Twenty-twenty was a strange year. Death distilled our lifestyles, bled aspirations and rendered hope to a trickle. The Pandemic was a year of forced solitude and quiet.
Twenty-twenty-one will probably not differ.
Effects of “COVOID”
Solitude and quiet frighten many people. Shunned are spaces full of nothingness but our own thoughts. With only an internal world to keep as company sitting still can turn scary.
With fewer distractions to fend off the emptiness, what happens is distinctly uncomfortable. Uneasy feelings creep − death distilled into everyday thinking. Recently, I saw this up close and personal.
It was uncanny. On the same day in November 2020 and within hours of separate conversations with my daughters − one in person at home, and the other by phone to England − they both expressed an ongoing existential unease with the notion of death.
Surprising conversations for young women. At ages twenty-five and twenty-two, the turn of their thoughts didn’t seem typical. With so much life and potential ahead, their minds churning on death caught me off guard.
Certainly, people my age close to retirement and older may think on our remaining time. My concern is not to kick the bucket before cleaning out the bucket.
But people of my daughter’s ages are pre-occupied with education, finding work and a love interest, keeping up with their social networks, accumulating money for cars, houses and travel in good times. Maybe even children down the line. Their thoughts turning to death and causing anxiety alarmed me.
But given the current world order, the real threat of COVID delivers existential death distilled angst to both young and old alike. Not really a surprise, after all.
We should call the phenomena “COVOID.” You know…coronavirus void.
It was odd, although my daughters were each situated thousands of miles apart, their respective thoughts aligned across a wide expanse of ocean. Must be a sister-brain thing, I figured.
Not an Everyday Conversation
It wasn’t an everyday conversation.
The word “unease” to describe the expressed feelings is too mild. The terror felt by my eldest daughter when considering a nameless, timeless void − an inexplicable place whence we arrive from at birth and return to upon death − causes her distress so acute she can hardly breathe. And less explicitly, her younger sister described a similar fear of that unknown void called death.
What’s a mother to say? My discussions with my daughters’ center on daily things. I’m not an expert on death and life in the Hereafter, and my knowledge on black voids is simply that… void. Death distilled was not an everyday conversation.
Forced Quietude
One challenge rising from the isolation restrictions of COVID-19 pandemic safety protocols is the forced quietude. With mandates to stay at home, work from home, physical distance, refrain from gathering socially, etcetera, fewer distractions exist to fill our time. We have lots of time to think. And not just a few random hours thrown our way but days, weeks, and months, with no immediate end in sight.
Space and time may not be welcome. You saw where my daughter’s thoughts landed. And they are young. How much more traumatic for older folks with presumably shorter horizons to the drop?
Given the current Pandemic, thoughts of death are reasonable and expected. But I’d rather watch Netflix, wouldn’t you?
Willing to Suffer Stillness
But if willing to suffer stillness, the quiet has something to say.
Through this COVID challenge, God, or the universal energies, or the Creator, or whatever name the power you assign in your life, calls humankind to stillness. We do well to listen.
How about not filling our time at home with replacement distractions?
Maybe it’s time to be brave. To look boldly at the voids in our lives.
Circular Sustainability
To return to the frantic business of our former selves, we may remember that economic growth and consumerism did not fill the voids in our lives before COVID lock downs. If we are honest, they only distracted. Economic growth won’t fill the voids when we again move freely.
A return to balance will better serve needs, rather than a return to unbridled consumerism. Unbridled consumerism surges in one direction up which guarantees hitting a ceiling when the planet can no longer sustain the demands on finite resources. A circular approach ensures sustainability. Growth in kindness, caring, reverence and gratitude recalibrates our balance.
Opportunity knocks.
The Voids in our Lives
Now, getting back to my story on death. Perhaps this will also end in a circular story on balance.
It is usual for thinking, thoughtful people, or anyone to have uncomfortable feelings about death. Those who ponder big life questions inevitably land at this place—looking into the void. The pandemic has forced a slower pace and given rise in time to think. Thinking, thoughtful people grapple with the big questions:
From where do we come?
Is our life all there is? Are we truly gone when we die?
Is death a lack of consciousness, where we slip into a black, thoughtless void? Do we cease to exist entirely in any knowable form, our energy and matter returning to the earth?
Is there a heaven?
Is there a hell?
What is heaven?
What is hell?
We are born into a linear world. That is all we know — beginnings, middles, and ends. That is the story of our lives. To fathom timelessness (death?) is beyond our understanding, and frightening.
As a woman of Christian faith who believes in life after death, I should have words to distill the fear of death. With my own doubts, and no proof to comfort two young women circumnavigating their own spiritual beliefs, the answers elude as much as the next person. Like my daughter’s, as a fellow traveler on life’s journey, I still look for them.
Though, as a thinking, thoughtful person, I consider ideas and search for explanations. After my conversation with my eldest daughter, I went looking for help and rummaged through my bookshelves. Which book, I wasn’t sure. I thought to quiet her fear by offering the perspective of an author with more wisdom and knowledge than I could muster.
I’d forgotten a favorite book by a father-son team, Josh McDowell and Sean McDowell, More Than a Carpenter (Carol Stream, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers Inc, 2009) pages 55-57 and offered it. With four books already on the go, my daughter declined.
I had long forgotten the book details, so I sat and reread the whole thing. I remembered why it was still on my shelf…couldn’t put it down. I was sorry my daughter had not added it to her reading list.
The following is an excerpt that lends answers to the big questions. It’s long, but worth consideration. The section is called:
Fine-tuning the Universe
Imagine you are trekking through the mountains and come across an abandoned cabin. As you approach the cabin, you notice something very strange. Inside, the refrigerator is filled with your favorite food, the temperature is set just as you like it, your favorite song is playing in the background, and all your favorite books, magazines, and DVD’s are sitting on the table. What would you conclude? Since chance would be out of the question, you would likely conclude that someone was expecting your arrival.
