Come, Follow Me March 25-31: Easter
In 2024, the Maxwell Institute will offer a weekly series of short essays on the Book of Mormon, in support of the Church-wide Come, Follow Me study curriculum. Each week, the Maxwell Institute blog will feature a post by a member of the Institute faculty exploring an aspect of the week’s reading block. We hope these explorations will enrich your study and teaching of the Book of Mormon throughout the coming year.
Make a Little Space for Death
By Philip L. Barlow
Easter is soon upon us. A comely season, no matter the weather. A time of promise and hope, of renewal and imminent or arrived beauty. Whatever can T.S. Eliot have been thinking when he decreed April the cruelest month?
Christ’s resurrection–and through his, ours–is proper cause for jubilation. Resurrection, however, presupposes death. This pairing is definitional, too obvious to mention…but perhaps not quite. Not quite, because Easter’s celebration, or our familiarity with it (or societal custom or our personal obliviousness) can obscure death, especially if we are young and have not gazed into its maw. It might be worth pausing during this season to give death its due, lest we cheapen our wonder at the notion of Christ’s conquest of it. We adhere to resurrection on the witness of others and of the Holy Spirit; death we will in time witness directly here on Earth. Maybe Eliot was being more than grumpy when he wrote. Maybe he did not want to raise his hopes, nor ours–as though the wasteland of modern life to which his famous poem pointed were worth the cost on its own terms, without faith in a wider horizon. Perhaps April’s sham hope seemed to him a dangerous folly, what with its “breeding Lilacs out of the dead land” and all. April is indeed the cruelest month if winter is the last and truest season.
Portions of the Book of Mormon do not romanticize the grave. Its authors reject this temptation, where they do, to help us sense the grandeur of the Lord’s subjugation of it. Jacob goes so far as to link death with hell, calling them jointly and repeatedly a “monster.” Without filter he warns of the fearsome “grasp of this awful monster; yea, that monster, death and hell, which I call the death of the body, and also the death of the spirit.” Lacking an infinite divine intervention, he insists, our demise would have been of endless duration. “And if so, this flesh must have laid down to rot and to crumble to its mother earth, to rise no more.” (2 Nephi 9:7, 10)
How might we avoid taking for granted the pervasive miracle of the overthrow of this monster?
One option would be to meditate on the blessing the restoration affords us to value our physical as well as our spiritual selves. A portion of humanity construes “spirit” as unreal (“materialists”). Another portion, including ancient Gnostics and traditions akin to contemporary Christian Science, have held that physicality is either inferior, illusory, or a prison to be escaped: our body hungers, it wants, it lusts, it tires; it suffers, decays, stinks, and dies. Others yet respect the body in theory, but have an uneasy relationship with their own: it won’t do as they bid it; it seems not as conventionally beautiful as someone else’s. For many, the prospect of resurrection is implausible or repellant. Joseph Smith was a prophetic midwife to something profound when he taught that our souls were a compound of spirit and body necessary for a fulness of joy; that spirit too is matter; that “that which is neither body or parts is nothing”; that the pursuit of physical health is an aspect of the gospel; that being created in the image of God is more literal and consequential than we comprehend; that resurrection is part of atonement and the work and glory of God. These and other topics might preoccupy us fruitfully as we ponder resurrection. However, in this brief space I would like to propose a different line of Easter inquiry.
Might we better grasp the wonder of resurrection if we first allowed more room for the reality of death? I do not wish to champion morbidity nor encourage a wallowing in self-indulgent misery. However, it is possible to short-circuit a healthy grieving process, as well as to trivialize both death and the resurrection, in our rush to get to happy endings while skirting over the path that gives them their amplitude. We can hardly comprehend the ultimate if we do not experience the penultimate enroute, in all its emotional, psychological, and spiritual dimensions. We understand immortality more dimly if we do not first apprehend the limits of mortality. I am grateful for an honest faith in eternal realms, yet there is another sense in which it is our mortality that gives our lives meaning. In our divinely sponsored veiled condition, it is this life, on this earth, in the here and now, surrounded by present people and essential tasks on which we are invited to concentrate–all without losing faith in the divine and the “beyond.” I suspect that after our time of resurrection, as in our own world, there will be a vast difference in the present tense (“I am”) and the present perfect tense (“I have become”).
There are forces in modern culture and in our psyches that militate against this kind of attention and keep us from focusing on the things that matter most: diversions and busyness that amount to a kind of “denial of death” or what the Christian philosopher Soren Kierkegaard called “tranquilizing with triviality.” But death’s inevitability has a way of poking holes in our defenses. These are symbolized in many religious traditions, such as the tale of “the (first) three sights” the original Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, saw when he left his family palace after living a sheltered life: the sight of an old man, then of a sick man, and finally of a corpse on a funeral pyre. The shock of this revelation of life’s transitoriness led ultimately to his “awakening,” but has led many to despair.
Perhaps like you, I have had personal jolts to complement my own “intimations of mortality,” jolts that conveyed the deathfulness of death. One occurred at the “viewing” prior to my father’s funeral when I impulsively approached his casket and kissed his forehead. In his embalmed state, his skin did not yield. My lips met a hard and wooden surface, an object, not my father. Before that kiss I knew this abstractly; during and after that kiss, I knew it viscerally, immediately, and more deeply. I am graced with faith in the basic doctrines of the restoration, but I found I was not helped much in processing the death of my father at the time of his funeral by hearing doctrines of eternity pronounced as reassurance to the assembled audience nor by well-meant declarations that “he is in a better place” or “everything happens for a reason.” I was helped more by inquiries into his life and by gestures of compassion unadorned by unbidden counsel and assertion.
All this has parallels to our attempt to honor Christ’s resurrection. The meaning of his triumphant resurrection, reign, and gospel would be less accessible to us if we had only hortatory epistles, revelations, and proclamations about it. We also need the gospels, their narratives of the unfolding story of Christ’s path, his teaching and confrontations, his suffering, his real human experience–and his death. The full meaning of Christ’s emergence from the tomb depends on his Gethsemane and Golgotha that preceded it. We ought not speed through the concept and experience of death in our haste toward resurrection.
And if we choose to slow down to consider that thought, a final and practical suggestion for implementation might be to heed church leaders and members who in recent time have called our attention to the “holy week” preceding Easter. [1]
Practicing such attention is awesome.
[1] For examples see https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/comeuntochrist/easter/holy-week;
Eric D. Huntsman & Trevan G. Hatch, Greater Love Hath No Man: A Latter-day Saint Guide To Celebrating the Easter Season (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book and BYU’s Religious Studies Center), 2023.