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The Christian is hooked on either side and stretched between two disparate statements about his death: \u201cRemember that you are dust\u201d \u2014 muttered by Catholic priests as they draw\u00a0a cross of ashes on the believing brow \u2014 and \u201cRemember, O Christian, your dignity\u201d \u2014 the mighty words of Pope Saint Leo the Great, extolling us to marvel over the fact that we are destined to live forever, sharing \u201cin God\u2019s own nature.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2026and to dust you shall return,\u201d the priests finish, pushing us into the deep dark of Lent. That is, you will die, disintegrate into the indifferent atomic stuff of the universe, a brief blip on a cosmic radar that neither knows nor cares about your presence. Or, as Josemaria Escriva puts it: \u201cBefore long \u2014 years, days, \u2014 you will be a heap of rotting flesh: worms, foul-smelling liquids, filthy shreds of cloth, and no one, on earth, will remember you.\u201d\u00a0And yet \u201cyou have been rescued from the power of darkness and brought into the light of God\u2019s kingdom,\u201d says the Pope Saint \u2014 you will not<\/em> die, you will live forever with the God who made you.<\/p>\n Why this contradiction? Why is the dust of death not simply undone by the hope of Resurrection? Surely the Christian who believes he will live forever should drop his morbidity, his memento moris<\/em>, his depressing notions of death as The End, The Rotting, Full Stop, and Final Fix. For, as a matter of belief, such views of death are over. \u201cDeath thou shalt die,\u201d no more the misery of the Psalmist:<\/p>\n Death-as-end and death-as-not-the-end creates a disharmony in the Faith, but it is a disharmony pregnant with its own resolution, aching for the next chord. The Christian carries this contradiction \u2014 a \u201creturning to dust\u201d and a \u201cliving forever\u201d \u2014 because he hopes<\/em> for eternal life. He does not, or ought not, expect it.<\/p>\n It might seem like a pious Christianism, to expect eternal life, to think of death as a mere \u201ctransition\u201d into a Whole New World, to speak, in the vocabulary of those blindingly dull obituary notices, of our loved one\u2019s \u201cbeing in a better place,\u201d moving on, and having their souls carried up to God by the angels \u2014 as if it were all simply a matter of course! As if Christianity were the revelation, not of salvation, but of the world\u2019s having \u201cgotten it wrong\u201d about death, and the Christian is simply the one who, with some inside information, knows death is really<\/em> just a phase, an illusion, and a passing-into-something-else. It is precisely this mentality that hankers after near-death experiences as proof of Heaven, that looks for \u201cobjective evidence\u201d of the afterlife \u2014 and it is precisely this mentality that remains unchristian. For we do not expect Heaven as something which simply follows on upon life as Act II follows Act I, as something which could be \u2018proven\u2019 by peeping behind the curtains and seeing the set pieces lined up and waiting.<\/p>\n We hope for Heaven because we were promised by the person of Jesus Christ \u2014 that he would put us there. Our certainty does not lie in Heaven being observable as an object, nor in our reasoning, nor in some feeling of being owed Heaven. In short, our hope for Heaven\u00a0does not have its source in us, but in another whose promise we believe.<\/p>\n This is in accord with the nature of expectation and hope. I expect my paycheck \u2014 I do not\u00a0hope\u00a0<\/em>for\u00a0it. I\u00a0expect<\/em>\u00a0Wednesday to follow Tuesday and day to follow night \u2014 I do not, under ordinary conditions, hope for it. Expectation, then, achieves what it expects as something already owed to it, already known by it \u2014 something it \u201calready has.\u201d To simply expect Heaven, to rid ourselves of trembling in the face of death, to not consider just dying, keeling over and becoming foul-smelling-liquid-the-end-thanks-for-playing as a real possibility \u2014 this is to pretend that we already have Heaven, that it is owed to us, that it does not come from the surprising and unexpected gift\u00a0of another.<\/p>\n I do not already know what I hope for, nor I do not think I am already owed what I hope for, rather, I\u00a0desire<\/em>\u00a0what I hope for. Expectation does not imply any desire, for I may expect Tuesday to follow after Monday without any particularly erotic surge. But hope is\u00a0always<\/em>\u00a0a desire \u2014 indeed, I cannot imagine hoping for anything\u00a0apart from it. Thus there is no rejoicing when an expectation is fulfilled \u2014 we simply expect Tuesday to follow Monday \u2014 but there is wild rejoicing when a hope is fulfilled \u2014 for we desired the good that we hoped for. This is what is particularly flaccid about a religion that claims \u201cyou won\u2019t really<\/em> die, you actually just go to Heaven.\u201d Such thought is neither to desire, nor to rejoice, nor to be thankful, but to presume \u2014 and presumption is boring as the brat who expects his birthday presents.<\/p>\n The certainty of hope is not a certainty that annuls the surprise, the terrible shock, the givenness and utter unexpectedness of that which is hoped for. A husband who expects<\/em> his wife to love him has certainty that she will, but it is a perverse, unloving certainty which views her love as a matter of course, as something established with the given fact of her being his wife, following with logical necessity, as if it was not entirely dependent on her upholding of the promise, as if she were not free to not love him, as if her love is not still a gift, a gratuitous blessing and a surprise that he does not deserve, at each and every moment it is given! The man who hopes<\/em> in the love of his wife, on the other hand, maintains the right relation to her love \u2014 it is always surprising, always a gift, always outside of the expected and the owed. And thus it is, properly speaking, always a response of love to love, for hope is always a desire for the good<\/em> one hopes for, an eros<\/em>, a burning-for \u2014 while expectation can be without desire for the thing expected, as I may fully expect to get the flu, fall into debt, and watch my loved ones die.<\/p>\n So the Christian is dust, and he harbors within himself the knowledge that he will return to dust and that this crumbling of self into primordial soup is an entirely legitimate expectation \u2014 for he is not owed<\/em> continued existence, nor can ascertain the necessity<\/em> of continued existence beyond any reasonable doubt, nor does any evidence of continued existence give itself to him, at least nothing beyond the overwhelming counter evidence of death really being an end. Far from being unchristian, this repetition that I am ashes and I will return to ashes, that I am dust and I will return to dust, that there is nothing to gain from my going into the grave \u2014 this forms the necessary condition for hope in salvation. For hope arrives as a warrior, dispelling the darkness. The person of Christ promises salvation, not as a matter of course, but as an act he will perform<\/em>,\u00a0and the certainty that I will rise and not simply return to dust is a consequence of being surprised and dumbstruck by this promise \u2014 and yet believing. This put things in the right order: I desire to be saved, and salvation is never something I can expect. It is a shocking lurch away from the pit. So Lent gives us the opportunity to meditate on our death, and Easter gives us the opportunity to meditate on the promise that we will not die, and the two taken together allow us to hope in and never to expect our salvation \u2014 and hope does not disappoint.<\/p>\n The Christian is hooked on either side and stretched between two disparate statements about his death: \u201cRemember that you are dust\u201d \u2014 muttered by Catholic priests as they draw\u00a0a cross of ashes on the believing brow \u2014 and \u201cRemember, O Christian, your dignity\u201d \u2014 the mighty words of Pope Saint Leo the Great, extolling us […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":121,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/content.artofmanliness.com\/uploads\/\/2012\/10\/alexander-mair-memento-mori-1605.jpeg\")
What gain is there from my lifeblood,
\nfrom my going down to the grave?
\nDoes dust give you thanks
\nor declare your faithfulness?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.gtaog.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/Heaven-is-for-Real.png\")
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