Resurrection Dazzle
Resurrection Dazzle
Ashley Lande
Father’s Day of this past year marked three years since my dad passed away. I should be honoring his life, luxuriating in cozy memories of how he’d lift me up to pet the velvety muzzle of our spotted horse, or how I could pinch the age-stippled skin on the back of his bronzed hand and marvel at how slowly it returned to level, or how he always said “sounds like a personal problem” in response to any dilemma, especially the most mundane. Or perhaps I should be honoring the memories of how his anxious, roving mind and most likely undiagnosed low-level Tourette’s caused his shoulders to jerk erratically and had him constantly adjusting his glasses and how this incessant nervy movement imperiled the ever-lengthening ash end of the menthol cigarette he was always holding. And I am, with the usual mix of joy and sorrow and longing. But I also I can’t stop thinking about death.
He lasted barely 24 hours in the hospice, lapsing gradually from fitful consciousness to a morphine-slumber as we orbited around him anxiously. Finally, his labored, glottal breathing just stopped. It was an inhale, I believe, that last breath, and after the chaplain calmed my gasping hysteria and my mother returned, breathless, from her errand to retrieve the paperwork the hospice required, we were ushered into a seating area and told to wait while the nurses prepared his body. I walked out into the courtyard garden.
It was nearing midday, and the humidity imbued the air with a soporific pall, but I felt keenly awake, despite a near-sleepless night where, at one point, I could have sworn I opened my eyes to see my father standing beside the hospice bed, robed in white. When I shut my eyes and reopened them, it was my mother who stood there, comforting him in the last bout of restlessness he’d suffer before the end, with the exception of being bathed later that morning—an intrusion of indignity that I think may have hastened his exit.
*
My dad was ready to die. Not on Father’s Day that year, which fell four days prior to his passing. Not on Monday, either, or Tuesday—but by Wednesday something had changed. A peace attended him, something ineffable beyond opioid-induced sedation: it was holy. He asked to hear “Jesus Loves Me” and we sang it, our voices cracking. The fear of death that had dogged him, and which tracks all of us like prey, a shadow skulking about menacingly behind the trees, had fled for good. In its absence peace infused the air, the light, dying and living flesh, my bones and his.
In the courtyard garden of the hospice, I watched one of those labyrinthine wind-catcher sculptures weave and fold into itself again and again. Sorrow overwhelmed me, but what seemed a strange companion walked alongside it, weaving about like a metallic spindle of the wind sculpture, flashing light with each turn as it danced inextricably with its sister, Sorrow: Joy.
I had seen ugly, dark death, when my sister had died from an addiction we didn’t even know she had eight months prior. Now I had seen a holy death—still, with its own ugliness: buzzing and clicking and blinking medical equipment, fugues of terminal restlessness that had compelled him to struggle to leave the bed and then collapse again in ragged breathing as his wasted lungs reeled from the effort, the insomniac tension of waiting for something terrible. Incredibly, crushingly, devastatingly sad. Sad beyond sad. But hope was present, too, sometimes as an unwelcome, irrationally cheery optimist, others as a lifeboat to which I clung, nearly desolate, on a dark sea of chaos.
Could it be, as the Apostle Paul said, that hope would not put me to shame? That the death and rumored resurrection of a vagabond Jewish preacher which transpired in the shadow of an empire on the other side of the planet some 2,000 years ago had eternal meaning, for me, for my dad, and indeed was the event from which meaning itself reverberated?
In my rawer moments, I think: how totally implausible. Almost anything would be more plausible than this suffering God who defeats death by dying, including thethings I believed in my new age acidhead days: dolphins as extraterrestrial higher beings; a the Illuminati, the so-called Singularity, the moment at which the processing capacity of robots will somehow eclipse human ability in every respect and every knee will bow and every tongue confess that AI is lord, if transhumanists are to be believed.
Much of our cultural thinking about death these days is directed toward avoiding it at all costs, a promise which we look to technology to fulfill with something resembling worshipful investiture. We have pinned our hopes not on resurrection, it seems, but on a technological utopia where our troublesome “wetware” (the disconcerting techie term for flesh and blood) will increasingly be eclipsed by artificial parts or artificially regenerated. We can live forever, not by faith but by science. The idea is seductive. But I suspect it will cost us much more than we are prepared to pay.
I read recently that Peter Thiel, co-founder of Paypal with Musk, is passionately interested in and may very well have begun the practice of parabiosis, a kind of quasi-scientific vampirism wherein the blood of the young is injected into the affluent old in the interest of prolonging life.
I watched a Veritas Forum discussion between N.T. Wright and Thiel, wherein Wright played too much the affable British uncle and handled Thiel with kid gloves as he made such statements, when asked whether he’d ever choose to “pull the plug” on an artificially extended life, “I’d live in such a way that I’d never want to pull the plug”. Yet the idea of being periodically injected with the blood of virgins, having our natural organs gradually replaced by cyborgian gadgets and our genes tinkered with, which methods many transhumanists breathlessly extol as the wave of the future, starts to sound suspiciously close to hell to me.
