I have wanted to try to show everyone through my words the Fallen world and death so they can see it.So I have chosen to do it here.You don't have to agree with anything I say but give it a chance.
Part 1
All, even the most superficial, have at times felt that there is something ‘other’, something ‘further’, something ‘beyond’ ordinary experience.Have had the feeling that the whole of what we are or would be is not realized in the situation in which we find ourselves.Have come to the conviction that ‘more’ and ‘better’ exist beyond what we have experienced.Even in ecstatic happiness we sense that there is something more, something not yet attained; in sorrow we are aware poignantly of so much that apparently has been held from us.
It is, perhaps, when we are alone in silence, or with those few people we can be with in silence, and hear the sound of the wind in the grass and trees or the wash of the waves on the shingle, or we view the great spaces of the sky, blue in day-time and starlit at night, that we experience most intensely a feeling that may only be described as ‘a happy sadness’.It is both happy and sad because it speaks of some joy that belongs to us and yet is not ours.It comes from infinite distances to us and is never possessed by us. It is always ‘there’.
It is this sense of something ‘other’ that must lead us on to the thought of the barrier that has to be crossed before ‘this mortal life has put on immortality’. Death may be a beginning, but we feel that it is also an end. And this we feel in a thousand ways: a loved voice has forever been silenced, vivid experiences leave behind them but wraiths in the form of imperfectly evoked memories, and hopeful striving and ecstatic fulfillment are so quickly lost. We seem to be elsewhere before we are here, to be otherwise before we are thus, forever to be losing today to yesterday. Death is in us, about us and around us. We live in a world of dead leaves, of the flotsam of long-ebbed tides, of fading footprints upon roads where we may no longer pass and of echoes dying on a wind that scatters ashes.
Any consideration of death, therefore, must involve a consideration of these two great cross-currents of human experience: on the one hand, that all is passing and we with it; on the other, that we are part of a dynamic and creative force which is independent of and triumphs over destruction and decay. These cross-currents appear to be so opposed, so much in conflict with each other, that hope and despair, creation and destruction, seem irreconcilable forces which impel us in this way or in that in frustrating alternation. We cannot relinquish our hold upon creative hope, for, however much we may proclaim our cynical realism, we are unable totally to abandon it; yet, at the same time, we cannot but be piercingly aware of death and decay, however much we proclaim our confidence in the value of our plans for ourselves or for the human race. A facile optimism cannot do more than temporarily conceal the one from us, while abandonment to despair can never fully destroy the possibility of the other.
‘In the midst of life’, then, ‘we are in death.’ If there is one certain event in human life, death is it. We know that we shall die. We may attempt to forget it, we may even deliberately ignore it, we may revolt violently against it, but death is inescapable. As we have said, death is the great sign of contradiction. It signifies inevitable, daunting and certain destruction or ultimate triumph and lasting glory. That life is no mere existential phenomenon, episode no mere empty transience, love no mere passing affinity, that there exists, beyond and through all the changes and vicissitudes of living, an eternal life beating at the heart of things, and that death is but the rending of the veil that hides immortality from human eyes – such is the certainty of Christian faith, the assurance of Christian hope and the very substance of Christian love. That love is stronger than death, that hope transcends separation and that faith is the key to fact are of the very essence and meaning of Christianity. The gift of God to man is the present and permanent possession of that for which he yearns. As St. Paul tells us: ‘faith is the substance of those things for which we hope.’
Let us, then, face boldly and courageously the certain fact of death, let us see what is the worst that death can do to us and to others and then let us see that, for the Christian, death is not an end, but a beginning. Let us examine how and in what way we can prepare ourselves to pass through that gateway into the unknown. Let us see that the resurrection for which we long is already as much a part of our lives as the death which leads to it.
To be continued if there is a interest.
Part 1
All, even the most superficial, have at times felt that there is something ‘other’, something ‘further’, something ‘beyond’ ordinary experience.Have had the feeling that the whole of what we are or would be is not realized in the situation in which we find ourselves.Have come to the conviction that ‘more’ and ‘better’ exist beyond what we have experienced.Even in ecstatic happiness we sense that there is something more, something not yet attained; in sorrow we are aware poignantly of so much that apparently has been held from us.
It is, perhaps, when we are alone in silence, or with those few people we can be with in silence, and hear the sound of the wind in the grass and trees or the wash of the waves on the shingle, or we view the great spaces of the sky, blue in day-time and starlit at night, that we experience most intensely a feeling that may only be described as ‘a happy sadness’.It is both happy and sad because it speaks of some joy that belongs to us and yet is not ours.It comes from infinite distances to us and is never possessed by us. It is always ‘there’.
It is this sense of something ‘other’ that must lead us on to the thought of the barrier that has to be crossed before ‘this mortal life has put on immortality’. Death may be a beginning, but we feel that it is also an end. And this we feel in a thousand ways: a loved voice has forever been silenced, vivid experiences leave behind them but wraiths in the form of imperfectly evoked memories, and hopeful striving and ecstatic fulfillment are so quickly lost. We seem to be elsewhere before we are here, to be otherwise before we are thus, forever to be losing today to yesterday. Death is in us, about us and around us. We live in a world of dead leaves, of the flotsam of long-ebbed tides, of fading footprints upon roads where we may no longer pass and of echoes dying on a wind that scatters ashes.
Any consideration of death, therefore, must involve a consideration of these two great cross-currents of human experience: on the one hand, that all is passing and we with it; on the other, that we are part of a dynamic and creative force which is independent of and triumphs over destruction and decay. These cross-currents appear to be so opposed, so much in conflict with each other, that hope and despair, creation and destruction, seem irreconcilable forces which impel us in this way or in that in frustrating alternation. We cannot relinquish our hold upon creative hope, for, however much we may proclaim our cynical realism, we are unable totally to abandon it; yet, at the same time, we cannot but be piercingly aware of death and decay, however much we proclaim our confidence in the value of our plans for ourselves or for the human race. A facile optimism cannot do more than temporarily conceal the one from us, while abandonment to despair can never fully destroy the possibility of the other.
‘In the midst of life’, then, ‘we are in death.’ If there is one certain event in human life, death is it. We know that we shall die. We may attempt to forget it, we may even deliberately ignore it, we may revolt violently against it, but death is inescapable. As we have said, death is the great sign of contradiction. It signifies inevitable, daunting and certain destruction or ultimate triumph and lasting glory. That life is no mere existential phenomenon, episode no mere empty transience, love no mere passing affinity, that there exists, beyond and through all the changes and vicissitudes of living, an eternal life beating at the heart of things, and that death is but the rending of the veil that hides immortality from human eyes – such is the certainty of Christian faith, the assurance of Christian hope and the very substance of Christian love. That love is stronger than death, that hope transcends separation and that faith is the key to fact are of the very essence and meaning of Christianity. The gift of God to man is the present and permanent possession of that for which he yearns. As St. Paul tells us: ‘faith is the substance of those things for which we hope.’
Let us, then, face boldly and courageously the certain fact of death, let us see what is the worst that death can do to us and to others and then let us see that, for the Christian, death is not an end, but a beginning. Let us examine how and in what way we can prepare ourselves to pass through that gateway into the unknown. Let us see that the resurrection for which we long is already as much a part of our lives as the death which leads to it.
To be continued if there is a interest.
