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A Message From Pastor
Maridel - May 2010
Thomas Lynch is a Funeral
Director and he is a poet. In his book, “Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade,”
he writes about
his father who is also a Funeral Director.
Lynch writes:
As a funeral
director,
he was accustomed to random and unreasonable damage.
He had learned to fear….He saw
peril in
everything, disaster was ever at hand.
Some mayhem with our name on it lurked
around the edges of our
neighborhood waiting for a lapse of parental oversight to spirit us
away. In the most innocent of enterprises,
he saw
danger. In every football game he saw
the ruptured spleen, the death by drowning in every backyard pool,
leukemia in
every bruise, broken necks on trampolines, the deadly pox or fever in
every rash
or bug bite…So whenever I or one of my siblings would ask to go
here or there
or do this or that, my father’s first response was almost always,
“No!” He had just buried
someone doing that very
thing.
Do you ever wonder what it
would be like if we could lose
our fear of death? What if we could
truly see death not as an ending, but as a new adventure?
Playwright, Eugene O’Neill hinted
at a
possible answer with his little known play: “Lazarus
Laughed.” The play was not a
commercial success—it
closed a week after it opened on Broadway years ago.
Nonetheless, it begins where the Bible
story
leaves off. Lazarus has been called back
from the dead by Jesus, his friend. He
had been buried four whole days when Jesus came to the village of
Bethany, the
stone was rolled back from the tomb, and the gift of life was given
back to
him.
As the curtain goes up,
Lazarus is seen stumbling out of the
dark, blinking into the sunlight. And
after the grave clothes are removed he begins to laugh a gentle, soft
laugh—an
embracing, astonishing, welcoming sound.
The very first thing he does is to
embrace Jesus with gratitude. Then he
begins to embrace his sisters and the
other people who were gathered there.
He has a very clear look
in his eye, nothing far away. It’s
as if he’s seeing the world about him
for the very first time. He reaches over
and pats the earth very affectionately.
He looks up at the sky, at the trees, at
the neighbors as if he had
never seen them before, as if he is overwhelmed by the incredible
rightness of
the way everything is. The very first
words he utters are the words, “Yes, yes,
yes,” as if to embrace reality as it is being discovered all
over again.
In the play he makes his
way back to his house and the whole
village of Bethany is awash with wonder.
Finally somebody gets the courage to ask
what everybody is thinking, “Lazarus, tell us what
it’s like to
die. What lies on the other side of this
boundary that none of us have crossed?”
At
that point, Lazarus begins to laugh even more
intensely and then he says, “There is no
death, really. There is only life. There is only God. There
is only incredible joy.” He
continues, “Death is not the way it appears from
this side. Death is not an abyss into
which we go into
chaos. It is, rather, a portal through
which we move into everlasting growth and everlasting life.” He then says, “The One that
meets us there is the same generosity that gave us our
lives in the beginning, the One who gave us our birth.
Not because we deserved it but because
that
generous One wanted us to be and therefore there is nothing to fear in
the next
realm. The grave is as empty as a
doorway is empty. It is a portal through
which we move into greater and finer life.
Therefore, there is nothing to
fear…There is only life. There is
no death.” And with that his
laughter began to fill
the whole house! |
