“Because I could not stop for Death -
He kindly stopped for me -
The Carriage held but just Ourselves -
And Immortality.”
(Emily Dickinson)
People nowadays are just too busy to consider death. It’s an irritation they brush aside and avoid thinking about. Oh, death does happen, but mostly to strangers or on TV or in the movies. That’s just entertainment. It doesn’t count. There’s the matter of casualties in Iraq or Afghanistan, but those are mere statistics. Put it out of your mind.
At a wedding rehearsal last summer a young man came up to me in the vestibule. He showed me what he held in his hand. “What are these?” I took the packet of matches from him. “Appears to me like a book of matches.” “What are they for?” he asked with all the arrogance of ignorance. “Do you see the candles over there on the counter? People feel the need to light a candle when they offer a prayer to the Lord.” “But these have the name of a funeral home. Can’t you use another packet for the wedding?”
The request intrigued me. I never heard the like before. I told him the obvious: Like marriage and birth, death is part of the cycle of life. Had he never seen “Charlotte’s Web” ? Or “Lion King” ? I thought to search for something culturally compatible before going to the Bible for my mini-lecture. He claimed to be a “Born Again Christian,” but that was no proof that he took seriously the numerous references by St. Paul and Jesus to this lifetime as a prelude and preparation for the Kingdom of Heaven.
It happens even with the most faithful Orthodox Christians. I’m called to be at the bedside of one who is close to death. She is aware of it; the family had been notified by the physician that time left on earth is short. I prepare to speak about dying and death—what happens, what the Church teaches, what the Bible reveals what is the state of her soul as she receives the sacred sacraments—but no, none of that. I’m told that the nurses are not always polite, the pillow is too hard, and the food is awful…anything but the fact that death is imminent.
We call ourselves Orthodox Christians, and yet we are poles apart from the attitude of our spiritual ancestors to life, death and life everlasting. We love one another while alive, as we pass from this life, after we’re gone and even into the Kingdom of God. Notice how we observe the funeral service, the memorial requiems afterwards. Listen to the listing of the holy saints at the end of every service. See how we venerate relics of saints for having fought the good fight of salvation and earned a place in heaven. Contrast all that with the disregard we have for the bodies of our loved ones. Cremation is fashionable among humanists and other new pagans, having become normative for Protestants, now acceptable for Roman Catholics, and impinging on us as well. Take note of the cavalier way in which “corpses” are treated once dead, the cutting up involved in the process of autopsy, and the perfunctory way the funerals take place. If we really believe what we say we do at the ending of the Nicene Creed: “I look for [better translation yearn for] the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come,” we would embrace the feeling of coming to the conclusion of this lifetime and welcome the life beyond where our Savior and God is waiting to embrace us with open arms. We ought to be of the same mind as the elder [staretz] Theodore, whose last words were: “Thanks be to God, thanks be to God. I see at last the shore of the sea of life in which my soul, as a small boat, has endured many storms.”