Young people may forget that funerals are waiting on the other end of weddings and baby showers. When we segregate ourselves — when we don’t know anyone who is suffering from arthritis or Alzheimer’s — we can be lulled to sleep. It is this unexpectedness of death that should encourage us to take a second look, to reconsider our pleasant denial, to admit that, yes, death might visit us as early as this week.
Gen. William Nelson, a Union general in the Civil War, was consumed with the battles in Kentucky when a brawl ended up in his being shot, mortally, in the chest. He had faced many battles, but the fatal blow came while he was relaxing with his men. As such, he was caught fully unprepared. As men ran up the stairs to help him, the general had just one phrase, “Send for a clergyman; I wish to be baptized.”
He never had time as an adolescent or young man. He never had time as a private or after he became a general. And his wound did not stop or slow down the war. Everything around him was left virtually unchanged — except for the general’s priorities. With only minutes left before he entered eternity, the one thing he cared about was preparing for eternity. He wanted to be baptized. Thirty minutes later he was dead.
How was this general served by the remembrance of death? Hardly at all, because he remembered it too late.
To help us avoid such oversight, Thomas a Kempis urged, “Thou oughtest so to order thyself in all thy thoughts and actions, as if today thou wert about to die” (Imitation of Christ). As Vice President, George Bush represented the United States at the funeral of former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Bush was deeply moved by a silent protest carried out by Brezhnev’s widow. She stood motionless by the coffin until seconds before it was closed. Then, just as the soldiers touched the lid, Brezhnev’s wife performed an act of great courage and hope, a gesture that must surely rank as one of the most profound acts of civil disobedience ever committed: She reached down and made the sign of the cross on her husband’s chest.
There, in the citadel of secular, atheistic power, the wife of the man who had run it all hoped that her husband was wrong. She hoped that there was another life, and that that life was best represented by Jesus who died on the cross, and that the same Jesus might yet have mercy on her husband.
The thought of death came too late for an American Civil War general and a Soviet head of state — will it come too late for us?
[see #3551, #3620-21 for full article]