49 - Wrestling the World's Absences

Wrestling the World's Absences
By Marlyne an David Cain

"Whatever life after death might or might not be, the present is not negated by it. Precisely because God takes death seriously, God takes life seriously. This life, our lives, our decisions now, count for God; and that means they count eternally. Eschatology ought to be the goad of ethics, not the great slultifier. Life after death may, be confessed to the reconciliation of this life which we are living here and now, but it is neither the negation nor the eradication of it. "

BEAU is gone now… ." So begins an unassuming little poem by Loren Eiseley, who is also gone now. Beau was a "huge black poodle." The poem makes lively Beau's presence-hence the impact of his absence-for a chipmunk, for the poet himself, and finally for Beau's "girl playmate from up the road" who comes by, finds no Beau, and goes away:

How does one explain this to animals: that after a while
there are none of us left: no shadows, no voice, no odor.
One cannot even show a picture.
She goes away silently up the track.
She does not understand the world's absences.
Looking at the empty rug by my bed,
neither do I.¹

The world's absences: indeed we do not understand them, neither the absences of others nor our own in apprehension. We stand-and fall-under them.

Annie Dillard writes, "That it's rough out there and chancy is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac."² Something like this awareness struck young man Luther when, in July of 1505, he was returning to the University of Erfurt after

Marlyne Cain is Instructor in the Program in Patient Counseling, Medical College of Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth University, in Richmond. David Cain is Associate Professor of Religion at Mary Washington College, in Fredericksburg. They are ordained ministers in the United Church of Christ. This is a revision of a dialogue prepared for the Twentieth Anniversary Symposium of the Program in Patient Counseling at the Medical College of Virginia in February, 1980.
^{1 "}Beau" in Loren Eiseley, Another Kind of Autumn (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1977), p. 43.
² Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper's Magazine Press, 1974), pp. 6-7.

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a visit with his parents and was overtaken by a violent thunderstorm. A bolt of lightning threw him to the ground. "St. Anne help me!" he cried, "I will become a monk."³ The precariousness of life had jolted him, and spontaneously he spoke from that stage of death-dealing which Elisabeth Kübler-Ross' calls "bargaining."⁴ He wasted no time keeping his end of the bargain, entering the Augustinian cloister in Erfurt two weeks later. This was Luther's initial way of consciously living with dying. If, as the saying and our experience attest, "In the midst of life, we are surrounded by death," then we had best address ourselves single-mindedly to that situation.

Fortunately, perhaps, few if any of us do this single-mindedly; for death will not be content with ending life. Death is a usurper and wishes to rule in life as well. William Stringfellow's reiterated warnings against "worship of death" and "idolatry of death"⁵ speak pointedly here, as do attempts to bring Christian eschatology to bear on present existence. However, when eschatological language is aimed "solely" at the present, a legitimate fear that "life after death" will drain ethical energies out of the present has foreclosed an equally legitimate hope. Playing peek-a-boo with life after death may indeed numb playing earnestly with life here and now. But surely this is neither a necessary nor satisfactory way to relate eschatology and ethics in Christian faith-or to wrestle the world's absences.

A hospital chaplain knows that there are not many bedsides where theological talk of the relationship between eschatology and ethics is appropriate. We seek to be guided by such situational knowledge and to speak of living with dying in relation to persons-persons placed in parentheses by hospitalization and persons otherwise jolted by the precariousness of life, tossing and turning over fears and hopes, over anxious doubts and uncertainties. The challenge is to aim theology at existence, to hold back in honesty before taking short cuts to comfort.

Think, for example, of the person who tries to confront dying with hope-hope for peace, hope for reconciliation with God, hope for reunion with loved ones. To the extent that such hopes are honest ones, we have no right to trample on them. One of the special opportunities for persons reflecting together on death is afforded by death's uncompromising equalization of human diversity. Here there are no "experts." An expert swimmer learns the strokes (and maybe reads the books) but also knows the splash and tingle of the water. Words about death,

³ Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand (New York: New American Library, 1957). p. 15.
⁴ Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying (New York: Macmillan, 1969). pp. 72-74.
⁵ See, e.g.. William Stringfellow, Instead of Death (New York: Seabury, 1963), pp. 7-13: Count It All Joy (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1967), pp. 48-50, 90-93; Free in Obedience (New York: Seabury, 1967), esp. pp. 62-70; Imposters of God (Dayton, Ohio: Geo. A. Pflaum, Publisher, 1969), p. 31; A Second Birthday (Garden City. New York: Doubleday. 1970), pp. 53-54. 133, 185-188.

