Ashes to ashes Facing death & imagining immorality
Garvey, John
ASHES TO ASHES Toward a Christian understanding of death John Garvey T he first time I seriously questioned what we usually think of as the self, or the soul, was following an operation which...
...It is easier, in a way, to think that something naturally immortal inheres in us, to be freed by death...
...Christianity is not meant to reconcile us with death, but to see it for the horror it is...
...It means taking the flesh—God's creation, a good thing—more seriously than much of Christian thought has tended to...
...Paul asks in Romans (7:24...
...W hat will this be like...
...Some part...
...For Paul, the world, before God's will is completed in it, is given over to suffering and death, to the mystery rep-resented by Christ's Passion and Cross...
...And the more they eat, the more their hunger will grow...
...Schmemann again: Moths Some bewildering squall of moths might again rise florid in its infestation from within the replastered, clay-damp walls, showing us the waiting danger of the new, as we snuffed out, feverish, every blind brown life...
...tian idea...
...So much for the problem of boredom...
...There may be no interim...we are out of the space/time continuum, the "now" and "later" of the universe as we know it, with time as one of its limited dimensions...
...Paul, in 1 Corinthians 15, speaks of the body we now have as a mere kernel, as if what it will blossom into is something we are incapable of imagining...
...And this sweetness can-not decrease any more or less than can the water of the sea...
...the general resurrection at the end of time, and they wouldn't be much like bodies at all—but the really important thing was whether we were going to heaven after death...
...0 dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy...
...Callahan is bold enough to suggest that scientists might pay more attention to the Christian vision, much as it might gall them to take seriously a tradition they too often see as hostile to science: "Nonetheless, in the doctrine of the resurrection of the body many generations of thoughtful and imaginative people have tried to imagine what eternal life might be like...
...Peter, after witnessing the Transfiguration, denied Jesus three times, and we are all far from having come that close to witnessing God's glory...
...This is precisely where we move away from the Bible...
...It makes death seem less total, less thoroughly annihilating...
...Finally, we are, we exist, because we are loved by God, who wills us to be...
...Having been given the vision of a God whose care for us is so heartbreakingly thorough that he became one of us, suffering what we suffer, dying as we do, to show us that even what we fear most has been conquered by a love we are called to show one another, we cannot but hope that it is true and try to stake our lives on that hope...
...To think that we can have an eternal life apart from resurrection is not Christian...
...Neo-Plationism was an influence on many early Christian thinkers, Augustine among them...
...It puts our faith more on the line to believe in resurrection than to believe in an immortal soul...
...While believers hold that God wills us into being from nothing, heartbeat by heartbeat, and that from the be-ginning of time God knew that we would exist and saw this as something good, we also know that before a certain point—our physical conception—we simply were not...
...It is easy to see how some scriptural passages could be read this way...
...Callahan goes on to point out the obvious: death and suffering are not made the agonies they are by a conquerable biology, but by human behavior...
...The moment we think that our being is in any way independent of the relationship we have with God we fall into the trap Genesis warned us about: We want to be like gods...
...Still, as Daniel Callahan suggests ("Visions of Eternity," First Things, May, 2003), some secular approaches to the idea of immortality are even more problematic...
...The moths came stray, instead, this year, a reminder of the return of older, rainmaking stars...
...First, as Christians we must take seriously the tragedy of death...
...Who will deliver me from this body of death...
...I say this as one whoseinstincts are all thoroughly agnostic, dark, and pessimistic...
...Even with-in the Trinity, the persons exist separately only in relation to one another...
...The problem is not with the physical, fleshly nature of our being...
...it dies, even if this dying of the soul is not a complete annihilation, but a dormition, or sleep...
...In 2 Maccabees 7, resurrection is spoken of most dramatically...
...The extension of human life as it is, for many years or forever, would mean extending nearly infinite forms of misery, heartlessness, boredom, and torment, most of them the result of the kind of people we are...
