Friday's work

It's noisy here this afternoon. Loud, quite loud. A technician is here to install a new water heater, and the first part is to empty the old one, a very loud pumping process. 

Day before yesterday Linda spotted a small puddle in the utility closet, a leak from the water heater. I'm with water heaters as I am with car tires, car brakes, and car batteries: first sign of trouble, replace before I'm sorry. 

Original to Harbour Village construction, the water heater was some twenty years old, Time for trouble anyway. So a most efficient company came out promptly and is taking care, to prevent an issue.

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Graveside this morning at Greenwood Cemetery, son of a lifelong friend whom I always admired as an Eagle Scout and a leader in our Boy Scout and Explorer Troop back in the 1940s. His son, whom we buried today, was an Eagle Scout too; as was my friend's brother, who years ago was also a friend. I remember their mother, a single parent, head of this extraordinary family. Today at graveside, military presentation of the Flag, then for the son's burial service we used his 1928 Book of Common Prayer.

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Life goes on, which is the basic principle of living species in Creation. Seeds in their kind yielding fruit in its kind; animals and humans in our kind being fruitful and multiplying abundantly and replenishing the earth; that's what Life, Father Nature's circle of life, is about, origin and perpetuation of species.

And death: death is no mystery, death is a most natural part of life; yet, unlike plants and nonhumans, we grieve the death of loved ones and fear death for ourselves. Indeed, uncertainty, grief and fear have given rise to religion and holy stories since Time immemorial. What do we know? Only that with death, consciousness fades into nonresponsiveness and material being returns to dust. What do we hope? The Proper Preface for Eucharist at Burial of the Dead expresses the faith of the church:

Through Jesus Christ our Lord; who rose victorious from the dead, and doth comfort us with the blessed hope of everlasting life; for to thy faithful people, O Lord, life is changed, not ended; and when our mortal body doth lie in death, there is prepared for us a dwelling place eternal in the heavens.

We do not know, but we believe, eh? Here's another faith statement in a prayer:

Give courage and faith to those who are bereaved, that they may have strength to meet the days ahead in the comfort of a reasonable and holy hope, in the joyful expectation of eternal life with those they love. 

So its hope: a reasonable and holy hope. Abiding in hope, I still only have my own experience, which I've expressed here more than once: that deepest anesthesia brought me as near to death as it is possible for a living person to be, beyond all consciousness, feeling, awareness, responsiveness, and even dreams; not even darkness, which is a sense, an aware state of being; but total oblivion, kept alive artificially, myself no longer Being. I appreciate Marcus Aurelius' apprehension of death in his "Meditations" - - which you can search out and read for yourself. 

Not that belief or doubt makes anything a fact or a fiction, but these days I think most Christians seem to believe in immediate translation from this life to the next, the Spirit departing the body and entering the spiritual realm. The awareness of the Spirit, of relationships in life left behind on earth, is something to be contemplated. 

St Paul, quite conversely, speaks of sleep in Jesus until the general resurrection at the End of Days, of which Paul says Christ was the example, when the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised, and living and dead will meet Jesus in the air for judgment; with those judged saved entering into the new kingdom of God on earth, in which Christ will reign - - it is an earthly realm, not an otherworldly one. Of course, Paul believed the End of Days and Second Coming was imminent, to happen in his lifetime.  

An amateur astronomer most of my life, I am not sure, and I am certain of nothing I cannot see. My main concern may be trying to grow myself into the realization that, J B Phillips again, Your God Is Too Small - - God of two trillion galaxies in this Creation alone seeing me? Yet, English evangelist Canon Bryan Green used to preach that God loves you, even you, speck on a speck. Microscopic speck on an infinitesimal speck? Can it be? 

And can it be, that I should gain

an interest in the Saviour's blood?

Died he for me, who caused his pain?

Who him to death pursued? 

Amazing.  

Christianity and our Bible are stories, stories of our relationship with the God of Creation. We ourselves come from family stories, and in Time we shall be stories ourselves, for those who remember and love us.

RSF&PTL

T