Confronted by death this morning. The lovely wife and I had to attend her grandad's cremation. An ironic twist to it is that as we are stared in the face by this stark reality we also celebrate the knowledge that our little Malachi is 6 months old today. I guess death is no respecter of what joy may be taking place in the rest of the sphere of life.
One has to think when death knocks on your family door. If one can move on and not think about it at all then they are probably a little shallow. I have often heard it said though that we are a culture that does all in its power to sanitize death and to remove it from our immediate consciousness at all costs--this seems true as I have not been directly confronted with death more than I can count on one hand in my 31 years. So, in my thinking I certainly concluded that if what is burnt up in that coffin (in very much the same way as the cheaply made wooden coffin that surrounds it) is all that is life and as it become ash that alone is all that made up the 'years' and existence that passed before than life is truly meaningless. All the value put upon it, pursuit and effort made to maintain it and cherish it seems extremely pointless.
What I thought as I drove alone to the crematorium was that as there is something that lives on longer than even the memories of that person. Speaking to someone who was at the crematorium just 3 weeks before for the service of two still born twin girls I knew that their memories would last infinitely longer than there brief physical existence.
Not only is there something that lives as long (longer) as the memories but it shares another similarity with memories-- its non-physicality.
The reason it is so hard for us secularists to believe that there is more to humanity than that inflammable body is that we can't touch it. But as certainly as you will never deny the memory of my wife's grandfather to her is the certainty that there is this non-physical component of us that lives on after death.
As I thought on this I did wonder why a world so certain that all that counts is this body and the material pays such immense attention and respect to the end of it. Why is death something so confrontational? Why do we not just cast dead people upon some recycling system; discard of them like some over-used sofa that no longer serves a purpose?
I think we all know that will never happen.
We as humans are of infinite value indwelt by the image of the infinite God.
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