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spoken this side of that particular splash and tingle, ought to be shared in the humility and respect of personal risk and hope. Here there are no professors examining candidates. We are all candidates, and the stark reality of death examines us all. Our words rebound upon us. The fears and hopes of others interrogate our own hopes and fears. We must endeavor to be present with others rather than over against them. The latter is no presence at all.

The Christian model is incarnation. God embraces our place, becomes present with rather than over against us. It is sometimes said that God cannot die. Poor God! Risk an analogy and imagine what an inability to die might mean for us in a world of death: family and friends endlessly passing from dust to dust while we watch the generations, somewhat sadly, no doubt, but distantly as well, come and go. We might feel resentment-even guilt-in suspecting that we could not really love if we could not really die. Some of the cynicism breeding under attempts to "praise the Lord'; may be rooted in resentment of the supposed divine invulnerability to death-as if we, too, might be glorious if we were not … ultimately vulnerable.

But the Christian God can suffer death. Much of the power in Barth's treatment of reconciliation conics from this awareness:

It is not at all the case that God has no part in the suffering of Jesus Christ even in His mode of being as the Father…. This fatherly fellow-suffering of God is the mystery, the basis, of the humiliation of His Son: the truth or that which takes place historically in His crucifixion.⁶

Eberhard Jüngel, interpreting Barth's thought, urges, "God is able to suffer and die as man."⁷ Peter Kreeft asserts, "Without death, there could be no love."⁸ He is thinking of the way death makes persons precious, but try applying the point to God. If God could not die, perhaps God could not love-or be loved. Trinitarian musings might be construed as attempts to take seriously the vulnerability and death of God without thereby losing God to death.⁹ The death of Jesus is total divine risk: sham death yields but sham victory. Johannes Climacus takes the divine death seriously: "More bitter than wormwood is the bitterness of death for a mortal, how bitter then for an immortal!"¹⁰ In a

⁶ Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV, 2, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1958), p. 357. See also p. 358 and Church Dogmatics, IV, 1 (1956), p. 186.
⁷ Eberhard Jüngel, The Doctrine of the Trinity, trans. Scottish Academic Press Ltd. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1976), p. 86. The entire section, "God's Passion," pp. 83-88, is important.
⁸ Peter J. Kreeft, Love Is Stronger Than Death (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979), p. 48.
⁹ This is a way of responding to the dilemma focused by Michael Platt: ...'how can God die as a man and later return to being a God? Either He really didn't die at all, in which case He is not a man, or He died and is a God no more, if he ever was." "Would Human Life Be Better Without Death?" in Soundings, LXIII, No. 3, Fall, 1980, p. 323. The entire essay, particularly Platt's comments on Odysseus' rejection of immortal life (pp. 323-326), relates to our point.
¹⁰ Soren Kierkegaard (Johannes Climacus), Philosophical Fragments. trans. David F. Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), p. 42.

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world of death, it would be a liability not to be able to die. The Christian God has the ability to die, and divine warrant for human risk is issued. If God is not in some mysterious sense ultimately vulnerable, the presence of God cannot be ultimately comforting. Likewise, our capacity for mutual comfort is secured in equal and shared vulnerability.

II

Persons forced to confront living with dying may be dominated by fear of judgment, of punishment, of falling short; and perhaps not many persons are finally as "modern," as "scientific," or as consistently "demythologized" as some theologians suggest. The First Letter of John seeks to encompass all fears and to douse flaming anxieties:

Little children, let us not love in word or speech but in deed and truth. By this we shall know that we are of the truth, and reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything (I John 3:18-20, RSV).

