Crossing over with non-effort

When I first created “600 words,” I wrote about death. Readers were incomprehensibly immune to my poignant yet absurdist treatment. Death does, after all, evoke fright and dread. Mention of it dispenses with polite conversation faster than “vagina.” Those are now in major off-Broadway theaters, for heaven’s sake.

And so since energy must balance itself, it follows that the energy we’ve expended on fear of death has congealed into institutions. A lot of modern, individual interpretations of Christianity are predicated on fear of death. Don’t kill, don’t maim, don’t steal and you’ll not burn in hell for eternity. Some of our Muslim and Jewish brethren seem to share a similarly linear concept of death. Our other Eastern siblings are luckier. Hindus get to become bees or flowers. Buddhists just get so smart their atomic particles meld with space.

I like Descartesian cum Doris Day death: Whatever we think will be, will be. For a while. For a piece of time that might be a split second or a thousand years but has no relevance in measure. Until we perceive that our awareness is no longer butting up against the confines of our physical limitations and we join the all-knowing, all-loving all-forgiving field of energy.

How scary is that?

Now I realize the field of energy conclusion is not for everyone. Some of its more flaky expressions are derided by traditionalists as “New Agey,” although it’s actually a little closer to Taoism, a philosophy recorded around 2,300 years ago. The F of E also has a fairly solid basis in physics. If energy is neither created nor destroyed, the juice animating the old skin shirt must go somewhere. Not that a lot of Christian ‘tudes don’t jive with physics. You just go sit on a cloud until judgment day when you get to return to your body, although just what is appealing about that second part, I’m not sure.

I think the thrill of resurrection lore has more to do with judgment than anything else. There are those gentlefolk of every religious stripe who are just itching to see the infidelic pagan scum get what they deserve. That would be your eternal damnation, despite the teachings of a cadre of prophets who preached forgiveness until they were blue in the face. Forgiveness is reserved for those we like. Everyone else deserves to swing.

This is considered justice, but there’s a hint of a difference between justice and revenge. Justice is Ken Lay pumping gas for the rest of his life and donating half of his measly wages to a retirement fund for his former employees. Revenge is Ken Lay in a jail cell for the rest of his life with a large, muscular, lonely and very angry African American man named Tyrone.

Thus we see how truly attractive revenge can be. It’s what makes the end of the world all the rage in certain circles. Sweeping, mass revenge. Apocolypsists in t-shirts saying, “We told you so!!!”

Death, not sea or space, is our last, great frontier. None of us, with the possible exception of John Edward, is really sure what lay beyond life. It is unknown, and the unknown frightens us because religiosity is not the same thing as faith.

I probably spend more than the average amount of time thinking about death. It was a part of life on the farm, for one thing. My father worked in a funeral home, for another. But I don’t spend a lot of time fearing death. Perhaps I’m too lazy. Perhaps its denial. Perhaps its because I’m short on religion.

But long on faith.

Monday, July 22, 2002

Copyright 2010 by Deborah McAdams. All Rights Reserved. For Reprint Rights, click here.