Living to Die

As I listened to Keith Olbermann last evening describe the extraordinary measures being taken to “heal” his father and keep him alive, it dawned on me that we humans are never going to get it right until we move past our denial of death. The Healthcare Reform Summit taking place as I write would do well to spend some time exploring the meaning of life in the context of inevitable death, but it won’t. Armies battling one another for whatever reasons would do well to examine just how imposing death affects the purpose of life, but they won’t. Religions extolling the virtues of immortality would do well to discern how that differentiates mortals from the divine (in my opinion, it does not), but they will not. We would all do well to seriously study the impact of our ultimate destiny upon this current process we call life, but we will not. We don’t like to talk about death. We don’t like to think about death. We almost always prefer the death of another to our own. We pretend to know all the answers, which we don’t, and end up living pretentious lives of denial as a result. If we are ever to achieve the next step of human evolution, whatever that may be, it will be because we learned to accept and celebrate death as the purpose of living. For those Christians who are faithfully following the lectionary during this Lenten season, I invite you to read the story with an eye to the possibly new revelation that Jesus provided a living example of how to die.