We prefer to ignore or deny the realization that death is coming. In this we are not unlike previous generations. It was the teaching of the ancients, in fact, that helped me to gain perspective on death. The classical spiritual-life writers found great spiritual benefit in looking death in the face, seizing its reality, and making it their servant. They used death to teach them how to live.
Francois Fenelon, a seventeenth-century French mystic who wrote the classic “Christian Perfection,” spoke eloquently of the denial of death: “We consider ourselves immortal, or at least as though [we are] going to live for centuries. Folly of the human spirit! Every day those who die soon follow those who are already dead. One about to leave on a journey ought not to think himself far from one who went only two days before. Life flows by like a flood.”
Most of us recognize that we will eventually die, but this recognition is reserved for a distant event, decades from now, not today, this week, this month, this year. Death is a foreigner, not a close neighbor. Or so we live our lives, clutching fiercely to this illusion.
How else can we explain the fact that so many die without a will? We live without a will not because we believe we’ll never die, but because we don’t expect to die this week. Thus, we have more important tasks to take care of, meetings to attend, things to buy, decorations to hang.
REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS FUTURE
Why do we deny death? Fenelon believed we avoid the thought of it so we are not saddened by it. But this, he says, is shortsighted: “It will only be sad for those who have not thought about it.”
William Law, the eighteenth-century Anglican author of “A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life,” wrote that the living world’s brilliance blinds us from eternity and the reality of death. “The health of our bodies, the passions of our minds, the noise and hurry and pleasures and business of the world, lead us on with eyes that see not and ears that hear not.”
Part of this denial comes from the company we keep.
[see #3552 for denial of death, and illustrations of Civil War general and Brezhnev’s widow.]
John Climacus, a seventh-century ascetic who wrote Ladder of Divine Ascent, urged Christians to use the reality of death to their benefit: “You cannot pass a day devoutly unless you think of it as your last,” he wrote. He called the thought of death the “most essential of all works” and a gift from God. “The man who lives daily with the thought of death is to be admired, and the man who gives himself to it by the hour is surely a saint.”
Remembrance of death acts like a filter, helping us to hold on to the essential and let go of the trivial. John Climacus pointed out that a “man who has heard himself sentenced to death will not worry about the way theaters are run.”
TURNING EVERYTHING RIGHT-SIDE UP
Forgetting death tempts us to lose perspective. Thinking about eternity helps us retrieve it. I’m reminded of this every year when I figure my taxes. During the year, I rejoice at the paychecks and extra income, and sometimes I flinch when I write out the tithe and offering. I do my best to be a joyful giver, but I confess it is not always easy, especially when there are other perceived needs and wants.
At the end of the year, however, all of that changes. As I’m figuring my tax liability, I wince at every source of income and rejoice with every tithe and offering check — more income means more tax, but every offering and tithe means less tax. Everything is turned upside down, or perhaps, more appropriately, right-side up.
I suspect judgment day will be like that. Those things that bother us now, that force us out of our schedules — taking time out to encourage or help someone — will be the very things that we deem the most important. We may not remember the movie we skipped to paint that elderly person’s house, or the meeting we missed to visit that prisoner or sick person, but in eternity, we will remember the acts of kindness and love, and we will be glad we took the time to do them.
Death not only filters our priorities, it also filters our passions. In his Pensées, seventeenth-century French mathematician and theologian Blaise Pascal wrote, “To render passion harmless let us behave as though we had only a week to live.” All of us are captive to various passions; some good, some bad. Which ones will we follow?
William Law suggests we pick and choose according to how we will feel upon our death. “The best way for anyone to know how much he ought to aspire after holiness is to consider not how much will make his present life easy, but to ask himself how much he thinks will make him easy at the hour of death.” What men or women in their right mind would continue an affair if they really believed they might not wake up in the morning? What person would risk entering eternity in a drunken stupor? What fool would ignore his loved ones and God for one last night so that he could make another quick ten thousand just before he died? Thomas a Kempis agreed with such reasoning, arguing that the remembrance of death is a powerful force for spiritual growth: “Didst thou oftener think of thy death than of thy living long, there is no question but thou wouldst be more zealous to improve. If also thou didst but consider within thyself the infernal pains in the other world, I believe thou wouldst willingly undergo any labor or sorrow in this world, and not be afraid of the greatest austerity. But because these things enter not to the heart, and we still love those things only that delight us, therefore we remain cold and very dull in religion.”
When we schedule our priorities and follow our passions without regard to eternity, we are essentially looking into the wrong end of a telescope. Instead of seeing things more clearly, our vision becomes distorted. We miss the big picture. “Feasts and business and pleasures and enjoyments seem great things to us whilst we think of nothing else; but as soon as we add death to them, they all sink into an equal littleness; and the soul that is separated from the body no more laments the loss of business than the losing of a feast,” wrote Law.
It is only the denial of death that allows us to continue rebelling against God. It is only because we are presuming on some future time to set things right that we ever even consider letting them go wrong. Some of us will be surprised in our presumption; eventually our spirits will be dulled until we forget we are presuming, and death will catch us by surprise, like all the rest.
That is why Thomas a Kempis urged, “Labor now to live so, that at the hour of death thou mayest rather rejoice than fear.” That hour is coming. If it comes tonight, will you be able to rejoice at your state? Or does the mere thought strike fear into your soul? More is involved than just our eternal destiny. God’s mercy may well pass us into his eternal presence, but do we want to enter heaven after faithfully serving God to the best of our ability, or rather after some desperate, last-minute confession, realizing that we have wasted our life?
I want to enter death tired. I want to have spent what energy God has apportioned me. The cross-country races that were most satisfying to me were not the ones I won most easily, but the ones that took everything I had to win. Weariness produced by hard, diligent labor is a reward, not a curse. An eternal rest awaits all who know Christ, so why are we preoccupied with rest now?
Death becomes our servant, then, when we use it to reorder our priorities and to grow in grace and holiness. There is yet one more way we can use death to our benefit.