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...My faith is that if I am canceled by the power death has in our world, God's greater power can overcome it...
...And if we find this hard to believe, let us hope that our doubt has something in common with that of the Apostles in Luke's account (24:41) when they encountered the risen Christ: "While they still disbelieved for joy and wondered, he said to them, 'Have you any-thing here to eat?'" El Commonweal 19 January 30, 2004...
...There was always a nod to the idea that resurrection was somehow part of this—we would get glorified bodies after John Garvey is an Orthodox priest and a columnist for Common-weal...
...Our best scriptural witnesses stammer...
...and, even more to the point, what it ought to be like if we are sensibly to desire it...
...And it involves embodiment...
...It is a victory dance...
...I say second-hand because even someone who thought he had witnessed the Transfiguration or the Resurrection might later legitimately wonder, might have second thoughts...
...And this led me to won-der what it is that I consider my self...
...Christian thinkers have approached the idea of immortality in a way that is, in Callahan's words, a "much richer, more nuanced picture than anything the scientists and their followers have conjured up...
...Because Christian belief has held that eternal life requires embodiment, Christianity has a long tradition of thought about what eternal embodiment might mean...
...The problem, rather, has come about because the physical world and the flesh both holy, both good, from the time of creation—have been dragged into sin and death by a failing that is spiritual, not physical: by sin, something we both choose and fall into, a dark possibility that infected the world from the moment we were given the possibility of choice...
...eturning to my experience of anesthesia, I am not sure I have resolved what I encountered there, except to say that death may be known as a cancellation, as total an ending as humans could experience (if total endings can actually be a matter of experience), but at the same time God has the power to raise me to life...
...it tended to find the soul not only superior to the body, and an entity quite separate from the body, but saw the body as in many ways an encumbrance, something we will be happy to es-cape...
...26:19...
...Rather, I mean only to move away from giving the priority to the idea of disembodiment, to the idea that what really matters is liberation from the flesh...
...Ruah, in He-brew, and pneuma, in Greek, are often translated "spirit" but both literally mean "breath...
...This is an insult to our imagined autonomy...
...Still, as believers we have a story which is compelling to us...
...When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory...
...It means taking neither death nor resurrection seriously enough, neither seeing the tragedy of the first in all its depth, nor the great joy of the second in all its glory...
...All of which means that we are putting ourselves completely into the hands of a God we cannot understand, except through trust—stepping over the edge of a cliff in the dark, hoping that the promised net will be there—that what Commonweal 17 January 30, 2004 we have been told, second-hand, will be true...
...Some part...
...Think of the way many of us were taught: after death, an immortal soul leaves the mortal body and goes to heaven or hell (or, if you are Catholic, maybe even probably—to purgatory...
...In fact, who we are is formed by the family into which we are born, the language we learn, the culture in which we are immersed...
...I went under, then seemed almost immediately to wake up...
...If an anesthetic can do this, I thought afterward, if it can so thoroughly cancel what I thought of as me, what will death be like...
...Without exception, everything in the body, in the human organism, is created for this relationship, for this communion, for this coming out of oneself...
...Not so, the medievals held: it is the body...
...No one who has loved anyone or anything in this life can find the idea of leaving life any-thing but tragic...
...Gregory of Nyssa, who said that because God is infinitely other than we are, an eternity of approaching what we can never reach will mean our continual trans-formation...
...Jesus weeps at the tomb of Lazarus, and at Gethsemane he is filled with horror at what awaits him...
...Peace, though each had kept a distance from candle flames...
...And so every desire for the Beautiful which draws us on in this ascent is intensified by the soul's very progress towards it...
...but I have experienced enough to know that I am often wrong in allowing those instincts to govern my assumptions...
...The hours between might as well not have been there...
...For you have died," Colossians tells us, "and your life is hid with Christ in God...
...it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is...
...He deCommonweal 16 January 30, 2004 POSTAGE WILL BE PAID BY ADDRESSEE COMMONWEAL 475 RIVERSIDE DR RM 405 NEW YORK NY 10027-9832 Subscribe to COMMONWEAL Use the form on the other side or subscribe via the Internet...
