Life, in all its fullest

Would you like to hear some children’s prayers?

Dear God, maybe Cain and Abel would not kill each other so much if they had their own rooms. It works with my brother.

Dear God, I bet it is hard for you to love all of everybody in the whole world. There are only four people in our family and I can never do it.

Dear God, if you watch in church on Sunday I will show you my new shoes.

Dear God, I found out how babies are made. It doesn’t sound right to me.

Finally, and remember this one, Dear God, instead of letting people die and having to make new ones, why don’t you just keep the ones you’ve got now?

It is easy to mock the three-tier universe and the other now legendary anachronisms of the Christian tradition as childish, but this last prayer is not childish, because death throws everything we think we know into question. It makes us all children.

So don’t ever let anyone tell you the physical world does not allow for resurrection. Our best physical theories about the cosmos suggest a profound connection between a nothingness from which we originate and an infinity in which we are engulfed.

And when someone dies, they seem to become nothing. But what is no-thing?

Modern physics shows us that nothingness is in fact a seething mass of virtual particles, all appearing and disappearing trillions of times in the blink of an eye.

Using lasers in a vacuum chamber, science shows us that electrons within atoms are wobbled about by a deep and mysterious energy filling every single apparently empty space in the entire universe.

To put it another way, creation is full of God’s essence, as energy, and this is in fact just how the Orthodox Church does put it.

It isn’t just that the study of the physical world at its smallest levels can mathematically and scientifically predict these fluctuations in such a way that they exactly match the measurements in a vacuum chamber, but that a fluctuation within nothing can actually cause a universe full of matter.

And since God is not a thing, the light released after the Big Bang shows us how this nothing seems to have the most incredible potential.

So I repeat, even though it is easy to mock literal interpretations of much of the Bible and Church tradition, don’t let anyone tell you that the physical world does not allow resurrection. On the contrary, tell them how it does, since as far as our physics can tell, the physical world is actually spiritual.

The world allowed resurrection two thousand years ago, and it still does. New life still comes out from despair and destruction, whatever that is, for you. Resurrection, here-and-now, and not only for this life.

As St Paul says, if only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

What do I mean? Well, for example, in her book, On Life After Death, which you can still buy, the pioneer in the field of death and dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, shares a provocative personal experience about her meeting Mrs. Schwarz, a woman she worked with who had died ten months earlier. At the time, she, Elizabeth, was about to give up her work. She was exasperated.

And she says this: “A woman walked straight toward me and said, ‘Dr. Ross, I had to come back. Do you mind if I walk you to your office? It will only take two minutes.’ But this was the longest walk of my life. I am a psychiatrist. I work with schizophrenia. When patients would have hallucinations, I would tell them, ‘I know you see that Madonna on the wall, but I don’t see it.’ So I said to myself, ‘Elisabeth, I know you see this woman, but that can’t be.’

"And all the way to my office I did reality testing on myself, and when we reached my door, she opened it with this incredible kindness and tenderness and love, and said: ‘Dr. Ross, I had to come back, to thank you, and because you cannot stop this work on death and dying, not yet.’ I looked at her, and I don’t know if I thought by then, it could be Mrs. Schwarz. I mean, this woman had been buried for ten months, and I didn’t believe in all that stuff.

"But I finally got to my desk. I touched everything that was real. I touched my pen, my desk, my chair. I was hoping that she would disappear. But she didn’t. Then the scientist in me won, and I said something very shrewd. ‘Reverend Gaines would just love to have a note from you. Would you mind?’ And this woman, knowing every thought I had, and I knew it, took the paper and wrote a note.

"Then she got up, and ready to leave, repeated, ‘Dr. Ross, you promise,’ implying don’t give up the work. So I said, ‘I promise.’ And at that moment, she disappeared.”

Don’t let anyone tell you the physical world does not allow resurrection.

You may not personally have seen it yet, but as the gospel says, blessed are those who have not, and yet have come to believe.

Blessed, because a life lived in the hope, the trust, the intuition, the knowledge, or yes, even the experience, that death is not the end of life, is life lived closer to perfection.

The Bible says that through believing in Jesus you may have life in his name, but what does this actually mean?

It means to believe in the life which he represents.

The life of your true Self, not your ego.

That life which is both before and after you.

Your real life.

Spiritual life.

Matter is in life, not the other way around.

Which is it to be then?

St Paul says if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and those who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost.

And what does that ‘in Christ’ really mean?

‘Learn Christ’ says the letter to the Ephesians.

Not ‘learn Christianity.’

The first chapter of Colossians and Ephesians says that the whole universe is in Christ. It doesn’t mean the whole universe was in Jesus, the man who walked Nazareth, but in the cosmic mind principle he embodied, and we can too.

Because as St Paul goes on in 1 Corinthians: The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised 'pneumatikon soma', a spiritual body.

So do not let anyone tell you the physical world does not allow resurrection.

Physical death, whenever and however it happens in a life, as an emotional psychological death, or as full brain death, throws everything we think we know into question.

It makes us all children.

But that’s OK.

The remarkable thing about children is their very deep trust in life. Let this be your trust.

Not a 'Dear God, thank you for the baby brother, but I actually prayed for a puppy', but a thank God, thank God for life in all its fullest.

The life which was in Jesus, and which still is.

In the name of Father Son and Holy Spirit, Amen+