Tag Archives: death

Religion

Inanities of mortality

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Photo credit: Fey Marin. Unsplash license.

Somebody said that we don’t know what we’re thinking until we write it down. Like most aphorisms, it’s probably only true in limited cases. But I want to think this thing through, and you’re my designated victims audience.

What I’ve had on my mind of late is death.

This is not, I hasten to add, my way of easing into grave news. There is no grave news. I’m doing okay, health-wise, for an old fat man, as my doctor told me a few weeks ago (I think those were his exact words).

But there’s been a lot of death in my life of late. I lost a friend in December, and another in January. Now one of the men in my Bible study group at church is in hospice; we went to see him Monday night. We’ll likely never see him again.

Also I lost an uncle last month. And another friend died earlier last year. (That one was complicated. We’d been very close at one time, but over the years he changed his opinions, and I felt he was using me more and more as an ideological punching bag. So I broke it off. Then word came that he was dying, and I agreed to one last phone call. It was civil, I left him with God’s blessing, and a couple days later he was gone. I’m sure I could have handled it better, but handling things badly is sort of my personal style.)

So it’s probably not surprising that I’ve had death on my mind. I’m disappointed to find that I’m not properly resigned yet to my mortality. I honestly thought I was. I assumed (perhaps judgmentally) that those intense people who live their lives with gusto were probably in denial. But I’ve always lived carefully. Measured out my life in coffee spoons. I have looked on the dark side. Gazed into the abyss. The Roman emperors, I seem to recall, had a slave who followed them about, muttering, “Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.” I fulfilled that function for myself. “Remember, it can always get worse, and probably will,” has been my slogan.

And yet I find myself resistant to assimilating the fact that I’m in my 70s, approaching the actuarial horizon for most of my family. I had a vague idea, I think, that I’d probably drop dead after I finished the Erling books, like Pres. Grant, who finished his autobiography (which paid off his debts) just days before dying of cancer. (It’s a good book, too. Very succinct and efficient in style. He wrote like he fought. You’d almost think it was written post-Hemingway.)

But here I am, my great project completed, trying to find a way forward with an even more ambitious (but hopefully shorter) work. I’m planning as if I’ll live forever. Caesar’s slave whispers to me, and I give him an elbow in the gut.

I am, in short, in denial. That offends my sense of myself.

On the one hand, the Bible tells us to number our days. On the other, we’re told to cast no thought on the morrow. Am I living my best life, looking on the bright side? Or am I deluding myself?

I have no internal instrument for judging this.

I suppose I could pray about it, but that sounds kind of extreme.

Religion

Of death, and of children

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Image credit: Royal Academy

Bad and good things today. The good came first, but I’ll discuss it last.

Today, in the course of carrying out a routine task, I learned that a friend of mine had died last month. He was a member of my Viking group – not one of the regulars, but he showed up from time to time, and the two of us generally talked. But it was only at our last event, Viking Fest Minnesota last fall, that we discovered we shared very similar religious and social views. It may seem strange to know a guy for years and never learn that, but we generally keep off such topics at our events. Try to avoid kicking up divisions in the group. But lo and behold, Paul turned out to be One of Us. So we had a good talk. I looked forward to having more such talks.

Now that won’t happen.

He was almost two decades younger than me.

Receive him into glory immortal, O Lord.

Now to the positive stuff.

If you scroll down this page a few inches, you’ll see my meditation from the other day on some verses from Luke 18. I was pondering the contrast between the parable of the Importunate Widow and the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector.

I saw the point of the first parable as encouraging chutzpah – ask boldly; don’t be shy.

And I saw the point of the second as calling for humility.

Which seemed contradictory to me. I don’t know how to reconcile the two things in my own life.

This morning (having been kept from my devotions yesterday) I came to the passage that follows. And once again, context matters. Jesus Himself answers the conundrum he posed. It goes on like this, Luke 18:15-17:

Let the Children Come to Me

15Now they were bringing even infants to him that he might touch them. And when the disciples saw it, they rebuked them. 16But Jesus called them to him, saying, “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. 17Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.”

