THE CRISIS OF DEATH
In an earlier chapter I placed you in imagination in the darkened death
chamber, looking on the face of your dead and feeling the keen pressure
of the inevitable questions: What has happened to him? Where is he?
What is he seeing? What is he knowing in that mysterious world into
which he has gone?
That death chamber is the best place on earth for solemn thought about
the Hereafter. But when you are thinking only of your own dead and
your heart is all quivering in pain and longing you are not in the best
condition for cool, clear searching after truth. Imagination and
sentiment are apt to run away with reason. The tender tortured woman
is apt to believe too easily what the heart longs to believe. The
stricken man in his deep numb pain is in danger of yielding to hopeless
doubt about it all.
So I lifted you away into a clearer atmosphere and sent you searching
for definite revelations of God about other people's dead thousands of
years ago, where your heart and affections were not involved, and where
cool, clear reason had a chance to be heard. We tried to study
impartially what Scripture reveals about the World of the Departed and
how the primitive Church interpreted that revelation. This gives us a
solid basis to proceed on.
§ 1
With that preparation we come back into the darkened room again looking
into the face of our dead, trying in perplexity of heart to follow him
on the great journey. To avoid confusion we assume here that he died a
penitent man in Christ's faith and fear.
Let me try to enter into your thoughts. Let me begin at the
beginning--Death.
Naturally we all shrink from death--the seeming shock of sundering soul
and body--the launching out against our will into the regions of the
Unexplored--the "land of far distances" as Isaiah calls it. We are
afraid of that unknown death, for our dear ones--like children afraid
of a bogey on the dark stairs. We can't help being afraid of it. But
ought we to be so MUCH afraid of it? Has not our Lord taught us that
there is no bogey on that dark stairs, that he who has just now closed
his eyes in death is opening them already into a larger life?
"There is no death, what seems so is transition."
Now think of this "unknown death." Has not Christ revealed to you that
this terrible thing that you so fear for him who is gone really only
means that at the close of this poor limited kindergarten stage of his
history Death has come--God's beneficent angel to lead him into the
next stage of being. Why should you be afraid? Birth gave him much,
Death will give much more. FOR DEATH MEANS BIRTH INTO A FULLER LIFE.
What a fright he gives us, this good angel of God! We do not trust his
Master much.
Do you say that you do not know what is before your friend--that it is
a "leap off into the dark"? Have we not learned from Scripture already
that it is much less of "dark" than come of us thought? And may it not
be much less of a "leap off" than we think--only a closing of the eyes
here and an opening of them there? May not the birth into that life be
as simple as the birth into this? May not our fright be like that of
Don Quixote when blind-folded he hung by his wrist from the stable
window and they told him that a tremendous abyss yawned beneath him.
He is in terror of the awful fall. Maritornes cuts the thong with
gladsome laughter and the gallant gentleman falls--just four inches!
May we not believe that God reserves just as blithesome a surprise for
us when our time comes to discover the simplicity, the agreeableness,
the absence of any serious change in what we call dying. I am not
ignoring the pain and sickness of the usual death-bed. But these are
not dying? The act of dying comes after these. These are but the
birth pangs before the new life begins, the rough, hard bit of road
that leads to "the wicket gate out of the city."
Pliny, from much clinical observations, declares his opinion that death
itself is pleasure rather than pain. Dr. Solander was delighted at the
sensation of dying in the snow. The late Archbishop of Canterbury
remarked as he died: "It is really nothing much after all." Dying
itself may be pleasure rather than pain.
We have all noticed that expression of composed calm which comes on the
faces of the newly dead. Some say it is only due to muscular
relaxation. Perhaps so. But perhaps not. One likes to think that it
may be something more. Who knows that it may not be a last message of
content and acquiescence from those departing souls who at the moment
of departure know perhaps a little more than ourselves--a message of
good cheer and pleasant promise by no means to be disregarded.[1]
At any rate does not Scripture suggest to us in the story of
Lazarus--of Moses and Elias at the Transfiguration--of the dying
thief--of the spirits in the Unseen Life whom Christ visited at His
death--that Death comes not as an executioner to cut off our departed
one from life and love, but rather as God's good angel bringing him
more than life has ever brought, and leading him by a path as full of
miracles of soft arrangement as was his birth to heights of ever
advancing existence.