...they will drink to satiety, without getting tired and without in any way diminishing the water....[They] will drink and eat the great sweetness of God...
...It would mean a transformed reality participated in by a transformed people...
...After torture, one of the persecuted brothers "quickly put out his tongue and courageously stretched forth his hands, and said nobly, 'I got these from Heaven, and because of his laws I disdain them, and from him I hope to get them back again.'" Isaiah is even more explicit in linking the body to immortality: "The dead shall live, their bodies shall rise...
...Here one must ask why the assumption that the truth will be bleak ought to be preferred to good news to the contrary...
...Is what I consider my self, or my soul, what God considers my self...
...Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no help," says Psalm 146.that soul and body are not separate entities but that the fullness of what we are spiritually can only exist embodied, we are totally dependent on something that we do not and can-not possess...
...He quotes professor of religion Carol Zaleski: "To be given everlasting longevity without being remade for eternal life is to live under a curse...
...This is a contrast with those forms of religion that console us with the idea that "death is just a part of life...
...Is the desire to survive death, to live despite death, a case of wanting to believe in something because the alternative seems too bleak...
...Without descent, a left trace, there is an automatic end in all things, Valery's whole loss...
...Darius Victor Snieckus R Commonweal 18 January 30, 2004 In essence, my body is my relationship to the world, to others...
...it is my life as communion and as mutual relationship...
...Is it the sum of my memories...
...And could I imagine my self or my soul without a body that is unquestionably me, any more than I can consider my mind without my brain...
...Vladimir's Seminary Press), Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann cites Romans 5:12—Through sin, death has come into the world—and comments that for Christianity, death first of all is revealed as part of the moral order, as a spiritual catastrophe...
...Comments Callahan: "The crux of their 'courage and optimism' was to make the body the center of their attention, turning their back on the Greek notion that the soul is the essence of personhood...
...Of course it is hard to have faith that this will be so...
...This has nothing to do with something we possess or are due...
...Jesus weeps at the tomb of Lazarus, and at Gethsemane he is filled with horror at what awaits him...
...The idea that a soul has a separate existence—separate from the body, existing as a monad—is, if not part of orthodox Christian thought, a popular misunderstanding among Christians...
...For Paul, though, the sense of the flesh as a negative thing comes not from the fact that flesh is physical rather than spiritual, but that, as a result of sin, it is death-bearing...
...Biblically, eternal life and the resurrection of the body are essentially the same thing...
...And we do desire it, sensibly or not so sensibly...
...To believe in resurrection means that just as there was no life before conception, there can be no life after death that is not given by God's willing it to be so...
...In some final, indescribable sense man desired death, or perhaps one might say, he did not desire that life that was given to him by God freely, with love and joy....The world is a perpetual revelation of God about himself to humanity....But the tragedy—and herein lies the heart of the Christian teaching about sin—is that man did not desire this life with God and for God...
...This is a contrast with those forms of religion that console us with the idea that "death is just a part of life...
...The Paschal liturgy of the Orthodox Church sings over and over again, "Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life...
...Clapped dead between palms in the uncertain midair, the moth discloses its mark: dust and shadow, leaf-still wings pressed like a face on the shroud...
...It is the loss of everything we have known...
...This is very much like the vision of St...
...It is not an accident, of course, that love, the highest form of communion, finds its incarnation in the body...
...Callahan address-es, for example, the scientific vision of life extension (which encompasses even the idea of extending life forever), and contrasts it with the Christian approach to the question of eternal life...
...Yet I have no way of knowing this...
...It was God's will that brought us into being, and any being we have after death will likewise have to be willed by God...
...Callahan quotes Caroline Walker Bynum's The Resurrection of the Body: However absurd the idea of resurrection may seem, "it is a concept of sublime courage and optimism...
...Is one view inherently more realistic or more naive than the other...
