I am writing this nearly a week after my own father’s death due to a twelve-year battle with Alzheimer’s. Death has been looming in my thoughts and deeply impacting my emotional states these days. It seems almost serendipitous that I chose to write on the horror of everlasting life over a month ago, long before I knew my father’s final days were nigh.
While everlasting life is oft viewed in a positive theological manner, one cannot arrive at that precipice without crossing the stolid threshold of death. Sure, “where is thy sting, where is thy victory” is a comforting mantra, but we are a people frozen in stasis between the past, the present, and the future. We speak these words in the present knowing their fruition is in the future, much like the cross is presently reflected on while its ontology is anchored in a historical moment, and yet that moment is the whole grounding of every aspect of a Christian’s eschatological hope.
I’d be remiss not to mention the immediate thought that incarnates our cultural imagination, for we are obsessed with the iconography of the zombie and the vampire. Each of these represent a pale refraction of everlasting life. The zombie is the post-life that is nothing more than an animated corpse that rambles down a grassy pasture or a city street without a soul. It is merely gnostic rationality constantly consuming the promises of the Enlightenment: that the sum total of life everlasting is that which humanity can discover and consume in equal measure. Meanwhile, the vampire harkens back to the Romantics, where the desires of humanity are the singular priority of eternity. Human desire, regardless of its subject, is the thing we want to carry into our conception of the life everlasting when we think of these pallid figures of the undead. Where the zombie is drawn toward the violence of consuming human intelligence and sensorial information (i.e., brains), the vampire coerces or seduces others into the promises of human carnality as the sole apex of life everlasting. Yet these are merely the conjurings of the human imagination, which shrivel away in the face of very real, historical horror.
On March 9, 2008, Fleming Rutledge gave a sermon at the Washington National Cathedral during Lent using Ezekiel 37, which tied the death that inhabited the valley of the dried up bones prior to God’s miraculous (and terrifying) re-animation to the dread of the Holocaust. She focused on the moment before the miracle to accentuate the driftless nature of death in our being and in the very makeup of this world, and how that palpable sensation and knowing of death and evil is the oft unnameable dread that permeates those directly touched by it. She summarizes that dread with direct allusion to Ezekiel: “Our bones are dried up; our hope is lost; we are clean cut off.”
The mention of the Holocaust in modern times is rife with overtones of horror, genocide, and the overarching narrative of the moral decline of the West in the twentieth century continuing on into the twenty-first — not to mention the current political battles surrounding the conflicts in Gaza. To modern readers, we are meant to feel some way about the Holocaust, as its shadow leans long and heavy into history. Yet its bite for us is not the same as for a Jew who experienced its horrors firsthand or an Allied soldier happening upon a concentration camp once the Nazis had been defeated.
This was death on a grand scale with a stark moral dimension to its intensity of evil. In the midst of that darkness and that level of stalwart evil, human intellect and human desire fail to take stock of the fullness of its toll. For those lives so blithely taken by the Nazi machinery and ignored by the camps’ adjacent neighbors, their bones, in this life, were dried up; their hope, in this life, was lost; they were clean cut off from the living.
And this is the horror of everlasting life that we often conveniently forget: That all of the brokenness, evil, pettiness, and moral failings of our existence bears down on us unto death. From this side of the veil looking on, we have succumbed; we have been defeated. Our brains and carnal desires wrapped in flesh and bone have withered, and we cease to exist, empirically.
My father was a mere shadow of himself when we laid him to rest, and our mourning comes from the acknowledgement that he is not here. We have spent our lives either staring into the void or ignoring it, but eventually, as the saying goes, the void will stare back. So we then reach stasis once again between what our reason tells us and what our body recoils from in that moment of death.
For conscious humans to comprehend nonexistence is paradoxical thinking. It is this thinking that leads to what Søren Kierkegaard called “the sickness unto death,” or despair.
But in the Christian understanding of it death itself is a transition unto life. In view of this, there is from the Christian standpoint no earthly bodily sickness unto death. For death is doubtless the last phase of the sickness, but death is not the last thing. If in the strictest sense we are to speak of a sickness unto death, it must be one in which the last thing is death, and death the last thing. And this precisely is despair. (p. 24)
The mind and body of the human run up against a brick wall at their death. We can explain how one died, the biological processes of decomposition and the lack of presence, but on its own, it can’t explain away our despair.
Despair is what lurks in the hidden corners and crevices of our ontology of everlasting life. Our imaginations cannot fathom something that supersedes — or better — transforms our mind and body. The zombie and vampire maintain a remnant quality of that which is prior to nonexistence. In order for us to not succumb to despair and to be able to contend with life everlasting, we must then have faith, that small mustard seed the Lord plants in his children, so that it may overcome our sickness unto death.