And there, I think, is the answer, the truth that squares the circle. Who can be importunate like the Widow, and humble like the Tax Collector, all at the same time?

A child. Children ask without shame, and are humble by necessity. “Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.”

So all I need to do is become like a child.

The actual problem remains as difficult as it was before, but at least I can articulate it now.

Bookselling, Publishing

Paper Troll

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HOT TIP: Hurry out and buy paper manufacturing stocks now! Because my acclaimed novel, Troll Valley, was released today in paperback, and surely those presses will be running till their gears smoke, turning out copies for a hungry public.

[NOTE: This is the paperback version I’m talking about. The audiobook, about which I’ve written so much, is still in the pipeline. The instructions at Amazon ACX say the approval process may take as long as ten days – but a look around in online forums tells me six weeks isn’t uncommon, and it can take months. So your patience is appreciated.]

I’m planning to accompany the audiobook release, if I’m still alive when it happens, with a five-minute video short, to promote it. I’m intrigued by these short videos I see all over (on Facebook and YouTube; I do not visit Tiktok). Just as I taught myself book recording on Audible, I’m now teaching myself video editing. The result, when I have accomplished it, will be posted here.

In personal news, I got word of a recent death that made me thoughtful. It was that of a man who had been one of my schoolteachers. He never liked me, and at one point he singled me out for a humiliating punishment, in front of my classmates.

I forgave him, formally in my heart, years ago. As a matter of spiritual obligation. But I couldn’t help recalling one of C. S. Lewis’ letters (or it might have been a journal entry, but I think it was a letter, perhaps to his brother). He wrote it as a young man, recalling the sadistic, insane headmaster he had endured at one of the boarding schools he attended as a boy. But now he was a young man, and enjoying life and freedom, while his old tormenter was long dead “and in hell.” (This, I should mention, was before his conversion). I must admit that I had anticipated this teacher’s death with… what shall I call it? Interest. But he lived quite a long life. I may not outlast him by much.

Loni Anderson died too. She was a native of St. Paul, and a lot of people around here (not me, I must admit) remembered some local commercials she did here (as a brunette) before she upped stakes for Hollywood.

Like most people, I remember her best for the brilliant comedy series, “WKRP In Cincinnati.” I remember my astonishment as I found myself increasingly drawn to her as the series went on. I was always a firm Jan Smithers supporter – her character, Bailey Quarters, was the girl of my dreams – drop dead gorgeous, but so insecure I could imagine her going out with a dork like me. But Anderson’s brainy glamor grew on me, in spite of myself.

I’m already on record as being in favor of commercialized glamor. Loni Anderson carried it off well. R.I.P.

Authors, Religion

Meetings are too long, and life is too short

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Deathhbed of Hans Christian Anderson, artist unknown.

Today was Sverdrup Forum Day. Our annual Georg Sverdrup Society meeting for students of our seminary, and others interested, in which papers are read and discussion encouraged.

I usually read an extract from one of my translations of Sverdrup’s works, but this year somebody else did that duty, and I was asked to do opening devotions instead.

I’ve written before about my phobia concerning praying in public. But I wrote it all out ahead of time, and read it from my printed text. That was not a problem.

I ran short, time-wise, but not by accident. I knew, from experience, that these shebangs tend to run long. Nobody complained about my brevity, and the forum, as it happened, ended almost precisely on schedule.

[Insert here labored metaphor about the concept of brevity and its application to life.]

As I’ve told you, I just finished translating a literary biography.

A question occurred to me – “Is there such a thing as a genuinely good biography that isn’t sad?”

I once read (I think) a quotation by Oscar Wilde (can’t find it online, so maybe it’s one of those made-up things. Still good): “Tragedy is comedy plus time.”

In other words, you can make any comedy a tragedy by just leaving the curtain up. In the end, everybody dies, just like in Hamlet.

You’ve got two choices in a death. It can be too soon, or too late. There never seems to be a perfect time.

Most of us look forward to a long life. But that often means a slow decline as health problems increase, and friends die, and the world gradually turns alien and dangerous around us.

