“She would fain have caught at the skirts of that departing time,
and prayed it to return, and give her back what she had too little valued
while it was yet in her possession. What a vain show Life seemed!
How unsubstantial, and flickering, and flitting!
It was as if from some aerial belfry,
high up above the stir and jar of the earth,
there was a bell continually tolling,
‘All are shadows!—all are passing!—all is past!”
~Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South
This recent rediscovery of my love of reading has unearthed several gems which have both ripped me out of my complacency and brought me face to face with reality in a way that only God could have planned. One of these gems was the book North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell. I went into the book knowing the bones of the story thanks to a BBC miniseries, but the book itself was so raw and deep, mercilessly delving into the brokenness and beauty of humanity in a way that firmly placed the story in my top five most beloved books.
During the story, the heroine is introduced as a kind and faithful woman, but with the great flaw of naivety. Her life has been happy and peaceful with no hint of death or mourning or hardship. Through a series of events she finds herself ripped from her home, and her character develops magnificently as she is forced to come face to face with death time and time again. She is humbled as she sees that some people more faithful than her are given lives of continual hardship, and that no life is free from these inevitable days of darkness.
In our culture we tend to forget, or choose to ignore, the reality of hardship and the looming certainty of death, whether of those that we love or of ourselves. We are shielded from death, we feel disconcerted and uncomfortable when someone we know grieves a death, and we constantly try to lift the ambience with uselessly cheerful words and gestures.
In many cases our frenzied schedules are an attempt to escape from the horrific realities of life, or to run from the imminent guarantee of death. Our fear of death causes us to spend precious hours of our lives in attempting to achieve lasting youth, forgetting the value of the life that approaches the darkness of death.
As I reached the end of North and South, we also approached the end of Ecclesiastes in our weekly study of the scriptures. The last two chapters are heavy with the same truth:
“So if a person lives many years, let him rejoice in them all; but let him remember that the days of darkness will be many. All that comes is vanity.” (Ecclesiastes 11:8)
“Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near of which you will say, ‘I have no pleasure in them.’ before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened and the clouds return after the rain, in the day when the keepers of the house tremble, and the strong men are bent…” (Ecclesiastes 12:1-3a)
The reality of death causes us to view life in a completely different way. When we are faced with the death of a loved one, or even faced with the failure of our own bodies, the veil is drawn away from our eyes and we realize how much of our lives are “vanity of vanities.” Worrying about where we will live, stressing over our children's success, parties and popularity, careers and politics, the vacations we went on, the concerts we saw…all become meaningless and our lives are stripped down to the relationships that were fostered during our allotted time.
I go even further than this, for in the last moments we are even stripped from those relationships as our darkened eyes cease to recognized the well-known faces of our spouses, children, and friends, and we sink into unconsciousness. In the last moments we are ultimately left with nothing but the relationship that we had or did not have with our Creator.
It is prudent to remember that we are guaranteed hardship and death. Our culture will say that pondering such things is morbid, but the truth is that it is realistic. More than that, those who are able to face the prospect of death with equanimity are those who learn to live in equal peace and full comfort. In other words, the person who knows how to face death is the person who knows how to face life in all of its complexity and difficulty. Therefore, the younger we are when we learn to shake hands with death, the fuller our lives can be and the less we have to fear.
The ultimate and final cure for a lifestyle of meaningless toil and an existence saturated with thoughtless activities, comes from a focus on that final treasure that we are left with when all of our temporal treasures are stripped from us one by one in death. “The Teacher” in Ecclesiastes, after chapters of text bordering on nihilism and flirting with despair, sums up his final chapter with words that instantly change the tone and meaning of the entire book: “The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.” (Ecclesiastes 12:13-14)
These words, written years before the birth of Christ, mysteriously foreshadow Christ’s summation of the purpose of man on earth to "love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength." and "love your neighbor as yourself." (Mark 12:29-31)
Our focus is so divided. We are out of our minds with stress trying to achieve all of the goals that we set for ourselves that will eventually be swept away by our deaths. Most of us work at a job that we do not really like for money that is here today and gone tomorrow, and for a legacy that will most likely be forgotten by the time our great-grandchildren are grown. Why are we toiling?
It should come as a great relief to us that our time and purpose here on earth can be boiled down to four words “Love God, Love Others.”
My labor and the birth of my daughter brought this truth home for me in a way that nothing else had before. Although short, those four hours were filled with the worst physical pain of my life as well as the hardest work. During those moments, there was no thought in my mind aside from the end result of my labor. I no longer cared about whether my house was clean, my bills were paid, or my outfit matched. All of my strength and might, all of my fortitude and presence of mind were focused on one goal: bringing my child into my arms.
The same should be true of our lives. All of our toil, and every last bit of strength both physically and mentally should be focused on the goal that Christ summarized as “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your mind and with all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. “
In so doing, the drudgery of our every day toil, and that job that we do not really like, suddenly become an exciting adventure as we are plunged headlong into God’s ultimate plan. Even the smallest moments suddenly have eternal significance, and the phrase “vanity of vanities, all is vanity” loses its power and its meaning. When you are focused on the ultimate goal, there is a reason for living.
In doing this we lose our fear of death because the purpose that we strive for here on earth is the same that we will strive for after death, yet without pain or sorrow. Let us not be like the dying woman in the sequel to Anne of Green Gables who “laid up her treasures on earth only… lived solely for the little things of life -- the things that pass -- forgetting the great things that go onward into eternity, bridging the gulf between the two lives and making of death a mere passing from one dwelling to the other -- from twilight to unclouded day.” Let us rather say, like Anne that when we “ [come] to the end of one life it must not be to face the next with the shrinking terror of something wholly different -- something for which accustomed thought and ideal and aspiration had unfitted [us]. The little things of life, sweet and excellent in their place, must not be the things lived for; the highest must be sought and followed; the life of heaven must be begun here on earth.” 1
It is time for us to stop spreading our energies in so many different directions for things that will simply perish, but to begin our life of heaven here on earth, to place our hand into that of Christ while we yet have our breath, and to walk with Him boldly through the difficult and belabored, but not frenzied, life of one whose soul is safe and whose salvation is sure.
“Wearily she went to bed, wearily she arose in four or five hours' time. But with the morning came hope, and a brighter view of things.”
~Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South
1. Anne of The Island, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Chapter 14- The Summons
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