Remember You Are Going to Die

On befriending death and suffering

When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand on me, saying, “Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades.” - Revelation 1:17

The Resurrection - Philips Galle (Netherlandish, Haarlem 1537–1612 Antwerp)

Fear of Death

I can not pinpoint the moment that I began fearing death. It is a hard thing to do. To locate the precise moment we make a cognitive shift. When something familiar becomes unfamiliar. When exactly did my belief in heaven move from the realm of reality to that of a fairytale?

It felt like somebody had pulled the rug out from under me.

The only way I can describe it is that I no longer felt comfort in death. It felt like the garden of faith I had tended to my whole life had been overrun by weeds. Like the safe haven I had unknowingly lived under was split open, and suddenly I was in the wild, unprotected.

I spent the years following trying to get back to that place of knowing.

Even though I knew that I had grown in my knowledge of God and experiences of Him, I could not shake this uncertainty about death. I listened to podcasts. I prayed. I talked with my friends about faith. I attended Bible classes. I led Bible studies. I read Christian books. I did all the right stuff, I thought.

I thought I had reached the peak of my faith as a young adult. I thought I had done everything right. And now I was plummeting at 100 miles an hour toward the deep, murky depths of hell.

In this story, as in many others about deconstructing faith, before is a mythical land of certainty, where belief is easy and God is very, very real. It’s the kind of land you assume you’ll live in forever—until you don’t. - Jen Pollock Michel, Faith Torn Down to the Studs

I kept wondering why this anxiety around death continued to bloom, as each season passed by. Winter, Summer, Spring, and my fears remained…

Anxiety about death. That sounds wrong. In my experience, anxiety feels like a presence of fear. This was less of a presence of fear and more of an absence of confidence or sureness. It was as if my convictions about what happens after death had simply eroded away, and now I was left with nothingness.

I had accepted, after a while, that I would not feel the warm kindling of faith warming my hands again. It was strange that in this release of needing certainty, I rediscovered my faith.

Conclave, the film that took home Best Adapted Screenplay at the 2024 Oscars, is a film that explores the relationship between doubt and faith. The main character in the film, Cardinal Lawrence, is a Catholic priest who is struggling with doubt himself. book.

My brothers and sisters, in the course of a long life in the service of our Mother the Church, let me tell you that the one sin I have come to fear more than any other is certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end. 'Eli Eli, lama sabachtani?' He cried out in His agony at the ninth hour on the cross. 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith. — Cardinal Lawerence, Conclave

It is unsurprising that being devoted to a particular religion in the West is seen as strange when faith is not valued, but certainty is.

This certainly has bled into our churches as well. Hoping to give compelling apologetics, Christians who are peppered with complex theological questions from others, sometimes, rather than wrestling with them, give simple answers, inadvertently teaching themselves and others certainty over mystery and conviction over curiosity.

We all fear death. But through our conformity to Christ throughout our lives, we can move from a place of fear to one of acceptance. This is simple, but it is not easy.

Rather than trying to give easy answers, I hope my post today challenges you to ponder death and what it means to engage with our mortality.

If Jesus can face death, that means that we can too. He feared death as we did, and came out the other side resurrected. Just as we will pass through death into new life. But how did he do this?