God "knows everything." Part of the assurance of faith is that the truth will not destroy us but will make us free. Why do we almost invariably react, when someone says, "Well, do you want to know the truth?" as if something abhorrent were coming? We brace ourselves and are anticipatorily on the defensive. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, but the fear of the Lord may also be a failure of faith. The person who says, "I can never forgive myself!" is not exemplifying profound humility but is holding out against the divine mercy.¹¹

What of persons who fear the failure of their faith, persons filled with guilt over lack of faith, over not believing in a life after death or in some supposedly "literal" understanding of resurrection? We join them. Surely we can find ourselves here, at least part of ourselves part of the time. The word "literal" begs too many questions. Are we speaking figuratively when we say Jesus is the Lamb of God and literally when we call him the Son of God? These are images all the way. Finally, we do not know how our human words refer. Neither univocal, equivocal, nor analogical theories-nor several seminars in Wittgenstein-will save us. The Bible is unabashedly anthropomorphic respecting God and everything else. We can try for a standoff by recalling that God theomorphizes by creating human beings in the divine image; but if there is no living God who is to be trusted, who promises that God is not the God of the dead but of the living (Mark 12:27 and parallels), then

¹¹ Anti-Climacus says, "… despair over sin is not indisposed to bestow upon itself the appearance of something good. So it is supposed to be an expression for a deep nature which thus takes sin so much to heart… . 'I can never forgive myself for it,' he says…. He can never forgive himself for it-but now in case God would forgive him for it, he might well have the kindness to forgive himself." Soren Kierkegaard (Anti-Climacus), The Sickness Unto Death (published with Fear and Trembling), trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 242. Dostoyevsky's Tikhon tries to reach a desperately prideful Stavrogin: "Christ, too, will forgive you, once you only reach the point of yourself forgiving yourself." Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Possessed, trans. Constance Garnett, "Stavrogin's Confession," trans. F. D. Reeve (New York: Dell, 1961), p. 732.

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our linguistic refinement is as beside the point as our linguistic crassness. ¹²

Faith sets us free. It sets us free to be honest about our unfaith. We are also free to use whatever language we can muster to retain and enliven the mysteries of faith. Much Christian eschatological imagery, suffers from a failure of imagination. Harps and hosannas endlessly sounding may paint for even moderate cynics more a portrait of hell than of heaven.¹³ Again, honesty is essential. Someone attempted to comfort the dying Ethan Allen with the words, "The angels are waiting for you." To which Allen is said to have replied, "Well, let the damn angels wait!" Allen's honesty found a way, to humor. Those who are most immediately aware of living with dying often have uncannily sharp eyes for honesty-and for attempts at comfort which do not dare to own equal vulnerability, to share the fear, uncertainty, anguish, emptiness, and finality of the assault of death.

Consider someone haunted by guilt for wanting to die-both to be finished with it all, to escape the sufferings of the present, and to enjoy the promises of the future fulfilled. A woman critically ill called a chaplain to confess her anger with God because she had not died.¹⁴ The next day she was overwhelmed with guilt for wanting to run from life to the "peace" of life after death.

Many persons fear not death or whatever they might imagine comes after death so much as they fear the possibly, prolonged and apparently futile forms of dying. Talk of eschatology and ethics becomes practical here after all. Whatever life after death might or might not be, the present is not negated by it. Precisely because God takes death seriously, God takes life seriously. This life, our lives, our decisions now, count for God; and that means they count eternally. Eschatology, ought to be the goad of ethics, not the great stultifier. Life after death may be confessed to be the reconciliation of this life which we are living here and now, ¹⁵ but it is neither the negation nor the eradication of it. In Schiller's words, "What we have denied, the moment, eternity will never give back." ¹⁶ Henri Nouwen writes of memory:

¹² Bonhoeffer makes this point: "… anthropomorphism in thinking of God. undisguised mythology, is no more irrelevant or unsuitable as a way of speaking of the being of God than the abstract use of the generic name 'deity.' On the contrary, the fact that we simply cannot conceive of 'God in himself' is perhaps expressed much more plainly in clear anthropomorphism." Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall and Temptation, trans. John C. Fletcher (New York: Macmillan, Inc., 1974), p. 45.
¹³ See H. A. Williams, True Resurrection (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972), esp. pp. 177-180.
¹⁴ Stringfellow understates, upon regaining consciousness in the recovery room following serious surgery, "I was alive, alright; I could tell that because it hurt." A Second Birthday, op. cit.. p. 175.
¹⁵ See Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress. 1976), p. 488. See also Eberhard Jüngel, Death: the Riddle and the Mystery, trans. Ian and Ute Nicol (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1974), esp. p. 121. It is this life we offer to God in gratitude, trust, fear and trembling, repentance-and with the hint of a smile as if saying, "Well, that's what I made of it. Now see if you can make something out of it."
¹⁶ Quoted in Günther Bornkamm, Jesus of Nazareth, trans. Irene and Fraser McLuskey with James M. Robinson (New York: Seabury, 1977), p. 93.

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Our memory plays a central role in our sense of being. Our pains and joys, our feelings of grief and satisfaction, are not simply dependent on the events of our lives, but also, and even more so, on the ways we remember these events. The events of our lives are probably less important than the form they, take in the totality of our story. ¹⁷

A Christian is that curious creature who remembers his or her life from the perspective of the truth which frees, from the perspective of God's victory already won in Jesus. That means that times of explicit living with dying are times to try to imagine one's adventures and misadventures, one's supposed breakthroughs and breakdowns, as held in the reconciling hand of God. Good riddance to life, any life, may be failure of the Christian imagination.

This needs qualification. Medical ethics and daily, dark dilemmas tempt if not taunt Christians with requests for recipes. Christians do not have any recipes. Answers! Where did the idea ever come from that Christians are supposed to have answers? Faith does not offer many answers. Answers are often the affair of the failure of faith. At best, faith yields the nerve to ask the questions. Christ means freedom. Freedom to live. Freedom to die. Malcolm Muggeridge, asked about his attitude toward his own death, replied that he would wish to be put in the hands of a "Christian doctor," trusting his decisions.¹⁸ That answer will not satisfy some, but it implies a kind of freedom. Christians are in the business of trusting persons, not recipes. Finally, that trust is in God. Christian faith is nothing if not the freedom to take risks, the freedom to be wrong, the freedom to fail. One's relationship to God depends not upon what one does or even believes but upon who God is. The Christian is called upon to say no more, to know neither more nor less, than Jesus when, in the experience of human and divine abandonment, he cries, "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit" (Luke 23:46, JB).

Luther comments in the Table Talk, "God says, 'Do and believe what I tell you, and leave the rest to me."¹⁹ Some persons live with dying, allowing curiosity and concern to foster investment in evidences, psychic experiences or whatever, of life after death.²⁰ It is almost as if God's promises are not quite good enough. Give us a good old immortal soul any day to sonic supposed resurrection of the body-the whole self, whatever that is. Societies, conferences, lectures are dedicated to "researching" life after death. Brilliant minds argue for and against all manner of life after death and clues thereto-ESP, parapsychology, near-death experiences, the brain, the mind, the self. Fascinating, yes; frustrating, too, and of interest to most mortals: but what sort of security would some consensus emerging here provide? How risky to have one's deepest hopes wedded to reason's deliberations and probabilities.

¹⁷ Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Living Reminder (New York: Seabury, 1977), p. 19.
¹⁸ During discussion, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, The 1979 National Friends and Alumni Conference, 12 May, Washington, D.C.
¹⁹ Martin Luther, Luther's Works, 54, Table Talk, ed. and trans. Theodore G. Tappert (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1967). p. 64, No. 403.
²⁰ See Williams, op. cit., p. 173.

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We might rather worry if agreement, either pro or con, began to emerge. No such danger appears imminent.

III

The above remarks reject neither reason nor our curiosity and lively desire to know, but Christian faith exposes the limits of both. Speculation is insatiable and is apt to devour us unless we are bound somewhere beyond its calculations, its reasonable mores and lesses. It is as if Jesus says to us, "Cut the curiosity. Transform the energy of your curiosity and speculation about the what, where, when, why, and how of death into the discipline of faith, into getting acquainted with the who, the Lord of death."