I just wrote a novel where two main characters die Viking deaths.

There’s something to be said for that.

Does this mean I’m ready to go now, while I’m still ambulatory and not wearing a diaper?

Are you kidding? No way.

Authors, Fiction, Reading

Reading report: ‘The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien’

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Theologically (if the term is not too grandiose) I imagine the picture to be less dissonant from what some (including myself) believe to be the truth. But since I have deliberately written a tale, which is built on or out of certain ‘religious’ ideas, but is not an allegory of them (or anything else), and does not mention them overtly, still less preach them, I will not now depart from that mode, and venture on theological disquisition for which I am not fitted. But I might say that if the tale is ‘about’ anything (other than itself), it is not as seems widely supposed about ‘power.’ Power-seeking is only the motive-power that sets events going, and is relatively unimportant, I think. It is mainly concerned with Death, and Immortality; and the ‘escapes’: serial longevity, and hoarding memory.

(Letter, Oct. 14, 1958, from J. R. R. Tolkien to Rhona Beare)

I’ll have to admit that I’ve always thought that The Lord of the Rings was about the temptations of Power, but Tolkien himself says, in more than one letter in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (which I continue to read), that the story is about death.

Sauron (if I remember correctly) is a Valar, an incarnate angelic being (fallen in his case). He is not the equivalent of Satan, but of a powerful lesser demon. A creature like he (again, if I understand it right) would ordinarily live till the end of the world. But Sauron, as a repeated rebel, has been “killed” and reborn more than once. He knows, or suspects, that if he’s killed again, he’s not coming back in Middle Earth – and he has no reason for hope where his spirit is going after that. He’s struggling to stay alive, even in the hellscape he’s made for himself in Mordor.

Smeagol has been enslaved by the One Ring, and was given (or suffered) extended life thereby – but the life the Ring imparts is not wholesome. Bilbo, who experiences the same thing, says he feels “stretched.” It’s an addiction too – as the pleasure decreases, the craving grows.

Aragorn, on the other hand, who was granted a very long life through his Numenorean blood, will voluntarily lay down his life before it runs out completely. This is regarded as a noble act (not, I’m confident, comparable in any way with assisted suicide).

The elves regard human death as a gift. It’s a mystery to them, but they envy it in a curious way.

These are matters worth pondering, for a man who, like me, is growing old. I can’t say that my whole Erling Saga is about death, but The Baldur Game certainly is. And I was aware of that before I read these letters.

Authors, Writing

Death, Tolkien, and sagas

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I’m feeling better today, thanks for asking, so let’s think about death, shall we?

The short Tolkien clip above resonated with me. I forget where I saw it first – probably on Facebook, where I waste too much time.

I’m not sure what I’d have thought about that statement, that great books are all about death, before I started working on The Baldur Game (not to say I’m claiming it’s a great book). If you’ve been following the Erling Saga, you know that this will be the last book in the series. And that can only mean one thing. We’re going to be saying goodbye to at least one important character.

A weird, semi-intentional chronological harmony has followed my Erling books. The first novel, The Year of the Warrior, came out in 2000. That’s precisely 1,000 years after the events described, which culminate in the Battle of Svold, usually dated to the millennium year. That’s what the title means – the Latin numeral for 1,000 is M. And (according to one of my characters) M also stands for Miles, which is Latin for soldier or warrior.

The books have loosely kept pace with the millennial anniversaries since then. If I were following the pattern strictly, I’d have left The Baldur Game’s release to 2030, because it ends in 1030. But the book begins in 1024, and I figure that’s close enough for my purposes. It would be hubristic to assume I’ll still be alive in 2030. I won’t give you my precise age, but I’ll be a little surprised if I live that long. (Though it’s looking more likely as it approaches, which astonishes me.)

And yes, the book is about death. I realized that as I was constructing it. There are recurring images of the sea, of chaos, which in the Old Testament evoked death.

And of course Norse sagas are always about death. There may be numerous other themes – honor, love, freedom, loyalty – but in the end they’re about how the characters faced their deaths.

