But love laughs at the end of the world because love is the door to eternity and he who loves God is playing on the doorstep of eternity.
Thomas Merton
My mother’s birthday is coming up.
In November it will be two years in full since she has left us, and in actuality it feels like both an age and no time at all since she passed away. In that span, much of the sting has gone, although the sadness still comes and goes with surprising sharpness. I will always miss her.
What has surprised me, though, is my emergence into the reality of what it means to know both what death is and that death is defeated.
I would have said I knew this long ago. Heaven-as-fact is frankly one of Christianity’s better selling points. That death has no real victory, that all will be redeemed, that God will have the final triumphant say over hurt and sorrow and pain and loss: that’s the good stuff.
It is also the stuff we understand most abstractly.
I used to become disconcerted by the way folks at my church talked about longing for heaven, especially as they got older. It sounded like resignation to me, like they couldn’t be satisfied with what God had given them for now. When my grandmother’s eyes would stray to the window and she would wax poetic about the kingdom of God, I would think, “But that’s a long way away, and we’re here, now.”
That was before many things.
That was before I began crossing names off my Christmas card list, without ever bringing myself to rewrite it cleanly: the x through addresses its own sort of melancholy memorial. That was before I said goodbye to the same grandparents who longed for Jesus, and then aunts and uncles who left the earth in ways both calm and frankly horrifying. That was before my mother died.
That was before I realized I will die, too.
Our culture—and the secular culture of the world—lulls us into thinking we shouldn’t worry about such things. It’s enough, we are told, that we live well and fully. It’s no big deal, we are told: we are the stuff of stars and the matter of the universe and who we are will disintegrate but integrate, somehow, into a greater cycle of life. Don’t think about such things, we are told: live in the present moment.
But death is ever with us. Death, decay, and grief. Since my mother died the wrongness of it twists my stomach in a way it never did before. I grieve for fledgling birds that didn’t make it and a snake I saw a neighbor hit with the lawn mower; I grieve for the church members I knew and loved, the majority of whom now form my old congregation in heaven; I grieve for the inevitability of death and sickness for the people I love, and those who love them, and for myself.
But. But.
In the midst of all of this the promise of redemption has reasserted itself with startling frankness. There is nothing like encountering death vividly in the flesh to also bring to life God’s purpose and ultimate aim, in the flesh. Not in an abstract way, but in a startling, astonishing, wonderful way.
All the dead in Christ will rise. All the dead in Christ will no longer be dead but alive, and we will be feasting and seeing him, and a new reality—the true reality, the real story which has played out over millennia—will open up before us. Everything will be new. And we will be there. And we will be a part of it. That will be life: true life. And everything now is a part of that, but also, in so many ways, only the prelude.
This is crazy. This is ridiculous. It sounds like the best of fictions, but it is true.
It’s why I can’t erase the crossed-out names in my address book. They are not really gone. It is why I sometimes stumble when I say colloquially that I lost my mother: no, no, I know where she is. I’ll find her there. It’s why many trials now seem smaller and simpler to me—because why should they matter so much in the long span of eternity? It’s why God no longer seems slow, for God exists outside of time.
Look, listen, here is the truth: death is awful.
We can gloss over that with our platitudes. Sometimes, for some people, it comes peacefully after a rich and long life and that is a blessing. Sometimes it stops those in pain from suffering. But death is awful, unnatural, a curse. This isn’t right, I kept thinking as my mother died. And that is true.
But the awfulness of death makes us understand the marvel of its defeat.
I think of these names I know, and the sadnesses I have seen, and I try to imagine what God is going to do. How do you rip out the thread of death and sadness from the garment of life? And how then do you not throw away that garment, but redeem it whole into itself-as-it-was-meant-to-be? We are in part who we are through our suffering, from our scars—if Christ kept His, I know it matters—and God will redeem this while also removing that far away from us.
More and more, I keep thinking about this. It’s not that we’ll forget death, as though it was a bad nightmare we can’t recall. It’s not as though God will simply patch it up and keep us marching on. There will be no more, because the old order of things has passed away.
The world we knew with the awfulness of death will be the world we know full of naught else but life.
I believe this. And saying I believe it, I know, is more and more radical in an age where it is anathema to believe in happy endings, much less any happy ending brought about by anything other than ourselves. I hope it is. I hope that when I talk about this around people who do not believe, it resounds like an unexpected church bell, the sort of thing you don’t anticipate hearing in polite company.
For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
Samaritan's Song 