Prosperity That Leads On To Death

Me, thinking about more covid.

I was trying to really hunker down and read a little bit of the new Rachel Hollis book this morning—after several chapters of the book of Revelation first, naturally—but the cat came and stood on me and saved me, thank heaven, and so instead I read this. The Washington Post has got hold of some psychological “thoughts and prayers,” things like “Terror Management Theory” and “Existential Shock.” There are some great lines in this piece. Here are my favorites:

Simply put, to function as a conscious being, it’s imperative that you be in denial about your impending death. How else would you go about the mundane aspects of your daily life — cleaning the gutters, paying the bills, sitting in traffic — if you were constantly aware of the inevitability of your own death?

And

They found that death reminders cause a range of predictable behaviors, all designed to deny our certain end and cement our individual significance. They named this idea Terror Management Theory, and in the years since, dozens of psychological studies have supported it.

And

“What we are seeing is literally the predictable result of pervasive reminders of death,” he said.

And

“Unlike covid[-19], the fact of our mortal nature persists throughout our lives, and we can do nothing about it,” he said. “We virtually never think about it, and, when we do, we pay lip service to it.”

And

“I am an infinitesimal speck of carbon-based dust born in a time and place not of my choosing here for an incredible brief amount of time before my atoms are scattered back into the cosmos. That need not be a terrifying thought.”

That’s the way it ends, which is fantastic. Also, totes love that they threw in the word “literally.” Makes me feel better about everything in the world. Indeed, I was trying to do my own Terror Management this morning, and was failing, having only the Bible and a prayer book at my disposal, when the cat and the Washington Post saved me, the humor of it all jolting me out of my malaise. My favorite thing, besides this excellent line jotted down by the prophet Isaiah, who was a pretty good writer, I think, though perhaps not up to the mark of the Washington Post:

Do not call conspiracy
everything this people calls a conspiracy;
do not fear what they fear,
and do not dread it.
The Lord Almighty is the one you are to regard as holy,
he is the one you are to fear,
he is the one you are to dread.

Is this line from the Great Litany:

In all times of tribulation; in all times of prosperity; in the hour of death, and in the day of judgment, Good Lord, deliver us.

That single line has carried me through all my own covid related troubles. Especially this morning as I’ve contemplated the horror that our governor is considering whether or not to set us back to Phase Two, because of the spike of covid cases here in our country. That, if you remember, was the time when things like churches and places of exercise were considered “non-essential” and we were all encouraged to gather with each other online, which many of us are still doing, out of an abundance of caution.

I guess I would be ok with the caution thing—indeed, am ok with it—if a fear of God was gathered up into the mix. The problem is that God is the one person we are not afraid of. We are afraid of tribulation, but we are not afraid of the kind of prosperity that leads on swiftly to judgment, nor are we afraid of judgment itself. And I do mean “we” in the gathering up general sense of all of humanity, or all of the people of New York State in a collective sense. “I” am afraid of God and afraid of Judgment, but I am a very small minority. Most of the people around me are not afraid of those things.

I don’t mean to sound judgmental. Judge not lest ye be…etc. etc. It’s just that Prosperity and Tribulation are two sides of the same problem. You can have one or the other, it doesn’t really matter, and both are to be dreaded if you are not prepared to dread the deeper and more pressing reality of God, and all his judging properties. The problem is being human, of knowing that you must die, even when you shove that knowledge as far away as the east is from the west.

My grandmother really wanted a greenhouse in her back garden, but never got it—mostly because she sent almost all of her money away to missionaries, instead of buying a greenhouse. But she kept asking God to give her one. The morning of the day that she died, she scrawled in her looping script, asking God, once again, for a greenhouse, but not if it would send “leanness into her soul.” All of her family were mightily annoyed to discover that she so wanted a greenhouse, because we would have rallied around to get her one, except that she never spoke her desire out loud in our hearing. But that line has haunted me ever since as I have demanded one thing and another from God—even the end of covid. Do I even know the measured leanness of my own soul? Do I dread a prosperity that leads on to death? Or do I only want to be very comfortable and not troubled, temporally, in any way? Gosh, I don’t even know if I know the answer to that question this morning…Good Lord, Deliver Me.