A FRIGHTENING HUMAN EXPERIENCE.

praise-eu (67)in Christian Fellowship • 6 years ago (edited)

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A FRIGHTENING HUMAN EXPERIENCE.

There is no human experience that frightens us so much as death. The prospect of death raises all the important questions. What, if anything, does my life mean? Is there any goal or purpose to my life? Was Shakespeare’s Macbeth right in summing up all human existence as ‘a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing’? Is there anything more, or is death the end?

Despite the modern advancements in science and medicine, we are helpless before it. In the crypt of St. Leonard’s church, Hythe, Kent, hundreds of visitors come each summer to stare at 500 neatly shelved skulls and 8,000 femur bones stacked carefully besides them. These human remains challenge healthy young tourists with the unspoken certainty: ‘As we are, so you will soon be.’ Looking at a display of bones, it is hard to picture the exhibits as people who once lived, loved, laughed and cried like us. Is that it? Is death the only certainty in life? St. Augustine said long ago: ‘Everything in our life, good or bad, is uncertain, except death, only death is uncertain.’ Of course this is a simple truth known to man from the beginning of time, but the truth of it doesn’t always hit us.

In the past few years there have been more books written about this subject than for a full century before. Magazines report the long discussions of learned people on death, as well as the drawn-out courtroom debates on a suffering person’s right to die. The subject of death has suddenly become a ‘hot item’. Of course anyone who chooses to write about death is at an obvious disadvantage because he has never gone through the experience about which he is writing. As I have said we all know that we must die, but the delusion of many is that they imagine death as far-off, as if it will never come. There are people who at least for some period of time in their lives do not seem to take death seriously. During the 1960’s life seemed so full of fun and hope for many young people that they were uninterested in the subject, not just lacking belief in life after death, but not caring whether death really was the end of human existence. Though some people laugh and shrug their shoulders, eventually the loss of a friend or someone in the family forces them into some straight thinking about death, and the conclusions they reach can entirely change their lives.

One thing is sure, which Job in the Old Testament knew, ‘Man born of a woman is short lived and full of trouble. Like a flower that springs up and fades…..’When Philip II, King of Spain, was dying, he called for his son and pulling aside his royal robes, showed the young prince the horrible sores covering his body ‘See’, he said, ‘how even Kings die and how the grandeurs of this world end.’ Death runs to meet us, and we at every moment are moving towards death. Every step, every breath, brings us nearer to the end of life. I have often wondered how those who do not think about the shortness of life and are consequently unprepared for death act in the face of it. Life is short and death makes what we think are the ‘good things’ of life appear as they really are. Of what use are any of them when all that remains for a person is the darkness of the grave? Many of us, because it terrifies us, try to avoid the questions posed by death. But surely death is the most illuminating experience we can consider in our efforts at finding meaning to life. We cannot either discover or give a meaning to life unless we first find a meaning to death. Death provides a hinge for the meaning of life. True values become clear in the light of death. Our standpoint on death is central to our standpoint on life, and both involve belief, or call for acts of faith.

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We say people die. The key question is what is the meaning of death? What has become of the dead person? Absent from the body. Most cultures say that death means the end of the person. The only survival that society seems to allow a dead individual is in the evidence of the deeds he accomplished before death or in the memory of those who knew him. See what death does to a person; before death he might have been loved, admired, even sought after; at death he is a body that must be got rid of and quickly buried in the earth.

It may be comforting to hope with Tennessee Williams that ‘Death is one moment and life is so many of them’, but such a conception is false, even in its physical sense. To many, death comes only at the end of an agonizingly protracted illness, the outcome of which has been written clearly on the wall for years. The slow erosion of the body resulting from dread diseases of the nervous system like multiple sclerosis or Parkinson’s disease is no ‘short-time’ passing, either for the victims or for those who have the responsibility for caring for them.

What is the fact of death? The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as ‘the final cessation of the vital functions’. Put simply, the fact of death is that an individual’s heart stops beating and his brain stops functioning. A doctor after examination concluded, ‘he is dead’. All that the doctor means is that the physical signs that we associate with human life are no longer present. But does that person cease to exist because his heart stops beating and his brain waves cease?

Why does death rock the mourners? Why do we long that there should be something more? Whether the deceased is a six year old or a sixty year old, death devastates the mourners. The question ‘Why’? Naturally arises. Death seems to be a mistake, an error. It’s not fair. It’s as though something has become fouled up in the evolutionary process. Plants and animals die and that seems natural, but not people, people shouldn’t die. Shakespeare’s King Lear articulated a universal human reaction to death when, with his dead daughter in his arms, he cried,

‘No, no, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse have life,
And thou no breath at all?’

If there is something after death and life does not cease just because the heart has stopped beating, then the point of death is not a good time to deal with the issue. Businessmen will always take prudent measures in ample time to acquire financial gains in the event of loss later on. Sick people do not put off taking the medicines needed to preserve or to restore their health. A person on trial for his life will not delay preparation for his trial until the day of the trial itself.

The issue of life and death are important and need looking at now. ‘The time is short …