Sunday, September 21, 2025
Sunday Reflection: What happens when you die?
I was watching a TV show where a guy-- a man who was pretty lost and troubled-- asked a guru "what happens when you die?"
It struck me that people think about that quite a bit. The only true answer, unless you have been dead, is "I don't know"-- a very hard answer for people to accept.
In the TV show, a the guru, a Buddhist, said that it is as if we are a drop of water that leaps from the ocean and then, in death, falls back into it; that is, into the greater consciousness or whole. It was a description that was very close to how I have often thought of it, which is as a blade of grass in a beautiful field or a drop of water that goes from Minnehaha Creek to the Mississippi to the ocean.
Jesus taught that "At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage, they will be like the angels in heaven." Matthew 22:30. That has to be alarming to those that think marriage is truly eternal, but it is consistent with the idea that we all return to a greater whole, stripped of worldly identifiers. And it's not that married people will be separated-- but rather joined with all.
Think what that idea does to our ideas about the poor and reviled and outcast: someday we will be with them, in the same way we are with our family. Shouldn't that impact the way we act now?
I do know this. My dad had a heart attack and was revived, though his speech was impaired and he was in intensive care. He lived another two weeks. In that time I was in his hospital room when he pointed upward and said "it's beautiful."
That, I believe.
