The New Gospel

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Gilgamesh, where are you roaming?&nbsp; You will never find the eternal life that you seek.&nbsp; When the gods created mankind, they also created death, and they held back eternal life for themselves alone.&nbsp; Humans are born, they live, and they die, that is the order that the gods have decreed.&nbsp; But until the end comes, enjoy your life … savor your food, make each of your days a delight … let music and dancing fill your house, love the child who holds you by the hand, and give your wife pleasure in your embrace.&nbsp; That is the best way for a man to live.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">As the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity.&nbsp; The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning.&nbsp; So one generation of men will grow while another dies.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Accustom thyself to believe that death is nothing to us … For life has no terrors for him who has thoroughly apprehended that there are no terrors for him in ceasing to live.&nbsp; Foolish, therefore, is the man who says that he fears death, not because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect … Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">For just as children tremble and fear all things in blind darkness, so we in the light, fear, at times, things that are no more to be feared than what children shiver at in the dark and imagine to be at hand.&nbsp; This terror of the mind, therefore, and this gloom must be dispelled, not by the sun’s rays nor the bright shafts of day, but by the aspect and law of nature.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Reflect that there are no ills to be suffered after death, and the reports that make the Lower World terrible to us are mere tales, that no darkness is in store for the dead, no prisons, no blazing streams of fire … Death is a release from all suffering, a boundary beyond which our ills cannot pass—it restores to us that peaceful state in which we lay before we were born.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I do not fear death, in view of the fact that I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.&nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I certainly have my own fears of annihilation.&nbsp; But I also know that I had no existence for the 13.8 billion years that the universe existed before my birth, and I expect the same will be true after my death.&nbsp; The universe is not about me or any other individual; we come and we go as part of a much larger process.&nbsp; More and more I am content with this awareness.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Cowards die many times before their deaths,</em></p><p><em>The valiant never taste of death but once.</em></p><p><em>Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,</em></p><p><em>It seems to me most strange that men should fear,</em></p><p><em>Seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">When a man is dead, he is dead.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The finest achievement for humanity is to recognize our predicament, including our insecurity and our coming extinction [mortality], and to maintain our cheerfulness and love and decency in spite of it, to prosecute our ideals in spite if it.&nbsp; We have many good things to contemplate and high things to do.&nbsp; Let us do them.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The tide rises, the tide falls.</em></p><p><em> The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;</em></p><p><em> Along the sea-sands damp and brown</em></p><p><em> The traveler hastens toward the town,</em></p><p><em> And the tide rises, the tide falls.</em></p><p><em> Darkness settles on roofs and walls,</em></p><p><em> But the sea, the sea in darkness calls;</em></p><p><em> The little waves, with their soft, white hands,</em></p><p><em> Efface the footprints in the sands,</em></p><p><em> And the tide rises, the tide falls.</em></p><p><em> The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls</em></p><p><em> Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls;</em></p><p><em> The day returns, but nevermore</em></p><p><em> Returns the traveler to the shore,</em></p><p><em> And the tide rises, the tide falls.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">There might be something more after death, but my hunch is that this is all we get.&nbsp; It’s one of the reasons I tell my children and my wife that I love them every time I see them.&nbsp; It’s one of the reasons I rarely fail to notice birds soaring above my head and green grass beneath my feet.&nbsp; It’s probably one of the reasons why I have had an extremely happy life so far.&nbsp; I acknowledge death for what it is—death.&nbsp; Therefore I am highly motivated to be fully alive while I am alive.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Oh, threats of hell and hopes of paradise!</em></p><p><em>One thing at least is certain – this life flies;</em></p><p><em>One thing is certain, and the rest is lies;</em></p><p><em>The flower that once has blown forever dies.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">When we fully understand the brevity of life, its fleeting joys and unavoidable pains; when we accept the fact that all men and women are approaching on inevitable doom; the consciousness of it should make us more kindly and considerate of each other.&nbsp; This feeling should make men and women use their best efforts to help their fellow travelers on the road, to make the path brighter and easier … for the wayfarers who must live a common life and die a common death.</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Death puts an end to human life as the time open to either accepting or rejecting the divine grace manifest in Christ … Each man receives his eternal retribution in his immortal soul at the moment of his death, in a particular judgment that refers his life to Christ: either entrance into the blessedness of heaven — through a purification or immediately — or immediate and everlasting damnation. &nbsp;</em></p>

<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother’s hand of life, of crown, of queen, at once dispatch’d: cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, unhousel’d [without communion], disappointed [without penance], unanel’d [without extreme unction]; no reck’ning made [without confession], but sent to my account with all my imperfections on my head.&nbsp; O, horrible! O, horrible! most horrible!</em></p>