Mortality

This past Sunday we began a two-week series entitled The Five Things You Cannot Change. After having spent recent weeks considering the pathway of change, and the possibility that real change is possible, we shifted towards those hard realities outside of ourselves, those aspects of life we realize are immovable.

How do we talk about things that cannot be changed, especially in a “can-do” culture like ours? Such a message would appear to be a non-starter, because so much of our cultural conversation is based on the idea that we can bring real solutions to the problems that face us. And we do solve many things, but not everything. In our more honest moments we have to admit that there are hard and unyielding limits to our human possibilities. The truth is that an unrealistic optimism can paradoxically rebound into the deepest kind of despair. But the Christian faith is able to point to hope while squarely facing the most unyielding of all impossibilities – even our own mortality.

Ernest Becker was a Canadian intellectual whose book The Denial of Death (1973) was published only two months after his death. It won a Pulitzer prize that year and is still considered a penetrating look at the psychology of our culture. The basic premise is that we tend to organize ourselves in ways that keep us from thinking too deeply about our mortality. We want to be part of something lasting, something that does not die. We search for a legacy that outlives us through our projects and causes. While Becker did not believe in God, he did not believe that science could solve our problem of meaning either. He only hoped that a more honest look at our limits would help us live more wisely.

As a Christian and believer in the God of all possibilities, there is something I can gain from the wisdom of Becker. While he did not point to hope beyond death, he was not so naive as to postulate a solution to our existence that was grounded merely in the span of our human years. I agree with Becker that the meaning of my existence somehow outlives the frame of my human years. But even more so, my Christian faith helps me to see that the biggest thing I cannot change – my mortality – is at the same time the opportunity for my biggest hope, the hope of resurrection. For in the light of the biggest thing that I cannot change, my largest hope rests.

This coming Sunday, we continue The Five Things You Cannot Change with a look at two inner qualities that remain constant for all of us. We hope that you can join us at 9:29 or 11:11 am.

Bob