Life through death

 For a few weeks now I have been living in the book of Ecclesiastes. With its message of foggy vapour, it tries to teach us that life is but a breath. It is short and elusive. We cannot control the wind. We cannot hold our breath. We cannot understand this misty life. Much is fog to us. And there is much under the sun to cry out against: pain, injustice, futility.  

And this afternoon I attended a funeral online. The dear person who had died had a relatively short life and was often limited to a hospital room, to a bed. She suffered terribly. But those closest to her would say that in the midst of it all, in it, not despite it, partly through it, she found a truthfulness and gratitude, an honesty and an appreciation of grace which only daily dying and a reckoning with death could bring. In the midst of death, there was a true life. A short and painful life, but a life well lived. In a way, the best of lives. 

All of us, in fact, are always only a breath away from eternity. And should that not enable us to live? Should the fleeting nature of life not enable us to be more real, more present? Is not so much of this vain world boasted pomp and show? Should not our mortality deliver us from pretence? 

As the Preacher would say to us, what do wealth, power, success and status really count for when we are but grass which will pass away, flowers that will fade?

Life is only ever through death. 

May God grant us something of the beauty of the one greater than Solomon who was wise enough to trust his heavenly Father and not to worry about yesterday or tomorrow but to live today knowing that he would die. 

If we could only see it, we are weak, mortal, often foolish. But this cruciform life, this death to false selves, false hopes, false gods, is the way to a more glorious, solid, indestructible, everlasting life. 

May we die to sin and self, that we might truly live both now and for ever.