Last updated on May 6, 2014
Life can turn harsh sometimes.
After a lovely meeting with two of my new church’s pastors in which most of my concerns were addressed for church membership (I call that a big high five), I had to put my cat to sleep. Apparently, he stood on the precipice of death and probably only could last two more days at most. Heartbreaking stuff, to say the least.
And really, if Christian tradition teaches us anything, it’s that animals aren’t creatures with souls, and they’re certainly not going to Heaven or anything of the sort. Even so, I felt a taste of the constant state of entropy clouding over the spiritual and physical universe. Rather than grief, all I can feel is an emotional hole and a strange absence. Where did Meeko go? He was just here, and now he’s gone. He was my cat for more than half my life, and now he just isn’t there.Things change, but people stay with us whether alive or dead. Pets count too, I guess.
You don’t realize how many of your habits rely on circumstances staying exactly the same. Once something you did for seventeen years suddenly ups and disappears, you realize it was there. Your unconscious mind just assumes things, and the breaking of habit lets you see and appreciate how things were. When everything sits in the reign of stability and nothing touches your bubble of reality, it’s easy to take everything for granted.
But life, in whatever form, cannot return and cannot come back. Once a pet dies, it certainly isn’t going to return. That’s it – life isn’t permanent, even though it was certainly God’s intention to make it that way. Humanity messed up, and now everyone subsequent to that must pay the price of sin in viewing death everywhere, civilization and nature alike. Change and deterioration exists all around.
I think that’s what Paul means when he says that “death loses its sting”, at least in one way.
But when this perishable will have put on the imperishable, and this mortal will have put on immortality, then will come about the saying that is written, “Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law; but thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your toil is not in vain in the Lord.
1 Corinthians 15:54-58
How can death really affect you when you know, in your heart of heart, that Jesus lives? All that mourning and grieving will exist as a distant temporal memory, a time when we lived with the consequence of human failings. Right now, we’re in the thick of it, but hope exists – you just need to believe in the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things unseen. That’s why they call it faith, yes?
That’s as good of an obituary for an animal that I can write. Farewell Meeko, and here’s to hoping that the future holds a reality without suffering, pain, and death. We’re in the wrong place, but we can find ourselves in the right place.
ALL the optimism of the age had been false and disheartening for this reason, that it had always been trying to prove that we fit in to the world. The Christian optimism is based on the fact that we do NOT fit in to the world. I had tried to be happy by telling myself that man is an animal, like any other which sought its meat from God. But now I really was happy, for I had learnt that man is a monstrosity. I had been right in feeling all things as odd, for I myself was at once worse and better than all things. The optimist’s pleasure was prosaic, for it dwelt on the naturalness of everything; the Christian pleasure was poetic, for it dwelt on the unnaturalness of everything in the light of the supernatural. The modern philosopher had told me again and again that I was in the right place, and I had still felt depressed even in acquiescence. But I had heard that I was in the WRONG place, and my soul sang for joy, like a bird in spring. The knowledge found out and illuminated forgotten chambers in the dark house of infancy. I knew now why grass had always seemed to me as queer as the green beard of a giant, and why I could feel homesick at home.
– G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
