Maurice Sendak Hope to See Brother Again
Tish Harrison Warren
What I Believe About Life Subsequently Death
Opinion Writer
My friend Thomas died in Baronial. His death was sudden and tragic. He and his 22-year-former child were killed in a motorcar accident.
Thomas was the priest who introduced me to Anglicanism a decade ago. He explained to me why ministers wear purple during the flavour of Appearance, why people make the sign of the cross in church, why we have communion. He opened me up to a whole world that I didn't know existed, a world that feels enchanted, cute and poetic. He was as well ane of the first people I told that I was considering ordination, and he mentored and guided me through the yearslong process of becoming a priest myself.
In the terminal couple of years, Thomas and I spoke less often, and mostly online or over email. Simply I find I remember of him every day now. This month, for his sabbatical, he was supposed to be walking the Camino de Santiago, a 500-mile path that has been a religious pilgrimage since around the 10th century. He trained for months. Each solar day, I wonder where he would take been on the trail had he lived.
It feels to me like something went wrong. He tin't die, I think. He'd fabricated plans. He had so much left to do. A journey interrupted.
Decease, for all of usa, is a journey interrupted. I feel this acutely when someone immature dies. But not only then. When my begetter passed abroad in his 70s, I felt like there was so much that even so needed to happen, so many more conversations we needed to have. He'd always wanted to see the Panama Canal. There were grandchildren in his hereafter that needed him to be alive.
The calendar week before Easter, Thomas would lead a Tenebrae service — a gathering focused on the waning light as Skilful Friday approaches. These services, in Thomas's hands, were gorgeous works of fine art, incorporating motion picture clips, live music and poetry. Ane year, he played a clip of the beloved children'south author Maurice Sendak in an interview with Terry Gross.
Sendak'due south frail, gravelly phonation spoke of his brother who had passed abroad: "It makes me weep but when I meet my friends become before me and life is emptied. I don't believe in an afterlife, but I still fully wait to come across my brother again." Though he was an atheist, Sendak couldn't shake the hope for another glimpse of his blood brother'due south face. There is something deep within us that rejects the idea that the road but stops. We feel there must exist more. We must be made for more than: more than conversations, more than laughter, more breaths to take, more miles to walk along the trail.
Reading the Bible, I notice how Jesus' death, also, feels like a journeying interrupted. There was so much more he could have explained, then many more than people to heal, so much more than to be washed. Afterward his decease, nigh of his closest friends hid out, lost in grief and fright. And I wonder if this was in part because they thought that this wasn't how things were supposed to end. They had plans. They were part of a revolutionary brotherhood. And and so it all of a sudden was over.
I saw my friend Pete at Thomas's funeral. Pete and Thomas were close friends and he told me virtually how he would miss their weekly breakfasts together at the Waffle House. He besides told me that since Thomas had died he kept thinking about the story of Jesus' resurrection and what it must accept been like for the disciples to feel it. What struck him anew was how it would feel to exist in deepest grief and so all of a sudden see your friend once more. There is a deeply intimate and human reunion story among the larger cosmic pregnant of the resurrection business relationship. A community of friends was broken and then, somehow, against all hope, remade.
The truth is, no one — not priests, not scientists, non the well-nigh ardent atheist, not the almost steadfast laic — tin exist 100 percent certain most what happens to us afterwards we die. Each week at church building, when we say the Nicene Creed, I affirm that I believe in "the resurrection of the dead and the life of the earth to come."
I believe that after I die, somehow mysteriously but also materially, Jesus will raise me up to live on this expert earth, fabricated new. I believe this considering I believe that Jesus is risen from the expressionless. Specifically, I believe the witness of the disciples and others who lived and died for their claim that they (and somewhere around 500 others) had seen Jesus alive again and spoken to and touched him. That's ultimately why I believe there's a God at all and why I believe God has defeated expiry.
As a priest, when I talk virtually life after death with others, I tend to keep it objective, theological and creedal. I worry about making resurrected life audio sentimental, as though nosotros are but making stuff upwards, dreaming of what we wish was true. So I try to be evenhanded and factual.
But the fact is, I believe this is true, and I believe there are good reasons to believe information technology's true, merely I likewise want it to be true.
I detest death. I take never fabricated my peace with it and I never will. I don't desire to live in a world where everything good of a sudden ends.
Similar Maurice Sendak, I want to see the people I love again.
I hope that my longing for eternity — for joy and pleasure and friendship and dazzler to final — is there because information technology whispers of something that is truthful. I hope that decease feels wrong to me because it really is wrong, it really is not how things are meant to be. And I hope that this hope for more is not lightheaded or delusional. I hope to see my friends again and that death is an interruption, but not an ending.
Have feedback? Transport a note to HarrisonWarren-newsletter@nytimes.com.
Tish Harrison Warren (@Tish_H_Warren) is a priest in the Anglican Church in North America and the author of "Prayer in the Dark: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/17/opinion/life-after-death.html
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