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"Must not all things at the last be swallowed up in death?"

Plato wasn't right, of course, but one can only half-blame the chap because it surely feels that way much of the time.

It's odd, missing someone keenly and yet not knowing them very well. It's as if the memory of them is very sharp in your mind, but you know it's not the full picture of them that you got because you weren't around them long enough to get that full picture (and in a way a lot of the hurt comes from thinking about people who did have a more complete picture)--and yet that doesn't diminish in any way the vastness of the gulf that now hangs between you. You're missing something or someone, maybe because the person was such a constant that there's this hole, or because the person never got the chance to be a constant, but whatever the case... they're not there, and they never will be (again?), not in the way that you can comprehend at the time, and so you sit there and look at what seems to be infinity apart from them--and in a way it is infinity, because they've entered eternity and you, still not quite understanding or maybe even quite believing in the existence of the eternal, are left behind.

Thank God Plato didn't get it right--and I don't mean that lightly; really thank Him, because there actually is something--or rather, Someone--that swallows Death and its sting up.

I just can't comprehend Him right now. It seems the nearer death is, the nearer Christ comes, and the less I comprehend anything.

Then again, He never promised comprehension.

(I suppose the threat of that was removed long ago when He started being eternal. Yes, I'm being oxymoronic. Intentionally.)

I can't seem to end this satisfactorily, but I can't make myself delete it either. I have no nice-and-tidy summing up, no clever last line designed to make you chuckle throughout the day. My words seem unresolved and unnatural and insufficient.

It strikes me, then, that this post is a lot like death.

(And how much do I wish I had some Lewis with me, to absorb all my pathetic, philosophical eschewing.)
Read More 1 Comment | scribbled by Unknown edit post

1 Comment

  1. e on October 1, 2008 at 8:44 AM

    We *can* thank God for bringing resolution to death. Telos, to use the Greek word: it has a purpose, to complete our lives by ushering us into the Lord's presence. It's hard to believe that, though. In fact, it's hard even to "believe" in death until one is actually faced with it. We are so good at blocking it out of our minds when actually I suppose we ought to be thanking God every day for what He has done to make that day worthwhile so that its fruit doesn't just end when we die.

     


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