Yet Thiel made some points that, although they caused an uneasy stirring in my gut and a vague resistance in my heart, were difficult to refute. They glanced against the truth but then diverted in a materialist direction. The letter was there, at least initially, but the Spirit had flown.
“If we think everyone is doomed to a fate of old age and death, we’re setting our sights too low,” he said. And later: “The one thing I really agree with in Christianity is that death is evil, and death is wrong, and we should not accept it and we should fight it.” He added that people liked to be opposed to indefinite artificial life extension in theory, but in every particular case where a chance is given for a life to be extended, they take it.
*
I’m not convinced that death is the ultimate evil. Yes, it is the last enemy to be defeated (1 Cor 15:26), but the question remains—has it been defeated by annihilation? Or has it been siphoned of its power to sting, its power to keep us down, its power to have the final and definitive word about where our little war-torn rock, stained with Cain’s blood still crying out to Almighty God, spinning within this ancient star-dappled and shadow-shot universe of constant death and rebirth is careening toward? Could it be that Jesus’ blood has spoken a better word than even the erasure and annihilation of death itself? What do we make of the fact that he defeated death not by living indefinitely in the literal physical body of decay into which he was born, but by dying?
I have to wonder: does Peter Thiel not feel the death? The death that sinks deep into his bones, the death that hisses in the night, the death that causes us to not do what we would do and do that which we would not, as Paul says. Even those who do not live by a morality derived from Jesus still have a moral code of their own creation, a law—even if it be hedonism—which enslaves and puts them to shame. This rot runs deeper than skin or even cells or even DNA.
*
My dad was ready to die. He’d signed a DNR. He was tired. The C-PAP machine painfully inflated his digestive tract with air—that was perhaps one of the ugliest parts of his dying, having to watch him suffer with a distended stomach for which the nurses had little solution other than chalky Alka Seltzer tablets. Perhaps, Thiel might argue, with greater technology he would have cybernetic lungs by now and never be in that position. If we could just eliminate dying, and by extension eliminate suffering—is this not a deeply humane imperative, and a Christian one besides?
No. Well, sort of. Yes. But not exactly. I know, I know—it’s easy for me to say when I’m not currently the one doing the dying, or the abject suffering. But what if suffering and death is part of what makes us human? What if suffering is part of what shapes us into the likeness of Christ? I suspect that, even if technology somehow allowed us to eliminate physical and mental suffering (of which I am extremely dubious, not the least because we humans are notoriously poor at identifying what constitutes good and bad, despite Adam and Eve having eaten the rancid fruit), we would find a way to invent new means of feeling pain. Our bodies, condemned to earth, cobbled together from lab-grown organs, metallic bones and borrowed or stolen blood, would still long for transcendence. We hunger and thirst for righteousness, for rightness. For transformation, for restoration that material means cannot provide. It’s part of our humanness, inextricable from it.
*
Meghan O’Gieblyn writes, in an essay chronicling her departure from Christianity and dabbling in transhumanistic hope before returning to a chilly brand of atheistic materialism, of the disorientation she underwent after giving up on God, and, indeed, any brand of transcendence:
“My body had become strange to me; it seemed insubstantial. I went out of my way to avoid subway grates because I believed I could slip through them. One morning, on the train home from work, I became convinced that my flesh was melting into the seat. At the time, I would have insisted that my rituals of self-abuse—drinking, pills, the impulse to put my body in danger in ways I now know were deliberate—were merely efforts to escape; that I was contending, however clumsily, with the overwhelming despair at the absence of God. But at least one piece of that despair came from the knowledge that my body was no longer a sacred vessel; that it was not a temple of the holy spirit, formed in the image of God and intended to carry me into eternity; that my body was matter, and any harm I did to it was only aiding the unstoppable process of entropy for which it was destined.”
Later in the same essay, O’Gieblyn does the (very elegant, might I say) linguistic equivalent of shaking herself by the shoulders after she feels her old hope rising most inconveniently while listening raptly to the words of a Christian transhumanist whom she interviews.
“I could sense my reason becoming loosened by the lure of these familiar conspiracies. Somewhere, in the pit of my stomach, it was amassing: the fevered, elemental hope that the tumult of the world was authored and intentional, that our profound confusion would one day click into clarity and the broken body would be restored. Part of me was still helpless against the pull of these ideas.”
Part of me was still helpless against the pull of these ideas. But she is clear that this “part” must be tamped down, silenced, muffled for the wild-eyed religious hysteric it surely is—treated as nothing but a bothersome vestige of her childhood programming. “People who once believed, I have been told, are prone to recidivism,” she writes, when explaining why she’s had to stop thinking about the nearly religious dimension of transhumanism and her own abandoned faith. Like a thirsty alcoholic who can’t take a pull off a flask without going on a bender, she believes she must avoid the spiritual for fear of a hope-relapse.
