Death and the Christian Answer

The recognition that faces us as we think about our theme is the strange paradox of our conscious life that even though its inevitability is never disputed, and its meaning lies over and colors all our experience, we will not think about it. Psychologists tell us that it is the subject most determinedly avoided. This is not strange in our childhood when all life is ahead and the future knows no bounds. In the foreword to the "Ode on Intimations of Immortality," Wordsworth speaks for us all when he says, "Nothing was more difficult for me in childhood than to admit the notion of death as a state applicable to my own being." And not only for ourselves, but in childhood we cannot believe it will come to our own intimate circle. I remember clearly when I learned in childhood that the illness of one of my parents might result fatally, my inner response was: "It happens in other families. It can't happen in ours."

Not strange in children, we say, but things do not change when we grow older. Youth feels that he need not think of it now. This fact was demonstrated to me this autumn by a theological student who, in a conversation that had nothing to do with this theme, broke in saying "Do you know what? The professor in our theology class this morning said that any one of us might die tomorrow. This might be for any one of us the last day of life. I never thought of it before, but it might be--really might be."