There May Be A Reason

Being the penultimate unknown justifiably makes death a thing that most people don’t want to talk about. On the other hand, however, it does strike me as somewhat strange that the human mind doesn’t exhibit a greater curiosity with regard to the inescapable destiny of any living thing. Mom gave me Alan Watts’ The Wisdom of Insecurity many years ago, and I have long been impressed by the distinction he makes between “belief” and “faith”. In my own humble words, Watts supposes that beliefs are what we want them to be (e.g. what heaven is going to be like after I die), as opposed to faith which allows us to accept the unknowable, sort of like an antidote for anxiety. I was just thinking yesterday about how far removed I have become from the ministry, and how that distance creates an understandable credibility gap, especially with regard to things religious. But my faith is still, and always has been, deeply rooted in those things I learned and those things I taught myself about the life and teachings of Jesus. I have devoted myself to the quest of trying to understand what about the Nazarene’s life and death so captures the human soul. I cannot deny that the revelations of Moses, Mohammad, Buddha and Vishnu have equally stimulated human consciousness, and the thread that they all have in common—or so it seems to me—is that living should primarily be about dying. We have no guarantee that we will pass this way again (my apology to reincarnationists) and simply to fear the unknown does not justify ignoring it. In the remaining days of Lent I hope to share some of the scriptural passages describing Jesus and his teachings that I believe are intended to instruct us in the art of living to die.