Like all men, I’ve mostly tried to avoid thinking about my own death – though I’ve made an effort to prepare for it as a Christian. But old age tends to concentrate the mind, as Dr. Johnson said about the prospect of being hanged in a fortnight.

One of the values of literature, I think (and I think Tolkien would agree) is that it prepares us to face the things that must be faced.

Maybe we authors can help ourselves too.

(And before you ask – my health is fine, as far as I know. My chief malady, from my youth, has been melancholy.)

Music, Religion

Once upon a time in an epic

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Nothing to review tonight. I’ve had the misfortune to start reading two books in a row that I had to give up on due to lousy writing. Too painful to finish, even for the base pleasure of shredding them in reviews. And a third, which I just started, is looking a little dubious… (Fortunately, I got these books free or at very low cost through online deals, so my cost was minimal.)

I had a topic all teed up for blogging about, though. Entirely trivial and haphazard. And then I watched the video above, and it sparked some actual thoughts.

I do love Once Upon a Time in the West (except for the massacre at the beginning). It’s a case study in what you can achieve through blending visuals with music. The movie has been called operatic, and its effect has been lodged under my skin ever since I saw it in a theater back in 1969, when it was new. It’s even affected my novel writing – I try to mix poetry in with my big dramatic scenes, striving for the same kind of sublimity.

But it occurred to me to wonder about Charles Bronson’s character, known only as “Harmonica.” In the scene you see above, Jill (Claudia Cardinale) makes it about as obvious as she can (I think even I would have picked up on the hints) that she wants him to stay with her. But no, he’s gotta be on his way. Gotta ride off into the sunset, in the tradition of the Western hero (I think it has something to do with Manifest Destiny). Sergio Leone was explicitly doing homage to Western movie traditions here, and riding off alone, like Shane, is definitely part of that tradition.

But – in terms of this story – why? Why is Harmonica leaving? Up to now, his whole life has been devoted to a single goal – getting his revenge on the evil Frank (Henry Fonda). Now he’s finished that job. He’s got the whole rest of his life before him. Here’s an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of building a railroad town. Not a bad job. Not to mention THE MOST BEAUTIFUL GIRL IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE throwing herself at him. Why not stick around a day or two, just to see if it could work out?

I suppose Cheyenne (Jason Robards) explains it, when he tells Jill that men like Harmonica have got something inside them – “something about death.” Maybe Harmonica has killed too much. Maybe he’s got PTSD, and has lost his sense of belonging anywhere.

Then I pondered epics in general. In epic terms, I think we could say Harmonica is already dead. It’s the epic hero’s job to die at the end, like Beowulf. Like Hector. The very concept of the epic involves a battle with death – a battle no man can win. Epics teach us how to die.

And that’s a mythopoeic thing. The epic hero, in a dim and reflected way, foreshadows the great Hero of the Gospel. The epic hero may have no virtues at all except for courage – like Harmonica and Siegfried the Dragon Slayer – but his iron refusal to let Death break his spirit anticipates Christ passing through Death and finishing the job at which all the others have failed – killing the Great Enemy.

Uncategorized

Should a Christian be Cremated?

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“And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. Therefore encourage one another with these words” (1 Thess. 4:16-18 ESV).

Encourage one another with the truth that those who die in faith will rise in faith. They have not been lost because they died before Christ’s return. These believers (including Paul, I presume) did not imagine it would be at least a couple thousand years before that return. Christ had ascended in their lifetime; why wouldn’t he come back in just a few years? Not matter when it happens, Christ’s physical resurrection and ascension is the reason we believe the dead in Christ will physically rise again.

The question for some of us is what state the body should be in for the resurrection. I heard a pastor on the radio this weekend claim the faithful would be raised from their graves as is. Of course, he said, God can reassemble any body from any state of decay, but why force him to do more than he needs to do. Why usher along the decay by cremating a family member? He asked, do you know Christ will not return a few days after your death? What if he does and there you are, a pile of ashes?

