Intimations of Mortality from Recollections of Late Adulthood
“For he knows our frame, he remembers that we are dust.” - Psalm 103:14
We are fearfully and wonderfully made, woven together by God’s hand in our mothers' wombs. He knows of what and for what we are made. We are “a little lower than the angels,” but God knows we are ‘of the earth, earthly.’ God knows we are dust. Do we?
It is undoubtedly true that one of the biggest lies we tell ourselves is that death will not come for us. Despite the painful daily reminders that such an assertion is utterly preposterous, we perpetuate this myth. A young singer dies alone; a middle-aged television star exits prematurely; a friend perishes in an accident; a child dies of incurable cancer. “But it won’t happen to us,” we say to ourselves.
T.S. Eliot had a more realistic perspective, one deeply rooted in Scripture. In Choruses from the Rock, he wrote,
“Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger.
Be prepared for him, who knows how to ask questions.
There is one who remembers the way to your door:
Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.
You shall not deny the Stranger.”
We need such reminders. We need to have underscored that we are both glory and dirt, heaven and earth, which is why we need Ash Wednesday. Ultimately Death is swallowed up in Christ’s victory, eaten by God as he feeds us the Feast of Life on the Mountain of the Lord (see Isaiah 25 and 1 Corinthians 15). Until that day dawns, however, we face the fact that the sting of death remains painful and the taste of death like… well, ashes. I am not home yet.
Even if one does not observe Ash Wednesday or Lent, we must be reminded that we “are dust, and to dust, we return.” My self-deceptions on indestructibility have been dealt some hard blows by serious illness over the past few years, but the old lie persists, and only the truth can set me free. Even if I am not merely mortal (to quote C.S. Lewis), I am most assuredly truly mortal - my outer man is decaying even as my inner man is being renewed. I must be reminded that I will face my Judge and give account, that I am bought with a price and belong body and soul, in life and death, to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.
In J. R. R. Tolkien’s magnificent Return of the King, Sam, one of the Hobbit heroes, encounters Gandalf after he has been raised from the dead, and exclaims, “Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world?” Christian hope's answer to Sam’s question is a resounding: “Yes, the sad is coming untrue” and “Behold, I saw a new heavens and a new earth . . .” Because that day will surely dawn but has not yet come to pass, we journey through Lent with the hope of the Gospel.