Mortality, and How We Distract Ourselves From Dealing With It…

Copyright by Shea Oakley.
All rights reserved

There has probably never been a time or place in human history when and where it has been so easy to ignore questions of eternal existence as it is now in the West. Today we have so many temporal diversions offering every kind of false transcendence that literally millions have spent little or no time pondering the ramifications of what happens a moment after they die. We are diverted from such thoughts by the busyness of our Post-Modern lives, by obsessions with sex, money and power, by a mass-media that vies for our constant attention and by beguiling technology that eats up the leisure time we might otherwise spend on deep thought and meditation.

It was not always so.

For the majority of history most human beings knew lives that were tenuous at best and most often short by our standards. Mortality and want went hand in hand and death was not something easily pushed out of the mind by convenient distractions. It is really only during the past century that material and technological progress has created a so-called “First-World” in which so many live to an advanced age in comfort unknown to their ancestors. The very nature of life in past era’s put the stark fact of death before everyone’s eyes and people faced with death on a day to day basis have a much stronger tendency to wonder if their might be a better world coming or, for that matter, a worse one.

Of course religion had a far greater hold on people’s attention throughout those centuries, perhaps another result of their being more aware during those times of the temporary nature of life in this world. Beyond that the Judeo-Christian tradition dominant in the West taught that the God of the Universe had created humankind in His image and that part of that image included perpetual existence. This tradition also taught the concept that our actions and affiliations here on Earth during the time we were here would determine the kind of existence that would be.

Most theologically conservative Judeo-Christians, of course, still teach this concept today, but it seems that the popular mind isn’t too terribly interested in it. We are far too busy being entertained, pleasured and otherwise distracted and the idea that there might be a place called Heaven and a place called Hell, and that we might end up in one or the other forever, is just too much to think about.

(Of course we may not feel that way the day we get the bad report from the doctor or, worse, the moment the sudden fatal heart attack eliminates our ability to consider and perhaps change our final destiny.)

So no one likes to think about death and, today, fewer and fewer people in our part of the world consciously do. But now, as always, the wise still learn to number their limited days on this planet and they also do well in seeking the One who holds the potentially endless days beyond this life in the palm of His hands.