Beyond the experience of duality

Death and Resurrection

Death and resurrection

Bede Griffiths

When we reflect on the death and resurrection of Jesus, I wonder how often we realise that death and resurrection is the law of the universe. It is the law of growth for all matter, for all life and for all human existence. When two atoms of hydrogen combine with an atom of oxygen to form water, they have to die to their existence as gases and be reborn to a new existence as water. Again when water is absorbed by a plant, its molecules have to die to their separate existence as water and rise again to a new existence as the components of a living cell. Again when the plant is eaten by an animal, it has to die to its existence as a plant and rise again to a new life in the tissues and organs of the animal. Finally, when the animal becomes food for man, it dies as an animal and comes to birth in the blood stream of a human being, eventually feeding the brain, which gives rise to thought and human consciousness. Thus the whole process from inorganic existence to life and consciousness takes place through a series of deaths and resurrections. The death and resurrection of Jesus was the final act in this drama, when a human body, fashioned from atoms and molecules and living cells passed from a human state of existence and consciousness to a divine state, that is to a state no longer conditioned by time and space and the ordinary laws of causality.

It is the same with our ordinary human existence. Every night we die to our normal mode of consciousness and pass into a condition of unconsciousness, only to rise again in the morning to a new state of consciousness. So also as we grow up from childhood to maturity, we pass through a series of deaths and resurrections. The child has to die to its infantile state of being and consciousness in order to become an adolescent; the adolescent has to die in order to become an adult; the adult has to die to himself as he passes into old age, and finally everyone has to make the passage through death itself to the final resurrection. But in us these deaths and resurrections are at least partly voluntary. We can always refuse to die. The child can refuse to grow up, and become a Peter Pan, always clinging to its childhood and remaining attached to its mother. The adolescent can refuse to become a man, to become responsible, to face the burdens of maturity. The middle-aged man can refuse to grow old, to surrender his position as head of a family or a business or anything else and cling to power. Finally, we can all refuse to die, to face the challenge of death itself; we can go on clinging to life and refuse the resurrection.

This is perhaps the greatest danger for man today — to refuse to face death. Jesus himself deliberately accepted death. “I lay down my life, that I may take it again,” he says. “No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down and I have power to take it again.” This power he has also given us. We can all refuse to die. We can put death aside, refuse to think about it, regard it as a disaster which has to be put off as long as possible. Or we can like Jesus accept death not as a disaster but as a grace, not as an end but as a beginning. Death is as natural as birth. For a child in the womb, if it could think, the thought of birth would be terrifying, of going out from the warmth and security of the womb into an alien world, to another mode of existence. So also for us death is a birth which is terrifying. It means going out of our present mode of existence and consciousness and facing a new kind of existence, another world. It means going out of our ego-consciousness in which we are all now involved, and awakening to a new mode of consciousness, not depending on our senses and our feelings and our rational mind, but passing beyond them into a deeper level of consciousness, of which we can even now have some experience in prayer.

This is the real death which we all have to die, the death to ourselves; this is the real pain of death. Our present mode of consciousness has grown up in us since childhood. It has been structured by the atoms and molecules and cells of our bodies and developed through our conscious reactions, our thoughts and feelings, our will and purposes. And now we are being asked to give all this up. We have got to go out of ourselves, to enter into a wider and deeper consciousness, of which our experience in this world can only give us a faint glimmer. Yet if we have really tried to die at each stage of our life, to die to our childhood, our adolescence and our middle age, and not cling desperately at each stage of growth to the old ways of thinking and feeling, we shall find that the final death will also lose its terrors. Most people are prepared for death by the various shocks of life. When we see others dying, whom we have known and loved, when we suffer loss of fortune or friends or of our own faculties, we begin to experience the meaning of death. If we accept these things when they come and don’t resist the change, we begin to find a new meaning in each event, even the most tragic. We get a glimpse of the resurrection.

For the resurrection is always there. It is the eternal reality. All that we experience in time is only a reflection of that eternal life towards which we are journeying. The experience of the child, the adolescent and the man is only a slow growth towards that fullness of life and consciousness for which we are destined. “For now we see in a glass darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, then I shall know even as I am known.” Jesus is the sign which is given to us of the death and resurrection we all have to make. But the condition is that we accept our death and allow our final passage through death into life.

This article was first published in The Tablet in April 1981