I am continually amazed at the time-wasting stupidity of modern technology – as if, since there’s nothing useful anymore to invent to better the life of the average person, they have to keep “improving” what already exists, even if improvement makes it worse. For instance, calling a cell phone. If the person I’m calling is not there, a simple message and a beep to begin recording would suffice. Most people with an over-40 IQ could handle that. But to make it “better!” the cell phone companies have given you “options,” via the ubiquitous electronic female who, from her tone of voice, must hold the key to life and happiness: “When you are finished recording, you may hang up” – (!) – “or press ‘one’ for more options. To leave a callback number, press ‘five.’ To send a numeric page” – (a what?) – please press ‘seven.’”
Unfortunately, with the desk job that pays my bills, I have to endure this idiocy numerous times in a day. So, while the few people left in the world still deprived of the “benefit” of these merry instructions stand there through the lunch hour with their mouths open, not knowing they can hang up now, I head for the cemetery. Death is less insulting.
I mention this because, one day, on my customary afternoon walk through the graveyard in the town where I work, I happened to notice an interesting epitaph. It was on a small metal marker of the kind you can buy in the over-priced yuppie garden catalogs to insert wise or cute sayings among the geraniums. This one, to mark the grave, had the name of the dead person, her years of birth and death, and this intriguing sentiment: “Living Eternally in the Hearts of Loved Ones.”
There was an empty concrete planter behind the sign, crusted on the inside bottom with previous years’ maple seeds and decomposing leaves. The sign itself was tilted and skewed as if it had heaved with the freeze and thaw of seasons, and clumps of onion grass had sprouted up around it: in a matter of days, I guessed, it would be high enough to obliterate the message, were it not for the fastidious cemetery groundskeeper, whose mower sounded in the distance even as I pondered the oxymoron before me.
How does one live eternally in the hearts of other mortals?
Well, what do you say, exactly – what can you say – when someone dies without Christ, without hope of resurrection? To an atheist, or a “spiritual” person, that sounds like a sappy question, something to get the eyeballs rolling (see post, November 21, 2010 ) – but this little grave-sign begs a coherent answer. It certainly doesn’t give one.
If you don’t believe in Christ – in other words, if you don’t believe that through his blood, your sin (which brings death) is not imputed to you – how do you go about “living eternally?” Are there other options? Can you just float around? Does the faulty memory of another sinful mortal keep you “alive?” Are you somehow conscious of that while you’re rotting in the ground?
These seem to be questions most people avoid, until someone dies and they’re left with needing to say something comforting. What would a truthful atheist epitaph be? “Damned to the memory of forgetful loved ones,” or, “Living in the hearts of loved ones until they die, too.” That would be the truth, but atheists have a real dilemma when truth meets death, and so something deceptive becomes necessary – something warm and vague, some lie to divert them from the hopelessness of death without God. After all, their turn is coming. “Living Eternally in the Hearts of Loved Ones.”
I felt sorry for the woman in the grave, whose eternal life had apparently run out in the seven short years since her demise, when her loved ones got busy with other things. Having recovered from the sweet deception they enjoyed in the days immediately after her departure, what did they leave this woman with now, whose eternity had apparently depended entirely upon them?
As I headed back to the office, I reflected that this woman probably led a “good” life, in terms of all the usual measurements – friends that had enjoyed her company, probably a family, a useful occupation that helped people, or whatever. She probably believed in the modern concept of “choice” as a well-meaning virtue, willfully oblivious to its moral pitfalls. Choice itself has become a god, and the notion (as with technology) of there always being more “options” has filtered down into the minutiae of our daily lives and culture, making difficult the simple, clouding what was once clear, and forcing us to navigate a maze for which there is no apparent solution.
Technology can get away with this because there’s money in it – that’s the aim – but when it comes to questions of eternity, the proliferation of options is, frankly, a falsehood. You have one choice for entrance into eternal life – the blood of Christ – and it runs out at your last heartbeat.
1 comment:
Once again you hit it out of the park
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