That was the question Frederick Buechner's mother asked him in her later years. He was surprised because she usually didn't want to talk about death. He responded loudly, against her deafness either real or pretended, "YES." He believed, "SOMETHING HAPPENS."
But there are things that cannot be shouted, and as soon as I tried in my more or less normal voice to tell her a little more about what I believed and why I believed it, I could see that she was not only not hearing, but also not listening. Just to have asked the question seemed for the time being to be as much as she could handle.
So later, when I got home, I tried to answer the question in a letter. I wrote her I believe that what happens when you die is that, in ways I knew no more about than she did, you are given your life back again, and I said there were three reasons why I believed it. First, I wrote her, I believed it because, if I were God and loved the people I created and wanted them to become at last the best they had it in them to be, I couldn't imagine consigning them to oblivion when their time came with the job under the best of circumstances only a fraction done. Second, I said, I believed it, apart from any religious considerations, because I had a hunch it was true. I intuited it. I said that if the victims and the victimizers, the wise and the foolish, the good-hearted and the heartless all end up alike in the grave, and that is the end of it, then life would be a black comedy, and to me, even at its worst, life doesn't feel like a black comedy. It feels like a mystery. It feels as though, at the innermost heart of it, there is Holiness, and that we experience all the horrors that go on both around us and within us as horrors rather than as just the way the cookie crumbles because, in our innermost hearts, we belong to Holiness, which they are a tragic departure from. And lastly, I wrote her, I believe that what happens to us after we die is that we aren't dead forever because Jesus said so.
I don't agree with everything Buechner writes, but that last sentence has been with me since I read it years ago. "[W]e aren't dead forever because Jesus said so." That and the "SOMETHING HAPPENS."
There's a reason the most famous passage of the Heidelberg Catechism is that portion of the first Q&A, "What is your only comfort in life and in death? That I am not my own, but belong body and soul, in life and in death to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ."
I like to think of death as a personal eschaton. There's a lot of worry in contemporary evangelicalism about the imminence of the eschaton. But we each face our own eschaton in our deaths, whether or not the Lord returns during our lifetime.
Posted by: Jordan | June 06, 2009 at 11:30 AM
I think of it the same way, Jordan. We do not indeed know the day or hour of His returning, nor do we know the smaller hour of His taking of us. But it will most certainly happen in our lifetime. And for any of us, it could be tomorrow.
Posted by: Ethan C. | June 06, 2009 at 01:49 PM
I like that. A personal eschaton.
Posted by: Hunter Baker | June 06, 2009 at 03:33 PM
I like the b/c Jesus said so answer.
That is the Orthodox explanation for how we know that the Eucharist really is the Body and Blood of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ, be/c He said so.
How is it His Body and Blood? That we can't say b/c He didn't tell us, it is a mystery, which is the correct Orthodox term for the Sacraments, the Mysteries.
There are some things that we are not capable of understanding them, if we did, they wouldn't really be miraculous now would they.
Posted by: Dn Nathan Thompson | June 06, 2009 at 04:49 PM
By the way, I am no longer a seminarian, so I don't feel the need to hide between my nom de plume, NTBH. But I will still try to limit my commenting seeing as how the less I say, the less chance I will fall into heresy.
Posted by: Dn Nathan Thompson | June 06, 2009 at 04:51 PM
Deacon Nathan: If you are going to fall into heresy, this is the best place to do it. There are so many willing hands to help you back out....
Posted by: Deacon Michael D. Harmon | June 07, 2009 at 07:44 AM