I was listening to one of my favorite theologians speak via recording of a lecture he gave at my Alma mater a few years ago, and he was sharing some thoughts on death. On this Holy Saturday, the day we remember the Sabbath rest of our Lord as he lay in the tomb, I think these words on death are appropriate.
This quote is from David Bentley Hart, and in it he is expounding upon the claim that death is an unnatural part of our existence, and noting that in primitive (so called) societies, death was certainly seen this way – as an unnatural, foreign, intruder.
In most societies every death is in some sense murder; the violent interruption of a life that would otherwise have continued indefinitely. Now, most of us, we modern persons, tend to think that these are unsophisticated persons, and that they fail to recognize death as something natural and inevitable because they haven’t had a sufficiently comprehensive education in organic chemistry or something. But perhaps we should also ask ourselves whether we, in fact, absorbed as we are most of the time, in watching television, visiting shopping malls, and watching more television, necessarily possess a subtler understanding of the ambiguities that hold the human experience of death, then they do. At some very profound level this so called “primitive” intuition is surely correct and it’s one that we might share if we were more attentive to the conditions of experience.
-David Bentley Hart