Fear of Death

Fear of Death
Peter Shikli
14 Aug 2006

Ever since I was a little kid, I've always been deathly afraid of death. Being of above average intelligence in my pre-teens, I cogitated on the problem until I came face to face with what Sartre called the absurdity of life. I would have been one depressed kid if it were not for the religion the nuns had pounded into me. Not the notion that heaven was better than earth so death was really a promotion. That was a simple and popular way out for my friends, but contradicted by some writing on the men's room wall, "If there is no god, we would have invented one."

I feared that I would end, and that fear has never left me. Fortunately, my twisted path to enlightenment ended up with me believing in God. So it is that my search for meaning, which I see as a possible way out, includes God and whatever light he can shed on the subject of death.

Not surprisingly, my search began with the death of Christ, a central theme of all Christianity. I was not overly concerned about the part where he died for my sins. I didn't ask him to do that. From the black and white movies about the crucifixion to the Mel Gibson blockbuster, I tried to feel sorry for the guy. All that torture, and he was a truly nice fellow.

But I never could get the right frame of mind. Christ had no sins, no mistakes, no stupidity. It was hard for me to find common ground. The problem was that this guy was God. He could have stopped the party with a snap of his fingers. It started to sound like a self inflicted injury.

The big disconnect was when I thought of what made death so terrifying for me. Not the pain, it was the uncertainty. The fear that I would end. And this one thing God could not share. Whatever pain could be generated by nerves connected to Christ's brain would be soothed by the knowledge that he could not die, that the pain would end, but he would not. The attempt to gain my sympathy seemed illogical, perhaps even smoke and mirrors from my religion.

The breakthrough came recently when I pondered whether Christ was God pretending to be a man, or a man who had been infused so much with God that he became God. Is chocolate milk chocolate to which I add milk, or milk to which I add chocolate? Makes no difference, or does it? With Christ I saw a difference. God coming to us as a man is pretense, like sci-fi where a human becomes a dog. A sham that makes God look like he's just joy riding.

But if Christ was first a man, just like me, and then he was somehow infused with God, so much so that he became more like God than man, now that would be interesting and plausible. Then Christ's death would be that of a man, with trust in God, but without certain knowledge of the hereafter. He would still leave this world with the terror of the unknown, diminished but not eliminated by faith.

The implications to my attempts to get a handle on death are significant. The fear of death can be reduced by faith, but not if the faith is based on nothing more than an attempt to reduce the fear of death. It has to be faith based on what is beyond death.

This infusion of God into man appears not to be some rare phenomenon, only the degree to which it happened in Christ. Everything about Christ says he didn't start out particularly gifted for this transformation. He wasn't rich and powerful, nor was he poor or a slave. He didn't impress anyone as intellectual, though he wasn't dumb either. He didn't start with the lineage of a prophet or priest, yet he did start with a commoner's exposure to solid religious beliefs. Everything about him seemed to start out around average. It also appears as though the transformation happened gradually over time, from a level that wasn't extraordinary in Christ as a kid up to the point as a grown adult where his human nature became little more than a vessel to hold the new being he turned into.

The point seems to be that God didn't select Christ the man because of external circumstances. Christ arranged the transformation internally, by inviting God in and becoming who he needed to be in order to be acceptable to God. The message seems to be that each of us with a heart and mind can do something like what Christ did, to take what little we each have of God to start out, and transform that into a large part of ourselves.

Once I understood the difference between God pretending to be man vs. man being so completely infused with God, the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist took on a different meaning. My focus had been on the eating part, which made it a quaint custom with overtones of cannibalism, and in my case, gluttony. My new understanding focused on the transformation part. The message was not to eat God, but to have him become part of us, as the bread and wine eventually become part of us.

We can start out following Christ, but we're expected to catch up and become him, or rather the God he became. We can start out doing good, but then we are to become good. Christ seems to be saying that acting well is worth doing, but it is just acting. The real deal is in transformation, whether the bread and wine are infused with God, or whether we are infused with God.

And if this transformation is deep enough, we end who we are. The "I" ends, curiously parallel to death, and we become this other being, a feeling curiously similar to what many call heaven, nirvana, or just part of however we define God. We cheat death by beating it to the punch. Instead of letting the world kill us, we become what we are supposed to become after death, united with God.

Here lies the antidote to the terror of death, to end the worldly life in degrees until we become one with the God who is the afterlife. Not that I know how to arrange all that, but I think that is what Christ arranged for himself, and then left us with some tips on how to pull it off ourselves.

More ramblings like this: www.shikli.com/blog

Peter Shikli is CEO of Bizware Online Applications. You can view his bio and contact him at pshikli@bizware.com.