I’ve been thinking a lot about death recently. My mother died last fall. Then, 8 months to the day later, my dad died. And two weeks after that, my goddaughter died only in her early 40s and leaving behind four children.

Only one of my grandparents lived to see me alive. And most of my aunts and uncles just really weren’t that close to me (either physically or emotionally), so even though dad was pretty much the last family member of his generation, I haven’t been around family death much.

So I’ve been thinking about death. Theirs, mine, yours.

I know that many deaths are painful and leave sorrowing loved ones behind, that some deaths seem to come way too early, and some are violent or totally unexpected. My goddaughter’s death qualifies on several of those scores. What I’m writing about here is my own recent experience with death. I’m not telling you that this is how you should feel.

What I think particularly about my father is about his reunions in Heaven. His mother died when he was only 5 years old. He died when he was 94, so almost 90 years later. If he had any memories of her, I don’t remember him ever sharing them. And after pneumonia took her out of this life, I have imagined that my grandmother spent some time looking from Heaven, watching her sons grow up and grow old, grow to be twice as old as she was when she died.

I’ve wondered about dad passing through the pearly gates (“each gate made of a single pearl” Revelation 21:21) and seeing his mother for this first time in all those decades. “Mutti?!” he asks (she was a recent immigrant from Germany), “Mama!?” And as she is calling back “Pauli, it’s so good to see you,” I also picture my mother elbowing past her (they never met in this life, of course) berating dad “There you are! Where have you been? What took you so long?”

And maybe they get it all straightened out fairly quickly. Or maybe my mother is already happy just being in Heaven and is no longer weighed down by the parts of her personality, the wounds from her earlier life, that made her sometimes hard to be around (at least for some of us she was difficult).

Because, yes, we assume that there will be reunions in Heaven. We assume that I will get to meet my three grandparents I have yet to meet. We assume a lot about what we will do in Heaven, what it will be like. But the key thing about Heaven, the only thing I’m sure about, is that we will be with God in a way that will be much more clear and obvious than we are now.

God now rules Heaven and earth. He permeates the universe. Or, perhaps better, since God is the Creator, the universe permeates Him. He is everywhere and everywhen, and beyond anything that can be referred to as a ‘where’ or a ‘when.’ So He is here with us now. We are in His presence now.

But our vision is clouded. A bit like a car window with a little mud on it that is then heavily dusted with spring tree pollen. And maybe it’s night. You know that there are things outside to see. And you get hints of them. But you can’t see any of the details what with the mud and the pollen and the dark. What you need to do is have the windshield washed. And wait for the sun to rise. And roll down the windows. Or all three. Or, hey, even get out of the car altogether and go into the house.

Which, I think, is where we get back to death again. I’m thinking of it these days as an act of getting out of the car with its dirty windows and stepping into the clear light of the house – the Father’s house, if you will. That house with many rooms where Jesus went to prepare a place for each of us.

The description of the heavenly Jerusalem, the Church, that St. John records in chapter 21 of Revelation, tries to tell us about the overwhelming beauty of this place. Main Street in that city is literally paved with gold, but gold so pure that it is transparent as glass. There’s no need for a sun or moon overhead because the Lamb of God is its light. And the whole place sparkles more than the richest jewelry. We will see clearly then. We will.

I ask you to image with me getting out of the car with its dirty windows and stepping into the city of Revelation 21. It’ll be really real. It IS really real. Now. Already. It always has been, always will be. C. S. Lewis wrote about this both in “The Great Divorce” and in “The Last Battle.” Especially in the first of those the people just arriving in Heaven appear thin and ghostly, while those already living there are described as solid and bright. (If you haven’t read it yet, please do; I think you’ll enjoy it.)

In Heaven God will wipe every tear from our eyes. We’ll see Him as He is. And death in our present world – death of my parents, death of my goddaughter, your death, my death – death in this world is merely the way for those of us who are in Christ to get there, the way to enter in physically. I’m looking forward to it and pray you are, too.

We sometimes hear or say at funerals “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord” (Revelation 14:13). And it’s true. But have you thought about what it means? Many things, I am sure, but for now these two. In the Bible “blessed” can mean something like “happy” (as the Good News Translation/Today’s English Version translates it in the Beatitudes). But there’s another word sometimes translated as “blessed” that means more like “praised” or “spoken well of” (compare different translations of Psalms 103 and 104 where “Bless the Lord” sometimes comes out as “Praise the Lord”).

I think the dead who die in the Lord are blessed in both ways. They’re happy to be with God, to lay aside earthly labors, to rest, to be healed, to feast at the banquet.

They’re also praised, spoken well of, not for their own good but for God’s good in and through them. That’s literally what a eulogy is.

So I’ve been thinking about death a lot recently, and I hope you do too. A Christian’s thoughts of death aren’t macabre or depressing. They are joyful. They point our way to Heaven. These thoughts are the driveway leading to the door of the Father’s house, the door of our blessing.

May God bless you. Both ways.

first posted on 2019-06-06