...Such experiences either are merely human symptoms (like indigestion and dandruff) or they have something to do with what the universe is about, its ultimate ground...
...The spirit is seen as superior to flesh, and the soul, freed from the flesh, will certainly be better off...
...And this is the real meaning of seeing God: never to have this desire satisfied" (From Glory to Glory, St...
...It locates redemption there where ultimate horror also resides—in pain, mutilation, death, and decay....Those who articulated [it] faced without flinching the most negative of all the consequences of embodiment: the fragmentation, slime, and stench of the grave....We may not find their solutions plausible, but it is hard to feel they got the problem wrong...
...the body is that which sees, hears, feels, and thereby leads me out of the isolation of my I....The body is not the darkness of the soul, but rather the body is its freedom, for the body is the soul as love, the soul as communion, the soul as life, the soul as movement...
...and that which is limitless cannot by its nature be understood...
...And we are incapable of knowing what any kind of life after death will be like, or how it will be accomplished...
...ASHES TO ASHES Toward a Christian understanding of death John Garvey T he first time I seriously questioned what we usually think of as the self, or the soul, was following an operation which required general anesthesia...
...FIRST-CLASS MAIL PERMIT NO...
...I want to make it clear that when I move away from terms like "immortal soul" to a more biblical understanding I do not mean that God wishes for us to be transitory, or to say that we are not in fact called forth into eternal being...
...Callahan offers a delightful quote from Marguerite of Oingt, a fourteenth-century nun and mystic, who wrote that "the saints will be completely within their Creator as the fish within the sea...
...After ten years as a parish priest, and after many conversations with parishioners and with other clergy, I am convinced that, where death and the afterlife are concerned, most Christians are functionally Neo-Platonists...
...For the Christian, joy is found in the fact that even this enemy, even this thing we fear most—and rightly so—has been overcome in Christ...
...We can conceive then of no limitation in an in-finite nature...
...We must face the fact that death is as bad as it looks, that it is not a simple rite of passage...
...Who knows, or can...
...We should nevertheless understand why the Neo-Platonist idea of the unencumbered soul's immortality remains so attractive...
...immortality of the soul is more a Neo-l'latomsfthari a Chris- -If we see our bodies as the selves we are, rt we underhand Christianity is not meant to reconcile us with death, but to see it for the horror it is...
...And this is why, when the soul loses the body, when it is separated from the body, it loses life...
...It is hard, especially in a culture that stresses individualism, to accept the idea that the self exists only in relationship with others...
...Our faith tells us that we have been baptized into Christ's death and the hope of resurrection...
...In much of our writing and preaching about death there is an implicit denigration of the body and the flesh...
...This is the risen Christ who asked Mary not to cling to him, who showed Thomas wounds received on our side of death, and who made breakfast for his friends at the edge of the sea...
...The implication of this way of thinking is that we will be much happier once the soul leaves our body behind...
...Without proof—without proof being possible—I will try to live as if the latter were true...
...In 1 John 3:2 we are told, "Beloved, we are God's children now...
...In his book 0 Death, Where Is Thy Sting...
...Or, as some would have it, a result of not wanting to face the truth...
...We hold on to it because it makes more sense to us than any other story—more sense than reincarnation, or ultimate meaninglessness, or an extinction we won't have to worry about because we won't be there to experience it...
...That lump turns out not to be cancerous more often than not...but even apart from such obvious things, there are those times when an experience of great beauty or joy bursts in on you, or the incandescence of love overwhelms you, and such experiences put darkness and pessimism in their lesser place...
...That could be canceled by a blood clot...
...We should allow ourselves—in fact, should demand of ourselves—an agnosticism about imagining the afterlife, or what resurrection will mean...
...My loss of consciousness was so profound that there was no experience, none at all, of time passing, as there is during ordinary sleep...
...Resurrection implies embodiment...
...Vladimir's Seminary Press...
Vol. 131 • January 2004 • No. 2
