Resurrection with No After-Life?

Today I finished reading Let’s Take The Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell. I heard about the book when it first came out, but wasn’t very interested until I heard an interview with the author on The Diane Rehm Show. I bought it when Sally was in her last days, thinking that the bittersweet melancholy of its topic would soothe me in the days ahead. Not because I was equating Sally’s approaching death with the loss of a friend, but because I knew the friendship at the center of the book involved a shared love of dogs.

I enjoyed the book, although I feel like I am missing something. Maybe because it is at its heart a very personal story, and I am an outsider. Or maybe because I don’t have a friendship as strong as Gail and Caroline’s (seriously, who does?). Or maybe because I read too quickly or when I was too tired some evenings. Still, the book is very good, and probably worth re-reading for its wonderful observations on friendship, love, loss, and grief.

One thing that struck me today was the author’s discussion of her faith (or lack thereof) when she was struggling with Caroline’s impending death and how God did or did not fit in:

One especially bad night I remember staring at the light in the outside hallway and feeling the horrendous finality of this road–it seemed for that moment that the end was simply the end, like driving a car into a brick wall with nothing on the other side. . . . What I was witnessing was as ordinary as morning, and now it was Caroline’s time to fall, and I found the lack of light and meaning in that picture intolerable. No wonder we came up with the resurrection myth, I thought. It offered a crack in the blackness, the only way to tolerate this end.

This got me thinking about my own views about the after-life, because I’m not sure that my belief in The Resurrection would offer much consolation to someone facing the death of a loved one.

I believe in the Virgin Birth, Jesus’ Death on The Cross, and His Resurrection and Ascension. I just do. Like my priest preached one Easter, there are just some times when you need to check your intellect at the door, and I freely do so on these point of faith.

On the other hand, I’ve always been uncomfortable with the idea of an after-life, or at least with an after-life that resembles this life in any way. I believe that Jesus’ Resurrection shows God’s triumph over death–that death is not THE END, that this life is not ALL THERE IS. But I do believe that death is “the end of the world as we know it.” I have no vision of a heaven where families and friends are reunited and hold hands skipping across the clouds. I don’t know what “happens to us” when we die, and I am happy to live like Gail lived, “need[ing] not to know–need[ing] humble ignorance.”

I must write all this with the caveat that I have not been faced with the untimely death of a loved one. I have lost grandparents, but not friends. I have friends who have lost children, but mine are safe and healthy (knock-on-wood). My faith gives me comfort in these times. Not because I think we will be reunited in heaven someday, but because I believe that they are with God, and I know that God is with me, and so in some way we are still together now.

My views do not salve the open wounds of death and loss with a promise of being together again someday, but temper them with the knowledge that God is with us in our pain, and will wipe our tears away until we find joy in the morning–if not tomorrow morning, then some morning. Death sucks for those it leaves behind, but life will get better.