“Now and at the Hour of Our Deaths.”

Death and Reception

I am now in my 50s. I confess that on occasion, I think about death, not least because I had a brush with the “Cancer” (more on this later). Rather, I think about markers in the lives of my kids. Which ones will I be able to experience with them? Will I be there to walk my youngest daughter down the aisle? Will I be able bodied enough to mind my grandchildren? Which occasions will I only haunt as memory? “If only Dad were here.”

I think about the passing of my elderly parents, who now reside in a senior living apartment complex. Visiting them feels as if you’re entering into a different time, one that moves more slowly, as if reduced speed can keep death at bay.

I fear the day when I will stand at the side of the waxed coffin, expected to eulogize the complicated lives of my mother and father, when all I am is numb with grief. I fear my own death. According to Ernest Becker, this is normal. I am bound to fear death because, as he wrote, the chief problem of moderns is a “denial of death” - we cannot face our deaths, we do everything we can to avoid and subvert it. Or, we make death a “problem” to be solved, like the young man at Stanford who declared that he would fix that problem, as he does a bug in his program. According to Karl Rahner, I am bound to fear death, because I possess “that vitality of divine life” in the face of the “darkness of that night.”

And yet! I am a Christian. The vitality of that divine life thrums through me. And this means that I have an alien hope.

Only in Christ, death is not just defeated, but also transformed. Only in Christ does death become an “act of grace” - a partaking in Christ, not just deliverance from Sin.

Therefore, we can say, as Christians, “yes” to death. Stunningly, the divine freedom we have to say “yes” and “no” can be applied to death.

Death is a feature of the human life, not a bug. And in Christ, and only in Christ, can we receive death, not just as the due reward for our mortality and as a succumbing to the first Adam’s rebellion, but as rather a “dying in Christ.” And thus, “All that I am I have received” is fulfilled finally, totally, irrevocably in death. It is not a terror, but rather, a passing. Death is, as Rahner puts it, the beginning of eternity.

Death has lost its sting!

Yes, death is still “the wages of sin.”

Yes, death is still “punishment” for sin. As Rahner puts it, the punishment is at least in part that death is an obscurity, a “hiddenness,” a bleakness that is “remoteness from God.” But because Christ himself went through it, we can also go through it.

According to Rahner, death even becomes a kind of “fulfillment” - in the face of the ruinous destruction of death, it becomes:

an act of self-completion, a life-synthesizing self-affirmation, a person’s total taking possession of himself, the final act of self-formation, the plenitude of personal reality.

This means that I can choose death. Only in Christ can I choose to receive death as one of God’s good and perfect gifts, when it does come to and for me - the hour of my death is a grace. I can willingly say “yes” to death, though it only is a sliver of the mammoth “yes” Jesus said to his own death (indeed, that “yes” funds all the right “yeses” of humanity!). In that death, I can be opened finally and totally to the “plenitude” of God, rather than the yawning dark abyss that most conceive of as death. I can begin at the end, because in him all endings become beginnings.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that numbness or fear abrogate the “grace” of death. I will still feel these things. And yet, I will be carried, held through the darkness, and brought into the impossible light.

Alleluia.