Moths

...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...

...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...

...Still, as believers we have a story which is compelling to us...

...Jesus weeps at the tomb of Lazarus, and at Gethsemane he is filled with horror at what awaits him...

...Yet I have no way of knowing this...

...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...

...It is the loss of everything we have known...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...Some part...

...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...

...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...

...Without descent, a left trace, there is an automatic end in all things, Valery's whole loss...

...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...

...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...

...Peter, after witnessing the Transfiguration, denied Jesus three times, and we are all far from having come that close to witnessing God's glory...

...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...

...No one who has loved anyone or anything in this life can find the idea of leaving life any-thing but tragic...

...First, as Christians we must take seriously the tragedy of death...

...Even with-in the Trinity, the persons exist separately only in relation to one another...

...And it involves embodiment...

...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...

...I say this as one whoseinstincts are all thoroughly agnostic, dark, and pessimistic...

...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...

...but I have experienced enough to know that I am often wrong in allowing those instincts to govern my assumptions...

...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...

...Or, as some would have it, a result of not wanting to face the truth...

...Here one must ask why the assumption that the truth will be bleak ought to be preferred to good news to the contrary...

...Darius Victor Snieckus R Commonweal 18 January 30, 2004...

...This is a contrast with those forms of religion that console us with the idea that "death is just a part of life...

...My faith is that if I am canceled by the power death has in our world, God's greater power can overcome it...

...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...

...Without proof—without proof being possible—I will try to live as if the latter were true...

...We must face the fact that death is as bad as it looks, that it is not a simple rite of passage...

...Is one view inherently more realistic or more naive than the other...

...Peace, though each had kept a distance from candle flames...

...Is the desire to survive death, to live despite death, a case of wanting to believe in something because the alternative seems too bleak...

...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...

...Finally, we are, we exist, because we are loved by God, who wills us to be...

...Christianity is not meant to reconcile us with death, but to see it for the horror it is...

...To think that we can have an eternal life apart from resurrection is not Christian...

...It is a victory dance...

...It is hard, especially in a culture that stresses individualism, to accept the idea that the self exists only in relationship with others...

...The moths came stray, instead, this year, a reminder of the return of older, rainmaking stars...