Facing death: a reflection for Lent
When my deconstruction process entered beast mode, either a few years ago or several centuries ago (the pandemic has distorted all sense of time), I heard a sound bite that made so many things click for me. It was a remark made by Rachel Held Evans when she appeared as the guest on episode 3 of The Bible for Normal People. When she mentioned the role of fear in evangelical life, a host asked her what people are so afraid of. She answered:
Dying, and that’s it. At the end of the day, I think we’re all just afraid of dying. We’re really afraid that the story of Jesus isn’t true, that the resurrection isn’t true. We’re afraid that if we start to ask one question about the Bible, then none of it can be believed, including the story of the resurrection. And if the resurrection can’t be believed, then we die, and that’s that. It really scares people. It scares me, honestly.
This immediately struck me as true, both as an observation about conservative evangelicalism as a whole and as an explanation for what drew me to the tradition in the first place. Though at the time of my evangelical zeal I would brush aside any claim that my religion was simply a “get out of jail free card,” (where jail = hell,) deep down in the hidden core of my being was an unarticulated fear of dying.
But I didn’t need to acknowledge that fear at all—precisely because of the assurances of my newfound faith. I would go to heaven when I died; shoot, it would be even better than my life here on earth. So no need to worry about death (at least not mine and my fellow Christians’).
A long history of fearing death
Of course, RHE was not the first person to observe that the fear of dying can play a hidden role in all the different areas of life. My wife, a proud psych major, usually responds to this soapbox of mine by describing Ernest Becker’s terror management theory (“TMT”), an idea developed last century. This theory holds that most human activity turns out to just be attempts to avoid dying and to lower our death-related anxiety.
But Becker may owe something to Blaise Pascal, a really fascinating Catholic mathematician-philosopher in 17th-century France, who wrote this little gem in his unfinished tome Pensées:
Royalty is the finest position in the world. Yet when we imagine a king attended with every pleasure he can feel, if he is without diversion, and is left to consider and reflect on what he is, this feeble happiness will not sustain him; he will necessarily fall into forebodings of dangers, of revolutions which may happen, and, finally, of death…
Those who philosophize on the matter, and who think people unreasonable for spending a whole day hunting a rabbit they would not have bought, scarce know our nature. The rabbit itself would not screen us from the sight of death and calamities; but the chase which turns away our attention from these, does screen us.
I love Pascal’s insights on this: we (or kings!) will spend an entire day hunting a rabbit that we wouldn’t even spend a dollar for in the market. Why? Because buying and eating a rabbit takes about 30 minutes, then we’re back to sitting there thinking about our own mortality. But hunting one all day distracts us for a whole entire day.
Christianity’s role: blessing or curse?
Enter evangelicalism’s certainty about eternal life in heaven. It may not provide abundant distraction like a good old-fashioned rabbit hunt, but it does one better: it takes away the need to fear our own death at all! You won’t have to ever, ever, ever think about it again, in fact.
The problem, of course, is that this sort of certainty about something as inscrutable as “what happens to us after we die” is a sham. I don’t mean to say that notions of an afterlife are a sham—I still hope for a restored creation in a new heavens and new earth—but any sense of certainty about this is at best an illusion.
If we deconstruct our “eternal security,” where does that leave us? Destined to sit like a miserable royal on a throne of existential crisis, trapped in despair about our mortality while jesters bounce around in a futile effort to distract us from the inevitable?
This is where I think Lent offers us a gift. A difficult gift, but a gift. The 40-day season of Lent is calibrated, strangely, around two different events in the Bible: the span of fasting (and showdown with the devil) Jesus had in the wilderness before his public ministry, and the events three years later leading up to his crucifixion. These two chapters in Jesus’ life swirl together to infuse Lent with notes of self-denial, somber reflection, confession, and… death.
The first day of Lent is Ash Wednesday: a day set aside to remember the fact that we will die. A day that stands in defiance of both the escapist denial of evangelicals and the frenzied distraction of Pascal’s monarch. A day to face our own mortality.
But how can we possibly withstand such a day (or the entire penitent season it ushers in)? If Ernest Becker and Rachel Held Evans and Blaise Pascal are right—if the fear of death is ever pulling at our puppet strings—how can we sit and contemplate it? Lent may hold the answers to these questions.
I don’t mean the easy answers, as comforting as they may be, like “Resurrection. Mic Drop.” But it matters that Jesus died. It matters that he said, “I go and prepare a place for you.” I don’t think we know, with any certainty, what he meant—but he said it. So whether my hoped-for new heavens and new earth are real, or our souls go to some dreamy heaven, or we reincarnate, or we just blink out, or our energy repurposes itself in the universe… no matter what awaits us in the unknown, Jesus went there first. So did our ancestors.
When we take that terrifying step into the beyond, it is a step Jesus has already taken.
