Kissing cousins (3)
and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away. Revelation 21:4 NASB
Death – What do we do to blunt the reality of dying? The answer isn’t quite so straightforward as you might imagine. Since death represents the end of us, the extinction of all we accomplished and all we still hoped to accomplish, the removal of memory of who we were, it’s completely human to resist. In fact, those beautiful sculptures we have been viewing from the cemetery Staglieno are human attempts to redeem the ugliness of death, the loss, the decay. The artist makes something aesthetically arresting in order to distract us from the reality—bones and tissue turning to dust inside those boxes.
Yalom tries to face dying head-on when he writes, ““In his [Otto Rank] view, a developing person strives for individuation, growth, and fulfillment of his or her potential. But there is a cost! In emerging, expanding, and standing out from nature, an individual encounters life anxiety, a frightening loneliness, a feeling of vulnerability, a loss of basic connection with a greater whole. When this life anxiety becomes unbearable, what do we do? We take a different direction: we go backward; we retreat from separateness and find comfort in merger—that is, in fusing with and giving oneself up to the other. Yet despite its comfort and coziness, the solution of merger is unstable: ultimately one recoils from the loss of the unique self and sense of stagnation.”[1]
How do we comfort ourselves when we face inevitable extinction? Well, religion is one way. We search divine inspiration for promises of another life. We have no experiential evidence of such a thing, although we have historical attestation, but even if there were no prior witnesses, we’d find a way to believe. Why? Because another life means that this isn’t the end. As Mercy Chukwuedo wrote, “ . . . the world indeed is not our home.”[2] Religion offers hope, the pacifier for death anxiety. Chukwuedo’s justification that death is God’s way of affirming our commitment to the son is a masterful bit of theological manipulation, acceptable to those who are afraid.
But there are other voices, perhaps a bit less romantic. “What is pretty in nature is confined to the thin skin of the globe upon which we huddle. Scratch that skin, and nature’s daemonic ugliness will erupt.”[3] Viewing those monuments in Staglieno, I hear Camile in the background: “Art makes order of nature’s cyclonic brutality.”[4]
“There is, I insisted, nothing beautiful in nature. Nature is primal power, coarse and turbulent. Beauty is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature.”[5]
Step back from your theological paradigm for a moment (if you can) and attempt to see the unvarnished ferocity of the world. At first I wrote “our world,” but realized immediately that it isn’t our world. Chukwuedo isn’t correct when he writes that we don’t belong here. We do. But “ . . . ‘nature’ is not as natural as it seems. Instead, it is a profoundly human construct. That is not to say that the nonhuman world is somehow unreal or a mere figment of our imaginations—far from it. But the way we describe and understand the natural world is so entangled in our own values and assumptions that the two can never be fully separated. What we mean when we use the word ‘nature’ says as much about ourselves as about the things we label with that word.”[6]
Brown goes on to write, “Shocked by nature and angry at its wrath, humans rail about cyclones and tsunamis, but these natural disasters are completely indifferent to the presence of human life,”[7] but she violates the rule about attributing human constructs to chthonic forces when she pens “its wrath.” Wrath is a human idea. Nature doesn’t display “wrath.” It simply is. Primal, turbulent, and indifferent. “ . . . nature in all its indifference, a place with no sense of fairness or unfairness.”[8] Qohelet recognized this empirical truth. Nature doesn’t care! Even death doesn’t matter in the sweep of time. We’re here. We’re gone. Time continues without a blink.
The only real solution to this indifference is the God of nature. The only real solution is that God is the creator of the natural world. And that, of course, is also the real problem. If we believe, as we so desperately wish to believe, that a loving God is the author of all there is, then we are confronted with an intractable dilemma. How is it that nature is so indifferent to human existence? How is it that death is so inevitable? Where is the good and loving God in all this, His own handiwork? Is it enough to claim that all of this indifference, this brutality, is the result of human caprice? It hardly seems so even if that is a typical theological explanation.
“Civilized man conceals from himself the extent of his subordination to nature. The grandeur of culture, the consolation of religion absorb his attention and win his faith. But let nature shrug, and all is in ruin.”[9]
Despair! Is that also inevitable? Does the paradigm of religious belief really wipe away that inner anxiety? It purports to offer hope in another world, but does that really take away those nightmares when they come? Sometimes I find religious answers so naïve, so ingenuous. What about you? What helps you make it through the night? Oh, wait. Let’s see—tomorrow.
Topical Index: death, extinction, Heaven, nature, Revelation 21:4
[1] Irvin D. Yalom, Staring at the Sun: Being at peace with your own mortality, p. 110.
[2] Ibid., p. 49.
[3] Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickenson, p. 5.
[4] Ibid., p. 34.
[5] Ibid., p. 57.
[6] Erica Brown, Leadership in the Wilderness: Authority and Anarchy in the Book of Numbers, p. 17.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Irvin D. Yalom, Staring at the Sun: Being at peace with your own mortality, p. 268.
[9] Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickenson, p. 1.
