House of Mourning





A young man my husband works with passed away recently, his candle extinguished by a swift wind of cancer. As my husband and some co workers headed to his funeral, an ancient proverb kept coming to my mind:

"It is better to go to a house of mourning than to a house of feasting,

 for death is the destiny of every man;

the living should take this to heart."

 Ecclesiastes 7:2  

We humans spend a lot of our time trying not to think about death. There is nothing more certain in our lives than the fact that they'll end, but sitting and contemplating it is uncomfortable at its best and terrifying at its worst.  We might glance at it briefly from the corner of our eye, or give it a quick nod of acknowledgement, but sitting and staring into its eyes is not on many of our to do lists.  Because lets face it. Death is scary.

But we are all going to die.  Why is it important to take that to heart? Why not push it aside and press on with our lives with some degree of happy denial? Well there's the "carpe diem" approach, popularized in the Dead Poet's Society. "Make your lives extraordinary".  Seize today. Make every moment count.  I'm not dismissing the carpe diem philosophers, but the fact is that life is necessarily full of lots of mundane.  If I really wanted to seize today I would not do laundry.  I could proclaim to myself, "life is too short to do laundry!" but at some point I would need clean clothes. And so would my kids.  We can't avoid spending some of the precious currency of our lives on minutia.

We need to sit down with ourselves and seriously consider our mortality.  We are so busy with our day to day tasks and obligations, and when we finally reach the end of our day, we don't sit and contemplate, we distract and entertain ourselves. We fill any potentially revealing silence with music and stories and drowning out thoughts that could make us uncomfortable.

I can't think of anything more important than really contemplating and searching and deciding what you believe about this life, because what you believe in your core affects how you live.  How you prioritize. If you decide you believe there is a God, don't keep distracting yourself from asking what that means. What that means for your life, for how you should live, for how you should respond.  Because you are going to die.  Think about the immensity of what God must be to be real. What if the ultimate Reality, the Answer to all our questions and the Fulfillment of all our deepest longings said, "I'm here. But you'll only know that if you're willing to look for me." And what if our response was, meh. What's on tv?

You are going to die. Ask the big questions. Really ask them, don't just muse over them in passing. What is this life about?? Survival? Pleasure? God? Nothing? Ask and keep asking, search and keep searching, knock and keep knocking.

The world has successful, beautiful people who seized the day and made their lives extraordinary, but were still met with depression and despair. As a wise woman at my church has said, It is not enough to seize the day. You have to seize the right thing.

You are going to die. Find out what that is.