Death

 HS #69 2021.4.8

 

Death

 

Due to COVID-19 we’ve been surrounded by it this year. Yet even in its midst, there is something horrific about an automobile collision taking the life of an exceptionally productive, engaged and giving 48-year-old woman of our community. 

 

Modern automobiles are constructed to collapse – to absorb the energy of impact in order to save the life of the occupant. Airbags provide additional protection. 

 

So to kill a lone driver on a bright Sunday afternoon at a well-known intersection in the middle of Holland requires a precise confluence of timing.  It requires someone passing through the red light at considerable speed – a rare event. But it also requires every single detail that day in the life of the victim to have worked together to put her in the intersection at that precise time. An impact a quarter of a second sooner or later would have missed the driver.  A half of a second difference would have missed the car completely – barely something to call home about. 

 

A half of a second. That’s a stumble on the driveway while walking to the car. It’s the time to brush hair out of one’s eyes because of a tousling puff of breeze. It’s pulling the door shut a second time because it didn’t quite latch the first time. 

 

Yes, keeping her from being in that intersection at that precise moment could have been done a million different ways. But arranging things so that she WAS there at that precise time would have required exquisite planning as if from an omniscient physicist. 

 

Or perhaps no planning at all. Rare events happen continually – many of them are deadly. Our world is entirely different from what it was 16 months ago because of a chance encounter between a wild animal and a human on the other side of the globe. 

 

Is it exquisite planning or no planning? Neither answer is satisfactory. Reality is awful. How do we make sense of it? 

 

One way is not to try. Accept the world as it appears – a mixture of intention and randomness much like the feather floating in the wind that begins and ends the movie “Forrest Gump.” Things happen - run with them. Nothing to question, just run with them. 

 

The other option is to overlay this haphazard world with a blanket of meaning. “What is your only comfort in life and in death? That I am not my own, but belong – body and soul, in life and in death – to my faithful Savior . . . “ Keeping such a blanket mended and in good repair takes constant attention – the attention of annual celebrations of victory over death and of life beyond death. The attention of Easter Sunday. 

 

Perhaps the inclination and ability to seek for meaning is unique to humans. In Robert Bolt’s play,  “A Man for All Seasons”  Thomas More declares, “God made angels to show Him splender, plants for simplicity, animals for innocence, but man to serve Him in the tangle of his mind.” Humans are blessed and cursed with the desire to seek out meaning. We wonder. We wrestle. We ask “why?”

Mathematicians often seek truth by looking at limiting cases – by taking things to the extreme. If there is an omniscient omnipotent creator God, what choices would God have? One extreme would be no involvement in the world at all -  a Deity who watches but with no control or influence.  The other extreme is a helicopter deity who hovers and removes the consequence of every misstep. This would reduce human existence to one of no responsibility and consequently no meaning. 

Between those two extremes there is only one logical alternative – to allow some consequences of human action. Perfection is precarious – a boulder on a precipice. It’s easy to do harm. But to contribute to a better world requires assiduous effort and intention such as that given by my former colleague. Thus we mourn our loss.  This is the world we live in. This is the rich existence we want. This is the world we have to accept even when the results are heart-breaking. 

Significantly, C.S. Lewis, who tackles many such questions demurs on this one.  In the preface to “The Problem of Pain” he writes, “Nor have I anything to offer my readers  except my conviction that when pain is to be borne, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all.” Indeed.