Rumors of Another World, Part 2

Finding God in Unexpected Places
by Philip Yancey

(Page 2 of 2)

In our strange society, it seems the questions most worth asking are the questions most ignored. The French mathematician Blaise Pascal lived during the seventeenth-century Enlightenment era, when Western thinkers first began scorning belief in a soul and the afterlife, matters of doctrine that seemed to them primitive and unsophisticated. Pascal said of such people, "Do they profess to have delighted us by telling us that they hold our soul to be only a little wind and smoke, especially by telling us this in a haughty and self-satisfied tone of voice? Is this a thing to say gaily? Is it not, on the contrary, a thing to say sadly, as the saddest thing in the world?"

I still belong to Amnesty International and contribute money to it. I believe in their cause, but I believe in it for different reasons. Why do strangers such as Ahmad and Joseph and Jorge deserve my time and energy? I can think of only one reason: that they bear the sign of ultimate worth, the image of God.

Amnesty International teaches a more advanced theology than the Chicago Health Club, to be sure. It points past the surface of skin and shape to the inner person. But the organization stops short - for what makes the inner person worth preserving, unless it be a soul? And for that very reason, shouldn't Christians lead the way in such issues as human rights? According to the Bible, all humans, including Jorge and Ahmad and Joseph, are immortal beings who still bear some mark of the Creator.

Members of the Chicago Health Club do their best to defy or at least forestall death. Amnesty International works diligently to prevent it. But another group I attended faces death head-on, once a month.

I was first invited to Make Today Count, a support group for people with life-threatening illnesses, by my neighbor Jim, who had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. There we met other people, mostly in their thirties, who were battling such diseases as multiple sclerosis, hepatitis, muscular dystrophy, and cancer. For each member of the group, all of life had boiled down to two issues: surviving and, failing that, preparing for death.

We sat in a hospital waiting area on molded plastic chairs of a garish orange hue (doubtless chosen to make the institution appear more cheerful). We tried to ignore the loudspeaker periodically crackling out an announcement or paging a doctor. The meeting began with each member "checking in." Jim whispered to me this was the most depressing part of the meeting, because very often someone had died in the month since the last meeting. The social worker provided details of the missing member's last days and the funeral.

The members of Make Today Count confronted death because they had no choice. I had expected a mood of great somberness, but found just the opposite. Tears flowed freely, of course, but these people spoke easily and comfortably about disease and death. Clearly, the group was the one place they could talk openly about such issues.

Nancy showed off a new wig, purchased to cover the baldness caused by chemotherapy treatments. She joked that she had always wanted straight hair, and now her brain tumor had finally given her an excuse. Steve, a young man with Hodgkin's disease, admitted he was terrified of what lay ahead. His fiancée refused to discuss the future with him at all. How could he break through to her?

Martha talked about death. The disease ALS ("Lou Gehrig's disease") had already rendered her legs and arms useless. Now she breathed with great difficulty, and whenever she fell asleep at night there was a danger of death from oxygen deprivation. Martha was twenty-five years old. "What is it you fear about death?" someone asked. Martha thought a minute and then said this, "I regret all that I'm going to miss - next year's big movies, for example, and the election results. And I fear that I will one day be forgotten. That I'll just disappear, and no one will even miss me."

More than any other people I have met, members of the Make Today Count group concentrated on ultimate issues. They, unlike the Chicago Health Clubbers, could not deny death; their bodies bore memento mori, reminders of inevitable, premature death. Every day they were, in Saint Augustine's phrase, "deafened by the clanking chains of mortality." I wanted to use them as examples for my hedonistic friends, to walk down the street and interrupt parties to announce, "We're all going to die. I have proof. Just around the corner is a place where you can see it for yourself. Have you thought about death?"

Yet would such awareness change anyone for more than a few minutes? As one of novelist Saul Bellow's characters put it, the living speed like birds over the surface of the water, and one will dive or plunge but not come up again and never be seen again. But life goes on. Five thousand people die in America each day.

One night Donna, a member of the Make Today Count group, told about watching a television program on the public service station. In the program, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross discussed a boy in Switzerland who was dying of an inoperable brain tumor. Kübler-Ross asked him to draw a picture of how he felt. He drew a large, ugly military tank, and behind the tank he drew a small house with trees, grass, sunshine, and an open window. In front of the tank, just at the end of the gun barrel, he drew a tiny figure with a red stop sign in his hand. Himself.

Donna said that picture captured her feelings precisely. Kübler-Ross had gone on to describe the five stages of grief, culminating in the stage of acceptance. And Donna knew she was supposed to work toward acceptance. But she could never get past the stage of fear. Like the little boy in front of the tank, she saw death as an enemy.

Someone brought up religious faith and belief in an afterlife, but the comment evoked the same response in Make Today Count as it had in Amnesty International: a long silence, a cleared throat, a few rolled eyes. The rest of the evening, the group focused on how Donna could overcome her fears and grow toward the acceptance stage of grief.

I left that meeting with a heavy heart. Our materialistic, undogmatic culture was asking its members to defy their deepest feelings. Donna and the small Swiss boy with the brain tumor had, by sheer primal instinct, struck upon a cornerstone of Christian theology. Death is an enemy, a grievous enemy, the last enemy to be destroyed. How could members of a group that each month saw families fall apart and bodies deteriorate before their eyes still wish for a spirit of bland acceptance? I could think of only one appropriate response to Donna's impending death: Curse you, death!

There was another aspect of Christian theology, too, the one, most sadly, that Make Today Count would not discuss. The Swiss boy had included his vision of Heaven in the background, represented by the grass and trees and the cottage with an open window. Any feeling like "acceptance" would be appropriate only if he was truly going somewhere, somewhere like home. That is why I consider the doctrine of Heaven one of the most neglected doctrines of our time.

"I think it is very hard for secular men to die," said Ernest Becker, as he turned to God in the last months of his life.

Copyright © 2005 by Philip Yancey

About the Author

Philip Yancey is a distinguished writer with 20 books to his credit and a total of more than seven million copies in print. His books, including The Jesus I Never Knew, What's So Amazing About Grace? and Where Is God When It Hurts? have won a total of twelve Gold Medallion Awards. He has been published in Reader's Digest, Christianity Today, and The Saturday Evening Post.