God reveals to us too that the closing of the eyes in the darkness of
Death is but the opening them to the light of a larger life, to the
vision of the new mysterious real world which the glare of this world
obscured. It is just what happens every day when the glare of the
sunlight, revealing to us every little flower and leaf and insect,
shuts out from us the great universe of God which stands forth in the
midnight sky. Do you know Blanco White's famous sonnet? He is
imagining what Adam must have felt as the first night fell on the
earth. All the beautiful world that he had known for but a day was
vanishing from him into darkness. Was the end of all things come
already? But lo, a stupendous unexpected miracle! Lo, as the darkness
deepened a new and more wonderful world was revealed in the sky, a
world which the sunlight had kept absolutely concealed:
Hesperus, with the host of heaven came
And lo! Creation widened on man's view
Who could have thought such marvels lay concealed
Behind thy beams, O Sun? Or who could find
Whilst flower and leaf and insect stood revealed
That to such countless orbs thou madest us blind?
Why do we then shun Death with anxious strife
If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life?
Yes, life shuts out greater things than light does. God teaches us
that Death is birth, that what the earth life conceals Death will
reveal; that as the babe's eyes opened from the darkness of the womb to
sunlight on this earth, so will the eyes that close in the darkness of
death open on "a light that never was on sea or land."
§ 2
And may not this act of dying be much less lonely than we think? God
sent each of us into this first stage of existence with mother and home
and loved friends about us. No one comes into this world to
loneliness. Should not that stir some hope at least that the Father
may take similar care for us in our entry on the second stage at death?
I hate sentimentalizing about it. But this is not sentimentalizing. I
have already called attention to our Lord's only account of a good
man's entrance into the Unseen. "He was carried by the angels," He
said, and I have shown you some reason to think that He meant literally
what He said--that the angels who are presented in Scripture as so
interested in our life here are equally interested in our transition to
a larger life--that loving watchers are around a soul as it passes into
the Unseen.
I sometimes wonder, too, how much significance should be attached to
the fairly frequent phenomenon of dying people seeming in some rapt
vision to see or feel as if meeting them the presence of loved ones
gone before. Sometimes these phenomena are very striking. I once
thought of asking a religious journal to open its columns to testimony
from thoughtful, cool-headed clergy and laity of such experiences at
death-beds. It might enable us to judge critically if it could be
explained away as mere sentimental fancy or if the evidence were strong
enough to suggest an underlying reality. It would need to be very
keenly criticized. All allowance should be made, especially in the
case of women, for the deceitfulness of pious fancies. But there are
some cases which, if their number were large enough, would point much
deeper, where there could be no case of sentimental fancies. For
instance a young student in one of our city hospitals told me a curious
experience lately. A little child under two years old had been rescued
out of a fire and was dying badly burned. "I took the little chap on a
pillow in my arms," he said, "to let him die more easily. Suddenly he
stiffened himself and reached out his little hands and his face beamed
with the sort of gladness that a child has in reaching to something
very pleasant and in a very short time he died." My informant was by
no manner of means a sentimental youth, and he was much struck with the
incident. I don't know if there is much evidence of this kind. If so
it would count for a good deal in forming our judgment. Our Lord
speaks of those whom we have made friends on earth receiving us when we
die into the everlasting habitations (Luke xvi. 9). Is it too good to
believe that He might have meant some pleasant welcoming on the other
side--that perhaps that little child in the hospital that night was
really reaching out his little hands to some one invisible to the young
student? Let us have no weak sentimentalizing, but on the other
hand--is anything too good to believe as to what God might do for poor
frightened souls at such a dread crisis of being?
[1] I have here freely adapted some thoughts and phrases from Edwin
Arnold's _Death and Afterwards_.