“Rest thee, dear dust, until the joyful morning” (Karamzin)
[Epitaph on the grave of Dostoevsky’s mother]
How many hundreds of times have I taken a handful of earth and as the final liturgical action sprinkled it on the shiny lid of a coffin and repeated that awesome pronouncement from the will of the Almighty: “Dust thou art, and to the dust shalt thou return.” Why, we ask. Why must we die? The cycle of life is complete—or is it? The Creator had another intention for His finest creation. He wanted us to live with him foreverâto choose freely love and devotion to Him; but the gift of freedom was too much for us to bear. It wasn’t His original intent that we should disintegrate, but it was the only way to staunch the process of sin that was infecting our whole beings, and so we all die.
Thanks be to Him that is not the end of the tale of human existence. We Christians live by a promise, that the episode we call life is not all for naught, like an opera that ends with the final curtain and there is nothing more but the exit. The entire message of the Son of God who came into the world to rescue us from oblivion was to present us with the awareness of “the joyful morning” that gives meaning to our lives. Not by accident do we begin even in our mothers’ wombs growing, learning, feeling what is beneficial and what must be avoided, reaching out with all our senses to the beauty of creation, realizing that we alone of all God’s creatures have the ability to comprehend the loveliness of the universe and to thank Him on behalf of all and for all. Is it only to have the wisdom from all we had learned through meditation and by the harsh school of suffering perish with us? To descend into the earth and to be covered up with earth?
When we proclaim to one another the revelation that “Christ is risen!” we announce the awareness of that third phase of God’s plan for us. First the life in the womb, then this time, which limited individuals call the only form of life for God’s children, from birth to death, and onto the life for which this lifetime has been a prelude and preparation, the glorious gift of life everlasting in Christ’s and our Father’s kingdom. Only that promise is capable of making sense of a universe that is rational in all ways other than the fact that we die. Would it make sense that we have paid so great a price for the knowledge and wisdom acquired through a lifetime only to have it end at the grave? The unbelievers feel it is enough of a legacy that we pass on through DNA and whatever records, diaries and photographs we leave behind so that our progeny may know about us, but that is not God’s intention at all. All non-human life passes on DNA with instinct and memory. What we call animal instinct is the stored memory in the genes of each new generation. But the human being is radically different from all other life. We are programmed by God to live eternally.
I think that for the skeptics and unbelievers the gospel of Christ is too good to be true, like a fairy tale that one sadly discovers to be a mere myth. But proof of life eternal is in the saints who live and despite the limits of our present existence communicate with us the joy of the heavenly Father’s love. They are our cheerleaders as we struggle through this world and time with its own new challenges to our faith. What with human ingenuity and technological breakthroughs that present ethical problems along with events such as terrorism and the arrogance of empire, by the challenges of our times we are garnering ways of meeting the obstacles to salvation that our spiritual ancestors were not aware of. All this is stored up in our souls, minds and memories. To have endured and triumphed in the Name of our Lord Jesus—all for nothing? Or rather when we return to the dust from whence we came, is not that dust pregnant with hope, faith, love and joy to be born again into another and more glorious life that has no time limit, but will remain forever?