*
But what if? What if it is that the author of life himself, the One in whom are rooted the truths she eschews, with an addled shake of her head, as though awaking from a dream, what if he planted eternity in the human heart? What if that is why this desire for transcendence, for life beyond life, for something, Dear God, to break like a jagged blue crack of lightning and split this supposedly closed system of mechanistic matter wide open, to illuminate it and make it live, really live—what if this desire is inescapable because it’s who we are? And maybe it’s suffering—including and perhaps most pronouncedly suffering of the absence of God—draws us back to Him.
C.S. Lewis advises, “Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in: aim at earth and you will get neither.” Peter Thiel says that we are aiming “too low” if we resign to aging and suffering and decrepitude and death. I think we’re aiming too low if we aim at transhumanism. Its proponents claim it is an outgrowth of technological optimism, but really, it parks resolutely in spiritual resignation. It aims at earth and earth alone.
These artificial efforts actually have more potential to dehumanize than to humanize. With no death, there is no risk. There is no courage. There is no redemptive arc to Iron Man’s story, there is no hope of future glory: there is just here, now, interminably. There is just... us. Fighting and fussing, maybe forever, or until the sun runs out, unless we can fix that.
*
I’m still magnetically drawn to taking a gamble on Jesus. You might say inescapably drawn. It’s like it’s coded into my DNA, and God forbid it ever be written out because the beauty of Jesus is my lifeblood. A million and one things are more plausible than the idea of a physically unremarkable nomadic preacher whose only notable accomplishment, according to secular history, was ticking off both his own kind and the Roman Empire to the point where the two conspired to kill him off. And yet, He is the fulcrum on which all of history and my very life turn.
My rational brain screams “give me transhumanism, give me science, give me Buddhism, give me something vague and impersonal that will allow me to not have to carry this death around, to not have to hold these paradoxes of suffering and glory until I feel like I’m gonna go mad.” And we do go mad. It’s enough to make you want to give it all up, like O’Gieblyn. These impossible paradoxes: suffering and glory, life and death, running our race while resting in grace, striving to heal and soothe this ravening world while knowing there is a kingdom to come which we could never bring about by our own miserable paltry power—they break us, if we allow ourselves to be broken. And there, in the broken place, in the secret place, the mystery of the Gospel sparkles bioluminescently, suddenly the only thing that makes any sense at all amid all this chaos. The body. The blood. Given for us.
Because somehow we can't know his glory without knowing his suffering. Somehow we can't really live until we've died. Somehow the natural echoes the spiritual, the soul echoes the flesh, the corrupt that could not become incorruptible of its own accord—it is changed in a cataclysmic flash, a cosmic sparkle, a resurrection dazzle, a molecular jamboree. The perishable becomes imperishable.
Jesus said “Unless a seed falls into the ground and dies, it produces no fruit.” Do I believe him? Is there something about dying that God, through Christ, has enveloped into himself, redeeming it instead of merely cancelling it, making it the wondrous and even necessary precursor to the glory of resurrection? Is there something about us trying to create some cheap facsimile of eternal life for ourselves that could lead only to ruin?
“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord,” Paul says in Romans 8:38. Some might say Paul is using a rhetorical device here, being hyperbolic for the sake of illustration, because why would heaven try to separate us from the love of God? Why would life do so? And Paul, we know, loved rhetorical flourishes. But I am inclined to think that perhaps, on some level, he meant exactly what he said. Life itself cannot separate us from the love of God.
*
My dad is ash now, part buried in the ground in Missouri, part scattered to a lucid river beneath a blazing-red-striated tower of rock in southern Utah and carried downstream to God only knows where. My dad himself? He’s God only knows where. But I believe some day I’ll know, too. I’m a Jesus recidivist down to my aging, matronly blood and my inviolable DNA (inviolable because I’ll be recoded over my dead body).
That day in the garden, just after my dad died, the world breathed. The Holy Spirit whispered in the flora. When we went back in to look at him after the nurses had turned him on his back and smoothed the linen across his shoulders, he was so clearly not there. My son, Israel, walked up and touched his hand, and then so did I, felt its cooling leather beneath my fingertips, that skin with its waning elasticity which I used to watch sink slowly back to a weathered topography of vein and bone. His features even looked different, foreign, like someone had painted a portrait of him from a blurry photo and gotten everything slightly wrong.
It was deeply unsettling, this death, and yet I’ve rarely been so sure, rarely fallen so far in my recidivism as I did that day when death loomed so large: this is not the end, but a sweeter beginning than we can fathom in our most fantastical utopic imaginings. Jesus accomplished far more than we even know. Death is now life’s servant, heralding a glory which we cannot fathom.
Ashley Lande
Artist & Writer
Ashley has been published in Fathom Magazine & (in)courage
Find her work here: ashleylande.com
Photography by Benjamin Suter