Inquisitive About When I Will Die

I just answered a questionnaire that researchers believe can measure my chances of dying within the ext four years.  I could hardly wait so I spent the money.  When it was uploaded, I took it as hurriedly as I could since one of the test’s designers boasted of a eighty-one percent accurate outcome among those who are fifty-five years and old.   I’m seventy-one and aging!  The report of this innovative tool was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, claims the assessment will be useful to doctors in offering prognostic information and to patients who want a more determined look at the future.  Regardless of my doubt of the questionnaire's effectiveness, however, it brings to mind the lines of Emily Dickinson, "Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me."  I really didn't need to take this test or any other to tell me my chance of dying.  

British statesman and avowed atheist Roy Hattersley wrote some years ago in an article, A Decent Send-off, of an experience at a funeral.  It was a funeral, he said, which almost converted him to the belief that funeral services—of which he had disapproved for years—ought to be encouraged.  His conclusion was forged as he sang the hymns and studied the proclamations of a crowd that seemed sincere: "The church is so much better at staging last farewells than non-believers could ever be." He continued, "'Death where is thy sting, grave where is thy victory?' are stupid questions.  But even those of us who do not expect salvation find a note of triumph in the burial service.  There could be a godless thanksgiving for and celebration of the life of whomever.  The music might be much the same.  But it would not have the uplifting effect without the magnificent, meaningless, words."

I had been too or officiated maybe 15 funerals until I became a chaplain some years ago.  Although I had attended visitations, memorial services, and those mentioned years earlier, I had seldom watched a family, and never intentionally, move from planning to wake to service to burial, until I assisted more families through the entire funeral process than seemed possible during those years of the chaplaincy call.  The number of deaths seemed to me grossly disproportionate to the number births I was acquainted and ministered to those same years.

Something happened with me when I was given the opportunity to be an observer at that many funerals.  The reality of the sting of death became like a running commentary on the futility of life and fleeting nature of humanity.  "For who knows what is good for a man in life during the few and meaningless days he passes through like a shadow?" asks Solomon.  "Surely the people are grass," writes Isaiah.  I had never been more aware of my own transience.

But there seemed to be an incredible paradox in this looming experience of death's repetitive sting hanging around for me.  With each new grave came the unnaturalness of the process all over again—a body at the front of the altar, a hole dug deeply, a coffin lowered.  Yet as death continued to rear its vile head, life stood futile to stop it, the words spoken over the body again and again did not become futile themselves; they did not seem more trite, whether in repetition or as an obvious attempt to lessen the blow.  On the contrary, for me, they did not lessen the blow; they did not remove the callous enemy staring me in the face.  And yet, the words somehow grew all the more resounding.  I have come to realize that things I say are not spoken to soften the blow at all, but rather, to affirm the offense, to acknowledge the sting of death in all of its aberrancy (new word for me)—and to name the one Who came to reverse it, having gone through it in all its ugliness Himself.

I am only one of human creatures in this world who speak words over bodies, who bury our dead, and insist we take them all the way to the grave.  Why does death never cease to seem unnatural even despite the worldview I bring to the funeral?  What is it about this spirit that will not stop, that refuses to be reconciled to loss and give death the last word?  What is it that makes me cry out to someone or someplace beyond myself?  "If only for this life we have hope in Christ," writes Paul, "we are to be pitied more than all people" 1 Corinthians 15:19.  His words are not an attempt to undermine hope in this lifetime; they are not a spiritualized quip inviting the separation of the sacred from the secular, the physical and the spiritual, or this present world from a heavenly hope.  Far from it, Paul is emphatic that Christ's heroic confrontation with death so radically shakes my present reality that I can hardly bring myself to imagine what it has done for the next.  
  

Hattersley concludes his observations with a comment, in the same article, of which I have tried to plumb the depths: "Dull would he be of soul (or the humanist equivalent) who is not moved to tears by the exhortation, 'He died to make us holy, let us live to make men free.'" Such were the final, magnificent lines the statesman uttered at a funeral that moved him, though, he would insist, without meaning.

Father, God, thank You for the assurance and hope that Your Son, Jesus Christ has given me when He said: I am the resurrection and the life.  He who comes to me will live, even though he dies. Amen