ALL ROADS lead to the cemetery on Nov. 1, the traditional All Saints’ Day, as we Christians pay homage to our departed kins.
Death is like a thief in the night that comes when least expected. No man is too young to die – or too old to survive.
In the Bible, King David propounds that men who stay alive after age 70 are in their “bonus” years: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten, and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow, for it is soon cut off and we fly away” (Psalm 90:10).
Present-day scientists agree: No matter how healthy we are, by the time we reach 70, we will have yielded to deteriorating eyesight and distinct physical deformities like wrinkled skin and graying or balding hair.
A more popular Bible quotation is this: “To everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under the heaven: A time to be born and a time to die…” (Ecclesiastes 3:1-2).
We have no quarrel with that. What people debate about is what happens to us earthlings after death. Do we, like other forms of animals, return to dust forever or move on to a higher plane of life?
Most of us believe in the afterlife. In one of his poems, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote, “Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal. Dust thou art to dust returneth was not spoken of the soul.”
We therefore disagree with the atheists who think of death as the end, as in the movie Schmidt, where a rich, aging widower living alone after his only daughter marries, ululates, “What if I die? It’s as if I have never lived at all!”
But wait! Don’t we theists also disagree among ourselves with regard to what happens after death? There are as many views on post-death existence as there are religions and sects.
Christianity, which embraces the Bible as the textbook to refer to, offers no crystal-clear description of post-earth future. What is not written seems more acceptable to certain believers than what is written. While most Christian theologians maintain that Jesus will come again to resurrect the dead, their followers embrace the contrary belief that the soul immediately leaves the body at the moment of death and ascends to either heaven or hell. Moreover, Roman Catholics visualize this ascent as an appointment with Saint Peter, who holds the key to our assigned rooms in heaven or hell.
No wonder we all have read this birthday message to a departed loved one on Facebook: “Happy birthday to you in heaven.”
The Bible, however, denies any form or consciousness at the time of death: “For the living know that they shall die but the dead know nothing.” (Ecclesiastes 9:5)
“His breath goeth forth, he returneth to earth; in that very day his thoughts perish” (Psalms 146:4).
If we firmly believe that spiritual immortality follows physical mortality, why are we afraid of death? Oh we of little faith! It is probably because nobody who has gone up there has come down to tell us what paradise is like. It’s by sheer faith that we assume we’re going there if we do good. If in youth we prepare for old age, why not for the afterlife?
I remember those days in 1992 when my father – a believer in afterlife – was hospitalized. Though we had not told him he had terminal lung cancer, he calmly told us, “I think I will soon die.”
He waited and, a few days later, breathed his last. (hvego31@gmail.com/PN)
