Ending Is Beginning

I was born – on this date in 1923, in Akron, Ohio.  Much has happened in the intervening years, and the range of experience has been extensive.  My childhood was fairly good, despite poverty, in that I had the health and energy to do things, and to be interested in relationships, physical work and formal education in seeking maturity.  My father is remembered only in one event of seeing him on a day a year before he died, in 1929, of killer tuberculosis.  I married in 1943, and grew in that intimate relationship for the next 57 years, enjoying my wife, our four children, and their developing families.  I moved along professionally in the vocational environments of the church and higher education, with the privilege of experience in both sacred and secular contexts.  Age crept up on me, but I have remained active – even though slowing down.  No matter how many years remain for me, they cannot number many.  I am well into my tenth decade.

During my earlier years there was an unspoken assumption that persons would not talk about death.  That was for doctors, ministers, and funeral directors – done in hushed tones in consideration of the context of death.  Gradually the experience is emerging, especially as eminent or celebrity people remark about it – and as the public sees them in memorial.  In 2011, the world watched as Steve Jobs, the computer and communications guru was seen dying.  Speaking at Stanford University he broke off from what was expected and talked to the students about death – a largely secular view of it as experience.  Even the press appeared shocked by his digression on this secular stage.  His illness had pressed in upon him for several years.  He died of cancer, and was feted around the world for his talent and tensions in business and personal relationships.  But the public deaths of members of the John F. Kennedy family after the assassination of the president seem to have begun the turning of the door of hidden death to public observation and funerals.  Even the death remarks of a winning college basketball coach were broadcast over television.   Since then I have reviewed many publicly recorded and discussed deaths of public persons.  On Father’s Day, in 2012, the newspaper reported several stories of the deaths, or impending deaths, of some model fathers.  Mark Shriver made public his book on his father, Sargent Shriver, the first director of the Peace Corps.  The book about life was made poignant in the story of the death of his father.

Other books on decline and death are appearing.  One of these reports included Lt. Col. Mark Weber, a prominent military person, asked to give the speech commemorating the birth of the United States Army.  As he drew toward the end of his address, he broke the order usually followed on these occasions and, according to Jon Tevlin: . . . talked about another unwelcome guestat the back of the room. Tevlin continued: It’s death, Weber said . . . I mention him and hear once or twice a month as he whispers in my ear something I’d like to pass along to all of you.  What did Weber say that the guest of death said?  Live, because I am coming.  Then Weber told the audience to keep their emotions in control, while he and his son, Matthew, sang a song: Tell my father that his son didn’t run or surrender.  That I bore his name with pride as I tried to remember, you are judged by what you do while passing through….Tell my father not to cry, then say goodbye.  The event was dramatic and taken by the audience with deep emotion, but if the memorial were for me it would have to include an addenda, more important than my own courage, and vital to the implied victory.  I would want that victory to be told so to liven the story.  It has another venue.

The guest in the back of the room is death, a transition from this wonderful experience of life marked by learning/yearning, believing/loving, working/serving, winning/losing – to a life of conscious meaning and worth under God, foretold in Jesus Christ who proved immortal meaning by conquering the seen and unwanted guest.  Life wins!  Christ redeems it to new life – all worth living and dying for.  To face death bravely, as so many communicators are repeating, is some relief for the masses, but it is even better to inform the world that there is another in the front of the room who can be personally engaged as the one to remove the sting from the guestin the back of the room.  Without gospel my life story is incomplete.