We cannot buy life without end
or avoid going to the grave...
This is the lot of those who trust in themselves...
Like sheep they are driven to the grave.
- Psalm 49
It seems almost trite in this modern world to say that we will die. Of course we will die. Death becomes us. Yet, our avoidance is so complete and compelling that in all things we seek not to die but to maintain, not to live but to hold on. People have said they never felt so alive as when they were at death's doorstep - that in that moment when they were held at the very precipice they felt the exhilaration of stepping off into.......what?
If you believe in the promise of eternity your expectation is for something better, greater, and more than what life has given. You believe in new life, life made complete, life beyond life. And so these eternalists look forward to the grave, trusting that in dying they will live. But what of those who are more firmly rooted in the ground of the earth they inhabit. Their letting go is not so determined or ordained perhaps.
In the Catholic church when you die you aren't necessarily knocking on those pearly gates in that moment of letting go - you may go to a waiting room, a purgatory of sorts, where you wait. No one seems to know for how long you wait or what you do while you wait but there does seem to be some consensus of Catholic opinion on the fact that you will wait. I don't know if you wait for a final determination of up or down or if you are just waiting for Peter's call to come. The Protestants decided to simplify the choices, you die, you go up or you go down. No one even prays for you after you die because your fate is decided, no waiting time, no need for prayer. And of course, many of us are not of the Catholic persuasion or even of the Christian so perhaps in these other belief systems after-death is a different after-life. What seems to be a generally held opinion is that whatever comes next is either better or deserved.
So, if like sheep, our lot is to be driven to the grave then it would seem natural that our curiosity about the other side would compel us to keep the grave in sight. But typically, we do not do so. In fact, the opposite seems to be the case, it being more exciting to contemplate the t.v. guide than the hereafter? Is it a failure of imagination or intelligence that leaves us blinded by the light of t.v. not eternity? Or is that light so bright that it stuns us into sheep like complacency as we stumble ever onwards towards it? So we slumber on as we lumber on knowing what we do not want to know and hoping that in the end there is resurrection.
