When you are dead your are???
Published: Wed, 05/20/15
Yesterday morning I spent an hour or so in Chard Cemetery. A friend of mine, who is also one of my Stav students, is a monumental mason. This means he inscribes and installs grave stones. Sometimes he also has to take a kerb set (the lengths of stone which may surround a grave) apart so the grave can be dug again to add the body of another family member. Some of the lengths of concrete and stone are just too big for one person to move safely. Yesterday I was helping my friend to prepare a double grave for its fourth internment. The first was in 1979 when the 19 year old son was killed in a motorcycle accident, the second in 1990 when a second son died at the wheel of a truck. Their mother died last year and now the father and husband has passed away is is to be interred in the next few days. There is nothing like a visit to the cemetery to remind one of the transience of mortality.
I suppose you might think that as a Methodist local preacher I should have a ‘sure and certain’ expectation of something after death. But I can’t honestly say that is the case. I don’t not believe in an afterlife but we do have to accept that what really happens after we die is a mystery. There are basically four theories of what might happen when we die. Oblivion, if you are a scientific secular materialist then you effectively believe that the body is an organic machine. Therefore when it ceases to function that must be the end of consciousness too. (True materialists don’t actually believe in consciousness as such anyway. But that is another story.) Reincarnation, very widely accepted in the East and probably traditional in pre-Christian European religions. Ivar says that in the Hafskjold family tradition the belief is that souls are reborn into the family line. Hinduism and Buddhism seem to teach that souls are reborn
according to what they deserve from the life before. (Although that is probably simplifying it too much.) Paradise, the idea that there is somewhere else, a walled garden which is what paradise means, where we can enjoy eternal reward for a life well lived. And the opposite for ‘bad’ people. Again simplified but you get the idea. Then resurrection which suggests that at the right time, the second coming of Christ, all true believers will be raised to a new life. Hence the traditional Christian emphasis on burial of the body so that it would be there to resurrect. (the minimum requirement being the thigh bones and the skull). The idea of resurrection comes up on the Northern Tradition as well with the idea of the new world which will rise after Ragnarock.
Obviously this is a big subject. All I am doing here is suggesting the possibilities of what happens to us after death. Personally I really don’t know. I am happy to accept that there is a mystery and perhaps one day I will know and maybe not.
What we do know is that we are not here very long. As the grave I saw yesterday showed, it may be much shorter than we expect. So make the most of it while you can. Remember too that while lumps of granite and marble, although beautifully shaped and elegantly inscribed, don’t really tell anyone much about you once you are gone. I am prepared to suggest that we are all here for a purpose, purpose from God or gods, or chance or just one we choose for ourselves. Just realise that there is only thing that can definitely live on after this lifetime. What can survive you is what you created through that sense of purpose. It may not make you rich or famous. But it will be your genuine and unique contribution to the world. So find out what it is and start working on it if you have not done so already.
For myself, I did get latest newsletter finished and distributed yesterday. It deals with the As rune and Odin’s place in understanding the runes. I am glad that is done since we begin our journey to Sweden today. I will keep you posted on how we get on.
By the time we get back it will be almost June. So July and the Stav Camp is not that far away. Please think about coming, I don’t know how many more times Ivar will want to teach at such an event. Time can be shorter than we think as I hope I have made clear this morning. Details at http://www.stavcamp.org
regards
Graham