The God of the Signs - The Sign of Death and Rebirth
[Editor's note: This is part of a series by Corban Klug, author of A Light in the Darkness. This series will be published in its entirety here at Every Square Inch.]
How the Voice of Creation Teaches the Heart to Believe
In addition to the signs of Beauty, Order, Consciousness, and Conscience, which declare by the impressions of logic and experience the original goodness of the created order, the rationality and necessary justice of God, and the paradoxical resplendence and fallenness of man, the Book of Creation also contains an extensive discursive on the realities of death, resurrection, and the afterlife, which I shall call the Sign of Death and Rebirth. As any student of Nature will attest, images of death and rebirth are redolent in the natural world. In time’s grand orchestra, the brilliance of day trembles at the approach of night’s deep darkness; yet such darkness is always eventually pierced by the warming glow of dawn. The seasons, too, bespeak this transition. As the tale of life is told in the regimented language of cultivation, the fragrant, freshness of spring rains prime the soil for the limpid growth of summer’s crop, which crop, come early autumn, is harvested both in preparation for winter’s dearth and in hopeful expectation of another spring. The same tale is told in the freer wilderness tongue, though rendered somewhat differently: In the fecund moisture of spring, the leaves of the forest bud and bloom, their green the color of newborn life; in the storms and heat of summer, such leaves expand and darken as they are aged by water and sun; in the cool breezes of autumn, their chlorophyllic life, having sustained them through half the year, drains slowly from their veins, sparking that last, flaming display of variegated glory before the restless foliage falls to the earth, leaving limb and branch to stand beneath cold, gray skies, wrapped in the bleak cloak of a winter. Then, after a period of quiescence and sleep, winter, too, passes by, and the light of the Sun, once frigid and distant, strengthens and warms until the thawing ground gives birth again to the living wonders of a new year.
The inexorable progress of birth, life, death, and rebirth in nature teach three overarching lessons: First, the Sign of Death and Rebirth instructs the thoughtful observer that ordered existence need not be static to be lovely; indeed, that movement and dynamic change, rather than larcenously opposing the longevity of present beauty actually ripen the glory of the world and participate in its essential goodness. Second, taken together with the Sign of Order, the Sign of Death and Rebirth declares that there is something especially harmonious about change when penned within the fences of an overarching and undergirding structure of metaphysical continuity. Thus, the Sign of Death and Rebirth exalts ordered, purposeful variation, or variation grounded in eternal soil. Third, when the lesson of dynamic beauty is juxtaposed with the lesson of an original Genius taught by the Sign of Consciousness, it can be seen that the Sign of Death and Rebirth adumbrates something of the divine life of the Creator, namely that he who spoke such cycles into being and envisioned the beauty of bounded change must value such change, indeed, must in some sense participate in such change, not, perhaps, in his essential nature (though change on such a level is certainly not precluded), but rather in his interaction with the Creation. The Signs of Death and Rebirth and Consciousness, of course, do not teach that the divine is in any sense capricious; rather only that if Beauty and Order, per se, have their origin in his generative Mind, then so must the particular beauty of process, of ordered change. How interesting it is, therefore, that the God of Genesis is depicted in relationship with man, walking with him in the Garden and participating in the constant metamorphosis of his existence. Moreover, how profoundly curious that Christian theologians studying the New Testament and particularly the writings of the Apostle John have long professed the doctrine of divine perichoresis in which the Father, Son and Spirit are envisaged not in the rigid stasis of Neo-Platonic unity but rather in the perpetual dance of ordered interrelationship, of call and response, of love given, received, and shared.
Beyond the lessons that arise from the cycles of nature, the Sign of Death and Rebirth also delivers a lesson of especial poignancy in the aging narrative of man himself. Recent studies on the process of dying have documented what ancient cultures and many modern end-of-life physicians have long appreciated—that the ordinary process of human dying encompasses far more than the final judgment of physical decay, that it is, in fact, an inescapably spiritual transformation. Given widespread and cross-cultural anecdotal evidence of so-called Near-Death Experiences, it is obvious that dying persons are generally granted something of a portal of transcendent sight between this world and another world altogether different from our own. What each dying person “sees” in the midst of such an experience is unique, but all generally receive a vivid, real-time foretaste of something approaching heavenly bliss or eternal damnation. While many critics denounce Near-Death Experiences as a sort of hallucinogenic accompaniment to the process of dying, such experiences, in truth, constitute only one element of the uniquely human Sign of Death and Rebirth. How many people who have observed the passing of a loved one have later testified, using whatever words their spiritual vocabulary could offer, that the departure of that person from the land of the living, when at last it happened, was in some sense palpable to the soul, as if the tangible flame of the person’s presence had been extinguished? Moreover, how many people on their deathbed, whether historically religious or irreligious, request spiritual counsel from a pastor or priest? In this latter respect, the portal to the hereafter is, for the dying, its own sign of God’s superintendence in the life of man and man’s duty of obeisance to God. For the living, on the other hand, the experience of the dying is another rehearsal of the pattern written into Creation, and it teaches the same lesson, though more explicitly, than day and night and the passage of the seasons—the lesson that death, though final in one sense, does not lead to total extinction of life but only to some kind of transition, the likes of which cannot be described (apart from the special revelation of Scripture), only anticipated with trepidation and penitence.
One might wonder why the lesson taught by the Sign of Death and Rebirth is not the reincarnational nature of human existence but rather the lesson of fear and trembling at the unknown beyond the divide. The obvious response is that the experience of the dying fundamentally undermines the premise of reincarnation and buttresses that of judgment and reward. That is, no Near-Death Experience of which I am aware has granted the enlightened soul a vision of future life as a rabbit, a deer, or an altogether different human being. But such a response is incomplete, for the Sign of Death and Rebirth is only one sign among seven at least that tell the story of God and man in the symbols and internal reason of Creation. Consequently, when pared with the Sign of Conscience, the Sign of Death and Rebirth testifies that the end of a man who has knowingly defied his conscience and embraced depravity ought to be ultimate judgment, not mere recycled existence somewhere in Creation. For even if a reincarnated soul’s status in the created order is diminished (e.g. from a man to a roach) as a result of misbehavior in his prior life, that soul nevertheless continues to abide in the physical context of divine blessing and never suffers the ignominy of ultimate divine censure. Finally, the concept of reincarnational judgment undermines the expectation of ultimate, cosmic remediation which arises from the teaching of Beauty, Order and Conscience. Under a paradigm of reincarnational judgment, the status quo is merely reordered; there is no New Creation, no restoration of all things. On the other hand, when the pattern of judgment is conceived as wrath and reward, there is room for a final reckoning in which history’s savage violence and mindless cruelty will be abolished and their tyranny replaced with a benign and righteous ordering of societal authorities under which true life, in all of its incidents and appearances, may flourish forevermore.
Next time: The Sign of Love
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