“You live here ?” “For the moment, yes. Just passing through.” It was true when I lived in Australia and in the States, and it is true today in France where I have lived for over forty years. My twenty-seven years in Oz, my ten years in the States, all came to an end as will the decades I have spent here in France. Every thing does. Childhood and adolescence come to an end. Holidays are always too short. Marriages are sometimes too long. Governments are replaced, products are recycled; even plastics and nuclear wastes will, one far-distant day, decompose. Everything has an end. Even this Blog itself, and not just the post you are reading. But before they do, I’d like to point out – as I often do – the obvious : our world, our galaxy, our personal lives will end – give or take one or two million, five billion years (if we don’t do it in before that) for the first two, and a one-figure digit or fraction thereof for the decades you and I have left to live. Given the fact that everything else has an end, it seems normal enough to me that our lives should too.
But some people believe it ain’t necessarily so. Matter of fact they are damn sure it ain’t. You see, they admit that their body is mortal but claim their “soul” isn’t. Life after death, they say, will not just be a continuation of their mortal life; it will be infinitely better (or worse … ) – forever : naïve fantasy in a child, pitiful illusion in an adult. People who have grown out of and discarded the wishful thinking (or traumatic anxiety) about their purported personal post-mortem future, can serenely live without fear of death and get on with making the most of the only life they will ever have.
Christians say that Christ, through His Resurrection, conquered death. The veritable victory over death – more realistically – is to accept it as the definitive end of our existence. We literally have nothing to worry about, after we have “passed on”. But we have a lot left to discover and to enjoy, as we pass through the life we still have left to live. This afternoon I shall be on an operating table, under total anaesthetic. I’ll be back blogging in a couple of days. If not, it’s been a ball !
RIDENDA RELIGIO