream daisies (that was my friend's childhood fantasy).
Other, less noble, thoughts of heaven have been promoted through the years. Mark Twain once wrote that you go to Heaven for the climate, and Hell for the company. Neitzsche said something similarly interesting: "Hell is where all the interesting people are."
Christians have deserved this with their often strict, and even gnostic, expressions of the Faith. Immanence falling prey to Transcendence. Basically, we push everything good into heaven; one wonders, are we afraid?
Sting took a potshot at the Beatitudes somewhere in the early nineties with his song that suggested that the inheritance of the earth was not that great a reward for the meek. But, seeing Heaven with a wider, more comprehensive view, being meek sounds like a good investment to me.
Be that as it may, it was observed in our discussion that we too easily forget that the chief delight of heaven is the companionship and intimacy with God. Heaven is supremely about the unhindered, unimpeded presence of Almighty God, our Triune Creator: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Of course, the key, or, in line with Charlie's Chocolate Factory--the "golden ticket"--is Jesus. Jesus is the key to heaven; His perfect life exchanged for my wretched and twisted one. His perfect reward becomes mine by believing the unseen and impossible truth: God is and can only be my Companion through the death of His Perfect Son.
Belinda Carlisle is correct that we "make" heaven a place on earth, but it isn't by losing ourselves in a "wave of love" but it is as we receive, by faith, the life and joys of the Coming Age here and now with a transcendent, immanent faith in Jesus. Then it is really true: "ooh, heaven is a place on earth." But this place is a foretaste, the foyer, of the Real Heaven, when what we know now in part, whether wine, women, or song, is then Fully Experienced.
