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simply dead, “let the dead bury their dead” (Luke 9:60); the one who says, if we
want to gain life, we must ?rst lose it (cf. Luke 17:33). As Christ speaks of life,
life is not less than human, it is in fact nothing other than the life of God, it is
Christ himself, the one who shows himself not as yet something else in this
world, but as the very life of the world and the very light of the world. Life,
then, is something more or other than what biology studies, more than or
other than what we think it is that we are engaged in, in our daily lives. Life is
something that we must acquire, must enter into, must be born into, as we will
see later.

But we have come now to live in such a manner that we not only hope
for, but have come to expect, that our life will be free from pain, sickness, and
su?ering, that we have escaped the conditions endemic to human life as our
ancestors knew it, and that we can continue to grow in attaining a form of life
completely free of such limitations. We do indeed live in a radically di?erent
world than our forebears.

And perhaps, to take this to its ?nal level, this change is nowhere more
true than our understanding of death. I would suggest that very few people
today (in the West) “see” death. We know that people die, we hear reports
about death, tragic and catastrophic, and we see death in ever more cartoon-
like character in countless Hollywood productions and video games. Yet com-
pared to the situation a century ago, there is a marked di?erence. At the be-
ginning of the twentieth century, most people would have had one or more of
their siblings die during their childhood, and one or more parent dying before
they reached adulthood (and now, our parents live on till we ourselves are be-
yond the life-expectancy of previous ages). Deceased siblings, parents, friends,
and neighbours would have been kept at home, in the parlour, being mourned
and waked by friends and neighbours, washed and prepared for burial, until
being taken from home to church, where they would be commended to God
and interred in and entrusted to the earth.

Today, however, the corpse is removed as quickly as possible, to the care
of the death industry, the death professionals, the morticians, who embalm the
body, to make it look as good as possible. It is then placed under rose-tinted
lights in a funeral home so that it looks alive, in the hope that we might make a
comment such as “I’ve never seen him or her looking so good”! The casket is
then often closed during the funeral service. Or, as is increasingly happening
today, there is no funeral service: the body is disposed of in a crematorium,
increasingly with no one else there, and then, later on, a “memorial service” is
held in which the person is celebrated without being bodily present.

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