The Death of Death by Scott Cairns

Put fear aside. Now

that He has entered

into death on our behalf,

all who live

no longer die

as men once died.

That ephemeral occasion

has met its utter end,

As seeds cast to the earth, we

will not perish,

but like those seeds

shall rise again -- the shroud

of death itself having been

burst to tatters

by love's immensity. *

"The crux of their 'courage and optimism' was to make the body the center of their attention, turning their back on the Greek notion that the soul is the essence of personhood. Not so, the medieval held: it is the body...And we do desire it, sensibly or not so sensibly. Having been given the vision of a God whose care for us is so heartbrokenly thorough that he became one of us, suffering what we suffer, dying as we do, to show us that even what we fear most has been conquered by a love we are called to show one another, we can't help but hope that it is true and try to stake our lives on that hope. Our faith tells us that we have been baptized into Christ's death and the hope of resurrection.'For you have died,' Colossians tells us, 'and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.' (3:3-4.) John Garvey, Death and the Rest of Our Life, pg. 87-88.

This excerpt was in our church bulletin today. I loved it.

I found the above passage so interesting. It's revealing of a culture to see beliefs about the spiritual and the physical, and which idea is most dominant in a given time. Thanks to Progressivism, we live in a time when people don't even believe in the existence of a soul! This early on caused me to care deeply about the soul. I wanted to work with children and I knew that the soul would be a major focus of anything I did with children. But in the church, I saw an opposite problem: a disparaging of matter, of the physical. This is a rejection of all that Christ is. He was physical before time began.

'And He said to them, "Why are you troubled? And why do doubts arise in your hearts? Behold My hands and My feet, that it is I Myself. Handle Me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see I have." When He had said this, He showed them His hands and His feet. But while they still did not believe for joy, and marveled, He said to them, "Have you any food here?" So they gave Him a piece of a broiled fish and some honeycomb. And He took it and ate in their presence." ~Luke 24:38-43.

*from Love's Immensity, Mystics on the Endless Life by Scott Cairns, pg. 14.