Pascal wrote, “This present life is momentary, but the state
of death is eternal. How terribly important it is, then, to live in the light
of the eternal…Since nothing is more obvious than this observation, how absurd
it is to behave differently.
“Seen from this angle, how absurd it is for people to go
through life without regard to their final destiny. Instead, they are led as
they feel inclined and as they indulge themselves, unreflective and careless,
as though they could wipe out eternity and enjoy some passing happiness merely
by repressing their thoughts.” [Excerpts taken from Mind on Fire – A Faith for the Skeptical and Indifferent, Edited by
Dr. James M. Houston, Bethany House, 1989, 1997 – this quote from page 45].
When the amusement park ride begins I know it will end, I
may not know how long the ride will be but I know it will end. When the plane
lifts off from the tarmac I know its destination, I know the flight will end, I
know I will disembark. When I awake in the morning I know that the probability
is that I will be alive when night comes; I also know that I will awake one
morning and not live until the next morning. We plan for the ride to end, we
plan for the flight to land, but we do not plan to die. We have a general idea
of what we will do when the ride ends, we know what we will do when we
disembark from the plane, but we do not (as humanity) consider what we will do
when we die – we think we can control this life and we think we can control the
next.
We
criticize those around us with behaving like an ostrich if they fail to
recognize the realities of life, and yet we tend to ignore and suppress the
reality of death and so play the ostrich ourselves. A builder would not build a
house without blueprints, a corporate executive would not begin the new year
without a plan for the coming months, a family would not begin a vacation drive
without gasoline in the tank and monetary provision for the week, we would not
invite guests for Thanksgiving without a turkey and pumpkin pie, a surgeon
would not operate without knowing what organ requires attention – while some of
us may exercise more forethought than others, we all plan to one degree or
another, we all think ahead, we are all aware of the passing of time and the
diminishing of resources – the gas tank needs to be refilled at some point.
Yet we
suppress and ignore by denial and diversion the reality of death. For people
who are otherwise intelligent and thoughtful this is amazing and illogical.
People in business who are constantly focused on the financial bottom line
ignore the bottom line of life, they ignore death. Why? How can this be?
Would we
begin a trek across the Sahara without first
ensuring that we had water and provision for the journey? Would we say, “The
pint of water I carry is enough for now, I’ll worry about more water when I run
out.” Yet we say that we need not think about death today, we’ll deal with it
when it happens. We will have no more control over death when it comes than we
will have over the absence of water in the Sahara once our little pint of water
is exhausted – just because we say we’ll deal with the lack of water when it
happens means nothing – other than that we are denying reality – there will be
no supernatural appearance of water in the desert.
No
reputable builder would build a house without a foundation – yet we build our
lives without foundations, we build houses without bearing walls, and we see no
contradiction in our actions and thinking, we see no hint of being illogical –
in fact we applaud ourselves and each other. It is as if the Emperor has
convinced everyone else to wear his new clothes…is there no little boy to tell
us that we are naked?
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