Living through Death

I have been thinking a lot lately about the nature of suffering and evil in the world because of my work. It's impossible to overstate the sheer amount of human pain and tragedy one can witness in the hospital, from the agony of a long illness to the accidental death of a young child. If I hadn't believed in evil as a force before, I certainly would now. That's not to say I believe in a devil-with-pitch-fork type of character with little horns and a pointed tail. Real evil is far scarier than this. But the fact of the matter is that the more I find myself standing in the midst of tragedy, the more I am reminded of the sacredness surrounding us all the time.

Robot Devil

I read a truly exceptional article called Why God Will Not Die this morning, and I was really struck by it as I read, particularly thinking about atheist/secular humanist friends of mine who struggle with similar questions that I do, and whose life philosophy, though starting at a different point, ultimately converges with mine. The article talks about the author's young attempt to find meaning and purpose in his life, which in his 20s he framed using a Bertrand Russell quote that can be summed up much less eloquently through the phrase: "Life sucks, then you die." (Something my father was quite fond of saying in his younger years.) But as he got older, he began to see that his grasping of that idea was his (rather immature) attempt to find some sort of simple closure to the ongoing question which is being human.

The question is most often: "Why?" and "What?" Why are we here? Why did God/evolution/the Universe/chance create us? What purpose do we serve? Why do bad things happen to good people? What laws govern the universe? These are questions that humans have been pondering since we had the cognitive ability to ponder them. Wisdom literature wrestles with these questions in profound ways. Isaiah wonders: "What is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?" (Isaiah 8:4) and Job asks the unknowable question to God, "Yet when I hoped for good, evil came; when I looked for light, then came darkness." (Job 30:26) And we ask it: Why did this happen to me? What did I do to deserve this? Why do we keep killing each other? Why isn't there enough to eat? Why why why.

Slum in Mumbai

My view is that whatever happened at the fall of creation disrupted the natural order of God's world and introduced the power of death into our world. Ultimately, the root of most evil we commit to each other is committed out of the knowledge of our mortality, and the chaos of death is so ingrained in us that in permeates even creation where decay, illness, and natural disasters happen to us. And then there is this figure which stands up and says: "I AM the resurrection and the life!" Jesus says this defiantly, and acts defiantly against it by healing the sick, feeding the hungry, driving out demons, and fighting the inequality which kept people impoverished and outcast from those who would care for them. In a very real way, Jesus' ministry was spitting in the face of the power of death and the structures which lead to it, and the fear of it which binds us. 

This is why the gospel is so foolish, as Paul says. Because we live in death every day, watching our bodies grow weaker and older, watching our loved ones die off, seeing starvation and terrible disease, and witnessing atrocious acts of violence and war. And yet in the midst of it we have a story of this one figure who defies death one hungry person at a time, and then who himself dies only to rise. In the same way that Job came to realize his bigness to God through the smallness of being told: "Who are you to question me?" we realize our power by understanding our fragility.

Mother Teresa defying starvation

I said to a friend of mine that I believe we can "give the finger" to death through the act of living. By doing all the things we do, breathing, eating, thinking, we defy the death that surrounds us. And the irony of the gospel is that by our constant awareness of our finitude, we are empowered to cultivate life. Our despair actually has the power to give us hope when we start to see not how beholden we are to death, but how actively we can choose to fight it through service to our hurting world. Christ empowers us into this service, in the same way that he empowered his less than perfect disciples, so that through our dying we might live and live for others. And in knowing that we tiny humans can defy the tide of death a little, we may get a glimpse of the grandeur of God's ultimate victory over it.