In recent decades, scientists have begun to realize that this scenario mirrors the universe as a whole. The universe seems to have been crafted uniquely with us in mind. “As we look into the universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked to our benefit, “says physicist Freeman J. Dyson, “it almost seems as if the universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.”[1] This is why British astronomer Fred Hoyle remarked, “A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces speaking about in nature.”[2] Physicists agree that life is balanced on a razor’s edge.
Consider a couple of examples. First, if the law of gravity varied just slightly, the universe would not be habitable for life. In relation to the other forces in nature, gravity must be fine-tuned to one part in 10 to the 40th (that’s one part in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000).[3]
Second, Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking observed that, “If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have recollapsed before it even reached its present size.”[4]
There are actually nineteen such universal constants that must each be perfectly fine tuned.[5] Clearly, the odds against us being here are vanishingly small. In fact, Oxford physicist Roger Penrose concluded that if we jointly considered all the laws of nature that must be fine-tuned, we would be unable to write down such an enormous number since the necessary digits would be greater than the number of elementary particles in the universe.[6]
The evidence for design is so compelling that Paul Davies, a renowned physicist at Arizona State University, has concluded that the bio-friendly nature of our universe looks like a “fix.” He put it this way: “The cliché that ‘life is balanced on a knife-edge’ is a staggering understatement in this case: no knife in the universe could have an edge that fine.”[7] No scientific explanation for the universe, says Davies, can be complete without accounting for this overwhelming appearance of design. Some try to explain away the fine-tuning by positing the existence of multiple universes, but the empirical evidence for them is nonexistent. The most economical and reliable explanation for why the universe is so precisely fine-tuned is because a Creator−God−made it that way.
Mindful Intent
Now, as this book got published in 2009, I can’t account for later discoveries. I don’t know of any. Big discoveries in science take time and verification.
These astronomers and physicists suggest a mindful intent behind the creation of the universe and humankind. The creation of human life was no accident or by chance. I find this comforting and affirming of my faith-life. Scientific evidence supports our being is not random.
We were not born from nothingness but from somethingness − conscious thought and intent. Our origins began with purpose. And the scientists suggest with a loving purpose. Why else a world minutely fashioned, a life inexplicably balanced, and precisely provisioned?
So, the intent and purpose of human life does not disappear when our physical bodies do —when we go back from whom we came. Christians might refer to this as everlasting life, to Buddhist’s, Hindu’s and Sikh’s they might refer to this as reincarnation. Eternal energy coming and going.
There is a circular sustainability to this notion, with no risk of hitting a ceiling and running out of resources.
Surviving Death
There is an interesting series featuring on Netflix. Episode one of “Surviving Death” shares incredible stories of people’s near-death experiences.
Out of thousands of such stories, researchers have gathered commonalities, descriptions of experiences that are comforting and hopeful, where fear is absent and love is present.
To quote from one such survivor, a spinal surgeon who suffered a kayaking accident which pinned her and her boat under ten feet of water for thirty minutes, she said, “Beauty comes from all things.”
But the surgeon wasn’t referring to her own incredible return from death experience, which was remarkable. She was quoting the words spoken by the loving beings encountered in her near-death experience when telling of the future death of her eldest son and responding to her question: “Why, my son?”
Death Distilled An Everlasting Perspective
The morning after the death distilled conversations with my daughters and reacquainting with the treasured book More Than a Carpenter the following reading surfaced in my daily devotional book Jesus Calling by Sarah Young (Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson 2013, page 352). My skin tingled with goosebumps. The devotional takes the perspective of Jesus talking to the reader. This is what Sarah Young wrote for that day:
I love you with an everlasting love which flows out from the depths of eternity. Before you were born, I knew you. Ponder the awesome mystery of a Love that encompasses you from before birth to beyond the grave.
Modern man has lost the perspective of eternity. To distract himself from the gaping jaws of death, he engages in ceaseless activity and amusement. The practice of being still in My Presence is almost a lost art, yet it is this very stillness that enables you to experience My eternal love. You need the certainty of my loving Presence in order to weather the storms of life. During times of severe testing, even the best theology can fail you if it isn’t accompanied by experiential knowledge of Me. The ultimate protection against sinking during life’s storms is devoting time to develop your friendship with Me.
My daughters are still searching for their own God. I have found mine. His name is Jesus, her name is God, their name is Holy Spirit.
For me, God offers Jesus as a portal of understanding God’s nature. Jesus’ humanness bridges many gaps. He is God’s fullest expression of divine love. He is death distilled.
It may be through the Pandemic God is calling humankind to reclaim the perspective of eternity.
Multitudes of vibrant flowers, kaleidoscopes of colours, rapturous music, people with arms spread wide in welcome describe the experiences of near-death survivors. Embraced on the other side of life by joy, hope, peace and love doesn’t seem like a fear-filled void, but death distilled.
Comforting words for me.
Death Distilled: What in your life helps to distill the fear of death?
[1]Freeman J. Dyson, Disturbing the Universe (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 250.
[2] Quoted in Paul Davies, The Accidental Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 118.
[3] Paul Davies, Superforce: The Search for a Grand Unified Theory of Nature (New York: Simons and Schuster, 1984), 242.
[4] Stephan Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam Books, 1996), 126.
[5] Walter L. Bradley, “The ‘Just So’ Universe,” in Signs of Intelligence, ed. William A. Dembski and James M. Kushiner (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2001), 169.
[6] Roger Penrose, The Emperor’s New Mind New York: Oxford, 1989), 344.
[7] Paul Davies, Cosmic Jackpot (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 149.