A More Genuine Sympathy

The sympathy cards available at Hallmark or the drugstore rarely contain anything that could remind a grief-stricken friend of the Resurrection.

Even the sort of cards found in a Christian or Catholic bookstore have a tendency to follow some variation of contemporary spiritual sentiments: “Your loved one lives on in your memory” or something worse like “They’ve returned to the stars.”

It is beautiful that we remember our loved ones and carry their best moments in our hearts, and it is also true that we are made of stardust and return to earth, but these messages are not the astonishing gospel hope.

These expressions, however heartfelt, should not console us because they conceal a hard truth: when we are dead, we are dead. We do not go “back to the stars,” but are, pardon this, worm food. They also leave unsaid or deny a powerful reality: our body and soul is reconstituted by a God who loves us, who raises us from death.

We do not “go on” as stardust or as a “whisper on the wind” or “wave upon the shore,” nor do we live on only in the minds of those who remember us but truly live on as the unique and unrepeatable persons we have been since the moment of our conception.

We live on, body and soul glorified, as it was and will be forever in Jesus Christ, the first fruits of the Resurrection: able to be touched and held, seen and heard. We sit down at a meal in his New Creation and drink choice wine with the One who loves us and gave himself for us.

We are not ghosts in machines that go back to being ghosts, nor are we mere carbon that becomes “one” again with the rest of creation. The Christian hope is at once particular, personal, and unapologetically material.

We are destined for eternal embodied existence, where all that made us who we are as one-of-kind divine image bearers—laughter, courage, generosity, skin and bones, hands and feet, brilliant thoughts and selfless deeds, fingerprints and nucleic acids—is made alive again forever, redeemed by the power of the triune Love.

God keeps all the information (genetics) and all the mystery (the undeniable essence of every human soul) about us and he knows how to raise us from death.

That is a real hope. That is real love. That is something worth communicating to someone who has lost a brother or parent or friend or lover or inspiration. That is worth telling well in a sympathy card.

After everyone who remembers and loves us also dies, and their memories of us perish with them, we yet live on, and they yet live on, and longer than the stars, all holy memories and every personality intact.

We need cards that tell that story but what we need more are Christ followers, epistles that are read by others, whose lives depict this promise with hopeful conviction.