“What is Dying?”

Last updated on: January 31, 2018 at 3:30 pm by Dan Peterson

“What is Dying?” 2018-01-31T15:30:18-07:00 Dan Peterson

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Sunset at Carlsbad. California (Wikimedia Commons)

There have been a number of deaths over the past few days in our ward, neighborhood, and social circle. Some of them have been expected, while others (so far as I’m aware) haven’t been. We are saddened by these losses. But they’ve brought to mind again a poem that was apparently written by the Rev. Luther F. Beecher (d. 1903), who was a cousin of the much more famous Rev. Henry Ward Beecher (and, thus, related to Henry Ward Beecher’s sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the famous 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin). Sometimes, it’s called “A Parable of Immortality.” Sometimes it’s known as “What is Dying?” Here it is:

I am standing upon the seashore.
A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze
and starts for the blue ocean.
She is an object of beauty and strength,
and I stand and watch until at last she hangs
like a speck of white cloud
just where the sea and sky come down to mingle with each other.
Then someone at my side says,
“There she goes!”
Gone where?
Gone from my sight . . . that is all.
She is just as large in mast and hull and spar
as she was when she left my side
and just as able to bear her load of living freight
to the place of destination.
Her diminished size is in me, not in her.
And just at the moment
when someone at my side says,
“There she goes!”
there are other eyes watching her coming . . .
and other voices ready to take up the glad shout . . .
“Here she comes!”

***

In the spirit of that poem: Those who missed it will enjoy President Russell M. Nelson’s Facebook message for 29 January 2018:

https://www.facebook.com/lds.russell.m.nelson/

***

I share, again, a verse that has, somewhat to my surprise, become one of my favorite passages of scripture over the past two or three years:

Consider on the blessed and happy state of those that keep the commandments of God. For behold, they are blessed in all things, both temporal and spiritual; and if they hold out faithful to the end they are received into heaven, that thereby they may dwell with God in a state of never-ending happiness. O remember, remember that these things are true; for the Lord God hath spoken it. (Mosiah 2:41)

I suppose that it’s come to appeal to me because so many of those I knew are now gone. As the American poet James Russell Lowell (d. 1891) puts it in his “Epigrams: Sixty-Eighth Birthday”:

As life runs on, the road grows strange
With faces new, and near the end
The milestones into headstones change,
‘Neath every one a friend.

***

Here’s a record of an exchange between an unidentified but clearly well-read Latter-day Saint and a Catholic blogger. It’s posted by the Catholic blogger, who clearly thinks that his position is superior. (Not surprisingly, I do not.)

“Dialogue with a Mormon on God’s Nature & Transcendence”

***

The zealous atheists that I sometimes watch will not be pleased by this article, which suggests that American Christianity is not what is dying:

“New Harvard Research Says U.S. Christianity Is Not Shrinking, But Growing Stronger: Is churchgoing and religious adherence really in ‘widespread decline’ so much so that conservative believers should suffer ‘growing anxiety’? Absolutely not.”

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