Persons planning to marry, do not know what the future holds. Nor do they know where, when, why, or how the future holds it. They know only with whom they have chosen to risk it. And they are often remarkable unafraid. They offer an analogy for Christian living with dying. Jesus upstages death. Maybe that is the point of the words attributed to Jesus in John's Gospel: "Truly, truly, I say to you, if anyone keeps my word, he will never see death" (John 8:51, RSV). Or as Paul writes, Jesus "… died for us so that we, awake or asleep, might live in company with him" (I Thess. 5:10, NEB). Faith in God's resurrection triumph in Jesus sets us free from the worship of death to worship the Lord of life and death. Christian faith both takes death seriously as a threat to God and therefore to us and as a threat subdued, as a way through mortality to sharing in God's design on us.

Luther refuses to caress death after the manner of many contemporary authors on the subject. For Luther, death is the Devil's I doing and "such a great evil."²¹ At the same time, he declares that

… Jesus Christ, God's Son, has by his most holy touch consecrated and hallowed all sufferings, even death itself, has blessed the curse, and has glorified shame and enriched poverty so that death is now a door to life.²²

Death is taken with great but not ultimate seriousness. In dying, Jesus has undone death. Death is changed. In dying, we no longer eye death but eye Jesus. We die his death, that means death is dethroned, an irrelevant enemy. C. S. Lewis offers a faint analogy when he writes of the effect of the death of his friend Charles Williams upon him: "To put it in a nutshell: what the idea of death has done to him is nothing to what he has done to the idea of death."²³

One more analogy. Perhaps we have all had the experience of loving someone so much that suffering on his or her behalf was an honor-not a masochistic perversion but an opportunity to join with the other for

²¹ Martin Luther, Luther's Works, 42, Devotional Writings I. ed. Martin O. Dietrich, trans. Martin H. Bertram (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1969). p. 129, "Fourteen Consolations." See Luther, Table Talk, op. cit., p. 65. No. 408 and pp. 145-146, No. 1379.
²² Luther, Devotional Writings, I, op. cit.. p. 141.
²³ C. S. Lewis. Letters of C. S. Lewis. ed. W. H. Lewis (London: Geoffrey Bles, Ltd., 1966), p. 206.

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the other's sake and in that tribulation as an act of love. This is what the God who is able to die does with us-and graciously grants us the freedom to do in return. Had the beloved forbade us that expenditure and suffering, we would have been loved less well. If the other is struggling, our love demands we join the fray. In that combat we are strong, not of our own strength or courage but out of the power of love. "in love there can be no fear, but fear is driven out by perfect love" (I John 4:l8, JB). God does not forbid us the expenditure and suffering called death. Not that God needs it. Oddly, it is we who need it. In faith and grace, our deaths can be, not grim and inexorable necessities, but opportunities, creative occasions, to join our sufferings to the sufferings of a suffering God that our love might be, in the words of the Song of Songs "...strong as death" (8:6, RSV). And maybe even stronger.²⁴ As the ability to die belongs to the Christian concept of God, so death, transformed by God's participation in it, can become an ability for the Christian, a virtue made of necessity, a wink at the real. The dialectic goes something like this: God shares in our suffering and death, opening the possibility that our suffering and death can be appropriated as sharing in God's suffering and death. Death can become an act of love.

So rigorous is the challenge of faith in the face of death. As usual, God seems guilty of overestimating us. But we can face death with confidence neither in our courage nor in our penetration of the mystery but in the victory of the God who reverses the words quoted earlier, "In the midst of life, we are surrounded by death," enabling us to say with Luther "… in the midst of death we are surrounded by life."²⁵ To wrestle the world's absences would be to lose, "Were not the right Man on our side…."²⁶ In the strange somersault of faith, absence is the way to presence.

²⁴ See Kreeft, op. cit., esp. pp. 106-108.
²⁵ Quoted in Jüngel. Death: the Riddle and the Mystery, op. cit., p. 116.
²⁶ From Luther's hymn. "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God."