Embracing Death

Commemoration of All Our Dear Departed (2 November 2018)

“For your faithful, Lord, life is changed not ended.”

Today, All Souls' Day, is an appropriate day to reflect on death, on our own deaths—the only certainty of our lives. In fact, death is not the opposite of life. It is that which completes our life. In death, our life is not ended, but changed, transformed, transfigured. Death is not a changing of worlds, but an boundless expanding of the walls of this world. So as humans, our aim is to find love which will be the eternal home base, that on which we will continue to live even in our after-life.

Death may be about dying, but it is more about living. However sorrowful a parting our death be, it brings in the hope of resurrection. Nothing can separate us from Christ, from God: not even death. Even sadness becomes a beautiful prelude to eternal joy. Ernest Becker humorously puts it, “At heart, one does not feel that he is going to die, he only feels sorry for the man next to him.” Prolonging of this earthly life may not be a blessing, but a change of quality of this very same life is certainly a blessing.

What can we learn from death in general? Doesn't our awareness of our mortality make us vulnerable? Yes it does. And that's good. For the world, death, illness, human brokenness, ugliness, failures, sinfulness and woundedness all these have to be hidden from our sight because they keep us from the happiness for which we strive. The world thinks they are obstructions on our way to the goal of life. But Jesus shows another way: we need to embrace the cross, accept our brokenness and woundedness. Through death we receive life. We receive life from death.

Moreover, life gives us opportunity to die to ourselves so many times in a day. By dying to ourselves, we can truly love. We can love and give life to others. Death thus can be integrated into our life, even as we prepare for the final, physical death. Nothing is lost; everything is transformed in death.