This week’s question asks if the reader, including me, believes in life after death. The question implies that, after weighing and balancing one’s own experience and knowledge, a decision, a choice, can be made on the question of whether there is, or is not, life after death. Which answer is true for you, the questioner asks.
The question reminds me of a story Stanley Hauerwas tells from his days of teaching a marriage course at the University of Notre Dame. Hauerwas promised his students that he was going to provide them with one absolute truth about marriage. This was an absolute that they could write down and always depend on when the going got rough in their marriage. The reason I love this story is that I have been married to my wife, Win, for over 50 years and I believe that what Hauerwas asked his students to write down is absolutely true. Hauerwas told the young men and women in his class to write down: “You always marry the wrong person.”
Behind this marvelous bit of teaching was the intent to punch holes in the presumptions the students brought regarding the critical importance of their choice of a mate. Hauerwas hoped that he might help the students recognize that no one can ever really know the person they are marrying. To further make his point Hauerwas told the students to write on the other side of the paper this mirror image absolute: “You always marry the right person.” And once again I know that this statement is also absolutely true.
Through hard times and good times marriage is a mutual journey, a life lived in close relationship with another human being, a journey of intimacy and transformation. Asking if the choice you have made of a mate is true for you is beside the point. Not that the choice is unimportant or without consequences, but such consequences can never be known until they gradually unfold in the drama of a lifetime.
In this season of life, as I near my 75th birthday, I am quite clear that I use this same lens to view my life as a Christian. Marcus Borg has written eloquently about the Christian journey as a dynamic journey of transformation, a journey of being in relationship with the Spirit of Christ. In contrast, Borg suggests that a common way of seeing the Christian life consists primarily of believing certain things about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. I know nothing about life after death, just as I knew nothing about the consequences and meaning of my initial choice to embark on the journey of Christian discipleship. Like my marriage, this trip with the Spirit of Christ has been far too eventful, far too surprising and beyond my imagining, to wrap in a statement of beliefs. That is not the way love works.
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