Giving death its due
Garvey, John
JOHN GARYEY GIVING DEATH ITS DUE Christianity's eschatological hope This past year felt full of death. One of our godchildren, a twelve-year-old girl, died after eight days in the intensive...
...This mindset seemed to legitimize in29 (Continued from page 29) timidating black voters, doctoring absentee ballot applications in Seneca and Martin Counties, the reckless purging of voter rolls to reduce the number of black voters, and the stonewalling of the Florida secretary of state's office...
...The columns of several highly respected Republican pundits read like James Baker's press statements...
...My sorrow over my mother's death involved my father's sorrow, of course, as well as my own knowledge that I won't see her again, not before my own death anyway...
...He noted that it was anger that finally brought the party control of the presidency and both houses of Congress...
...I was with her parents when they got the news that she was unlikely to survive, and was with her and her family when she died...
...There is this medical/therapeutic way...
...They may learn eventually to live with it, but they will not get over it...
...She had been in an automobile accident...
...Christianity, continuing a tradition found in the Old Testament, associates it with sin: "Sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned" (Romans 5:12...
...The fact is that we don't know what death will be like, and we have no way of knowing...
...But this is only the latest of the ways in which we avoid death and what it means...
...Her fear was more honest than the ways we try to avoid the subject or make it pretty...
...We know it separates us from people we loved and people who loved us...
...This is beyond anything we can demonstrate, except in the way we live...
...many of the Americans seemed not to...
...Hard as it is to say in a culture that wants to make everything rational and pleasant, even as it finds new ways to kill inconvenient people, death is an enemy and we are not meant to be rec7 onciled to it...
...One of our godchildren, a twelve-year-old girl, died after eight days in the intensive care unit...
...A woman phoned our church recently, desperate because a family friend was dying of cancer, a woman with a young daughter...
...Certainly it has its stages, and some days are harder than others...
...About a month later my mother died...
...After Bush became president-elect, Rush Limbaugh angrily dismissed suggestions that Republicans should turn away from an "orgy of hate" to seek conciliation and pursue moderation...
...The politics of resentment created something almost akin to what Adorno called the authoritarian personality...
...I also have a daughter and I don't know what would happen to her if I died...
...She had been in poor health for some time, but we didn't expect her to die so soon...
...With our goddaughter there was the sorrow of a young life ended, and the knowledge that the lives of her parents and brother were now tragically changed forever...
...The caller wanted prayers but she also wanted to talk...
...at the same time, it will be the way God meant it to be, in God's time...
...There is a New Age way: "Death is really just a part of life...
...It is almost embarrassingly primitive, because we must insist that the way the world is is not the way it was meant to be...
...don swift Erie, Pa...
...The GOP chairperson of one Florida county told the New York Times that "our lives" were at stake...
...Remembering my own little sister's death and its effect on my family, thinking of my mother's death, I said, "Never...
...These tactics are very effective, but they also damage the fabric of our system...
...and I found myself, as I am sure everyone does, thinking of all those things I wanted to ask her about her girlhood, her grandparents, her uncle, the town she lived in and what it was like when she was growing up there...
...I'm scared to think of being in that box under the earth forever...
...Most alarming, their treatment of Jesse Jackson's orderly protests seemed to suggest that any time an African American speaks forcefully about civil rights concerns to other blacks a riot has taken place...
...It is not as if grief were a kind of disease which passes...
...8 (Continued from page 4) passions to win political support...
...The young girl's family were members of our parish, and we are a small enough community so that almost everyone knew them...
...On the other hand, they uniformly defended the conduct of the congressional staffers and others sent to Florida to stop the recount...
...I'm scared of death," she said...
...When the church loses its belief in the eschatological vision of the New Testament, or when theologians deal with this as if it were peripheral to more important questions, we move far from the heart of our faith, and from our hope for those who have died, and for ourselves...
...There were other deaths as well, but these two were especially difficult...
...as Wittgenstein said, death is not lived through...
...In cultural warfare, the stakes seem that great and call for extraordinary exertion that sometimes crosses the bounds of civility and lawfulness...
...The Albanian people who make up a good part of our parish understood this in their bones...
...Not really...
...As Christians we profess a belief that the relationship in some way truly continues, but we know that we will no longer enjoy their company in the only way we knew it, the way we loved...
...but it is not a medical phenomenon, or a type of mental illness, or something that is best dealt with therapeutically...
...And there is the nauseating way of sentimental Christian cliches: "God must have needed her there...
...We are to be witnesses to a time that has not come to fruition...
...Her death would have been even more difficult for us if my wife and I hadn't had a wonderful visit with my parents only a few months before...
...This hope is illuminated in the words of Colossians 3:4, "When Christ, who is our life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory...
...Jesus weeps at the death of Lazarus, and he begs his father to let the cup of suffering pass him by, if it is at all possible...
...One thing I noticed during this time was how infuriating the language surrounding death can be...
...or rather, the way we try to impute a meaning to death...
...There was something frightening about the bullyboy tactics of the imported demonstrators and the consistent liberties that Baker and his surrogates took with the truth...
...Instead of telling us that death is all right, just a part of life, Christianity claims that we go through death to resurrection from the dead—in the words of the exultant Orthodox Easter, "Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life...
...It may be peculiarly American, but when people discussed her death I often heard the question, "When do you think the family will get over it...
Vol. 128 • January 2001 • No. 2