I can understand personal arguments for burial over cremation. Christian tradition leans that way. I’ve read that Christianized countries tend to bury the dead, and countries will little Christian influence tend to cremate. That’s not what we have here. The Bible does not imply we will be raised like zombies in whatever nasty state our bodies are in. Most of us (99.999% of us) will have no bodies in our graves, if we still have graves. Within a month of our interment, the best of us will not be presentable.

The Bible does tell us to respect our bodies. Our funeral services should be exercises in hope that honor the one who departed and those left behind. And since the Bible does not command Christians to bury the dead, some of us are asking whether the economic choice of cremation would show the proper respect.

That’s what it comes down to for me. In the past, burial would have been the cheapest, most natural option. Years ago when we talked to someone about buying grave plots, it was several thousands of dollars to be buried but only a few thousand, maybe only several hundred, to be cremated. I can understand how funeral and burial costs add up. When I buried my parents, I helped reduce those costs by buying caskets online. The cemetery part was already covered.

Covering a couple burials myself worries me a bit. It’s the kind of thing you can’t look up online because they won’t tell you the costs up front. You have to talk to a salesman. Hiding the price before you talk to a salesman is how they tell you it costs more than you want. They want a chance at talking you into it.

To the guy who thinks the Lord will raise the dead like zombies, come on. Even Lazarus came out of the tomb in better shape than his body had been that morning.

What do you think about burial and cremation for low-income believers?

Uncategorized

November on my mind

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Photo credit: Beliaikin @ belart84

November is a juvenile delinquent, hanging out on a street corner, looking tough. Not one of those innocent, baby-faced delinquents who’ve only made a few mistakes and can still be salvaged, but a tough, street-smart young thug on his way to incarceration and/or an early death. Soon he’ll grow into December, and then he’ll be a made man.

November is, in poetic perspective, a season of death. The midlife crisis of fall is declining into a slow old age. I went to a sort of a wake tonight. There were three deaths in my life last month, and this was the only one involving a gathering I was able to attend. It wasn’t a drunken wake in the classic tradition, nor a religious wake in the Christian tradition. Just some people gathering to support a family which had lost its central heart.

Yesterday was cold and rainy. Today, bright and cool. It kind of works out the same either way, though, because the night falls early now and makes itself at home.

The only good thing I have to say about November is that it’s not quite winter yet.

Uncategorized

Harvest time

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Photo by Jamie Street @jamie452

[Sorry I didn’t post last night. I did a lecture, and when I came home I found this site unresponsive. Short report: I spoke to a Cub Scout pack, and they were a good audience.]

I am wondering how much my perceptions of the world are influenced by the aphorisms I’ve learned, more than actual experience.

This is what I mean: Some time ago, one of my brothers said, referring to a couple deaths in the autumn, “Well, Dad always used to say, ‘It’s fall – harvest time.’”

I actually have no memory of Dad ever saying this (not that I doubt my brother’s word – lots of things go over my head). But ever since then, when someone dies in the fall, I think about it, and respond (on some barely conscious level), “There it is. Fall, harvest time.”

Except I know it isn’t true. People die all year round. Dying in fall is just thematically harmonious.

That said, there’s been a lot of harvesting this fall, in my world.

The first death was particularly sad. A lovely Christian couple I know, who live in another state, had a little son who suffered severe disability from birth. For the years of his short life they’ve done everything possible to care for him and cherish him. Love being true riches, that boy was richer than a king. But his small body finally wore out not long ago. I mourned with them in spirit.

Some weeks ago, I’ve just learned, my uncle died. We weren’t informed for a while because his widow (a lovely woman) has been too overwhelmed to handle the notifications. I don’t begrudge it. We all have to deal with these things the best we can.

He was the last survivor of my dad’s siblings, and one of my favorite relatives. He was the brother who made good – went to work for IBM and rose to an upper management position on the Saturn Project at Cape Canaveral.

And a friend’s mother died the other day. He’s not a close friend, except in proximity. But his family has had a sad time watching their parent fail for some time now. Ironically, this is the only memorial service of the three I’ll be able to attend.

Of course, fall isn’t over yet.