Nuggets from Seeking and Finding God—The Certainty and Challenge of Death

Of Juliet, Lady Capulet mourned, “Death lies on her like an untimely frost upon the sweetest flower of the field.” In Paradise Lost, Milton expressed the universal horror that anyone could become “Food for so foul a Monster” as death. Homer’s Iliad, written in the eighth century B.C., lamented, “Death in ten thousand shapes hangs ever over our heads, and no man can elude him.” That being the case, there is great urgency to know what lies before us when death releases us from these material bodies. There is no known recovery once one passes through death’s door into whatever lies beyond.

The view that death’s consequences ought to be a matter of grave concern is opposed by three alternative beliefs. Some insist that there is nothing beyond death either to prepare for or to fear. Their mantra, which they desperately want to believe in order to be relieved of any thought of possible judgment, goes like this: “When you’re dead, you’re dead; that’s it, period.”

Others, while believing in an afterlife, still manage to relieve themselves of any concern by subscribing to the theory that in the next life our spirits meet perfect acceptance no matter what we may have done in this life. We simply continue to learn further lessons as we progress ever upward.

Still others are convinced that our souls migrate into new bodies, providing the opportunity to come back to earth to live again and again, hopefully to progress in each succeeding life.