Life - the Long and the Short of it
By Seán Mullan
(From the July - September 2021 issue of VOX)
Mortality. It will be the death of me.
In the last few months, three contemporaries from my school days have died. It was a small school with only about 50 in each year so even in our early 60s three in a few short months seems a bit much!
There have been moments recently when I glimpsed a reflection of an old guy in a window and realised I was the only one around. That, along with Covid, has reminded me that whatever blips there might be in the slope of the graph, the number of survivors of my school days is heading towards zero. The only unknown is how long it will take.
Mortality will be the death of all of us. It is life’s only certainty. Benjamin Franklin said taxes were the other certainty in life. But avoiding taxes has developed into a significant career for some. On the other hand, no one has ever made a successful career out of death avoidance.
People who live under the leadership of Jesus of Nazareth share an understanding that, though death is certain, it is not a terminus but a transition to a continuing life. This understanding is based on Jesus’ teaching which contains many such assurances. When death is imminent this provides a way of travelling that path with calm, comfort and hope. And for those facing the loss of a loved one, this understanding is a rock to stand on in a sea of turbulence.
There is, however, a significant difference in emphasis between what Jesus taught about eternal life and what many people believe. That need for comfort about mortality has led to a focus that Jesus never espoused - the idea that eternal life begins when you die.
In the four gospels, there’s only one recorded conversation Jesus had of the “where will you go when you die” variety. And that was when both Jesus and the man in question were hours from death. This man was in need of reassurance and he got it.
“The teaching of Jesus is not that we transition from ordinary life to eternal life at death but that eternal life is present and accessible in the lives we’re now living.”
Yet there are lots of other conversations about eternal life where Jesus shifts the focus from then to now. The normal and consistent focus is on how eternal life impacts the life we’re living. Eugene Peterson’s beautiful phrase, “to live eternal life in ordinary time” captures it well. The teaching of Jesus is not that we transition from ordinary life to eternal life at death but that eternal life is present and accessible in the lives we’re now living.
The distinction matters. If the life I am living now is of unending significance, I will treat it differently than if I believe it all ends when I breathe my last or if I believe that this life is just a waiting room for ‘real’ life after death. A ‘death-ends-everything’ view relegates all life to the ultimately ‘doesn’t matter’ category. ‘Waiting room’ thinking demotes this life to a second class experience, a shrunken and diminished version of the real thing, which is somewhere in the ‘sweet by and by.’
Pretty soon some of us will experience a sense of relief as we head off on holiday for the first time in a year or two. We will find ourselves lying on a sunny beach, summitting a majestic mountain or savouring a fine meal in a restaurant and we will think, “Ah this is the life!”
Indeed, it is the life. But that January lockdown when our cities were ghostly towns, that was life too. And March last year when we first began worrying about the strange virus, that too was life. And those moments in between when we worried about loved ones or mourned those who died, that too was life, though we may not have known it.
What if eternal life is the life we’re living right now and we don’t know it? What if we are missing out because we don’t pay attention or allow our imaginations to roam beyond what we can see and hear, measure and control?
The best of our poets, prophets and preachers call us to an awakening that enables us to see the reality of eternal life in ordinary time and ordinary place. Patrick Kavanagh’s childhood garden where...
“In the sow’s rooting
where the hen scratches
We dipped our fingers
in the pockets of God.”
By expelling eternal life from our everyday experience, we impoverish ourselves and those who share them with us. Eternal life is in the next conversation I have, whoever it’s with. I will be speaking to and listening to someone who is, as Dallas Willard said, “an unceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe.” Perhaps the conversation can reflect that.
Eternal life is not quantity; it’s quality. It’s not when; it’s now. It’s not where; it’s here. Eternal life is the opposite of restricted, diminished, shrunken life. It is unbounded, flourishing and full, even when it involves weakness, poverty and pain.
Eternal life is not just a promise for the future; it’s also a promise for the present.
Seán Mullan has been working in church leadership for many years. He has developed a project in Dublin City Centre called “Third Space”.
