![]() I have a dark mentality, I’m not a good-natured individual, I’m socially adroit but not particularly good-natured, not easygoing I do want to kill everybody in the subway when it’s hot and they have my seat-and so I understand suffering. I mean, I worship the resurrected Christ.” And I was like, well we all do, but where are we? … I suffer a lot, I just do. ![]() I remember saying, when I became Catholic: “You go up, and there’s that gory, bloody, butchered body on the cross. Poet/memoirist Mary Karr memorably described this tension: Understandably, many are eager to look away from the “morbid” carnality of the crucifixion and focus only on the resurrection. #LOFI BOOM SPEAKER HOW TO#How to cope is something about which Christians, too, are split. They’re unique and not standardized… It makes it a celebration of life and not such a morbid affair…” “Services are more life-centered, around the person’s personality, likes and dislikes. Now, many families are replacing funerals (where the body is present) with memorial services (where the body is not). Families want to put the “fun” in funerals. Instead, end-of-life ceremonies are being personalized: golf-course cocktail send-offs, backyard potluck memorials, more Sinatra and Clapton, less “Ave Maria,” more Hawaiian shirts, fewer dark suits. Somber, embalmed-body funerals, with their $9,000 industry average price tag, are, for many families, a relic. Heller explains:Īn increasingly secular, nomadic and casual America is shredding the rules about how to commemorate death, and it’s not just among the wealthy and famous. To soften a painful reality, many are reorienting funerals toward opportunities to celebrate life rather than mourn the loss of it. This is the number many people are now calling as we approach a “death boom.” Given that baby boomers are “not getting any younger,” says Karen Heller, it is estimated that the death rate will outpace population growth by 2037. ![]() Religions like Hinduism and Buddhism performed the ingenious trick of pretending not to want what you really want most.” In his Denial of Death, Ernest Becker wrote, “All historical religions addressed themselves to this same problem of how to bear the end of life. So the cross is one response to the ancient complaint of mortality. God, Revelation tells us, will make “all things new.” For now, though, we are part of a drama unfolding in a broken world, one in which God chose to become a protagonist.Ģ. What God offers instead is the promise that he is with us in our suffering that he can bring good out of it (life out of death, forgiveness out of sin) and that one day he will put a stop to it and redeem it. Scott readily concedes that there’s no good answer to the question, “Why is there suffering?” Jesus never answers that question, and even if we had the theological answer, it would not ease our burdens in any significant way. ![]() The cross is not only God’s way of saying we are not alone in our suffering, but also that God has entered into our suffering through his own suffering. Scott Dudley, the senior pastor at Bellevue Presbyterian Church in Bellevue, Wash., and a lifelong friend, pointed out to me that on the cross God was reconciling the world to himself - but God was also, perhaps, reconciling himself to the world. ![]() He is not remote, indifferent, untouched or unscarred. In a Times op-ed “ What It Means to Worship a Man Crucified as a Criminal,” Peter Wehner beautifully and efficiently summarizes that meaning:įrom the perspective of Christianity, one can question why God allows suffering, but one cannot say God doesn’t understand it. Off-putting and oft-baffling, the cross carries a multifaceted meaning that can prove elusive for onlookers and skeptics (and, much of time, believers). Today is Good Friday, which means, if ever there were a time to consider the brutal instrument of death at the center of a major world religion, that time may as well be now. ![]()
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