Death the shepherd dog

“In heaven, we look after everyone in this world.” But sometimes a shepherd dog is needed…

I have gotten through two chapters of Bishop Kallistos Ware’s book The Inner Kingdom. It was quite strange to see so many parallels to Ryuho Okawa’s books, and to things I had begin thinking of even before I heard of any of them. It is as if pieces of the jigsaw puzzle are raining down harder and harder, piling up faster than I can put them into place.

I have finished chapter 2 now, which is about death and resurrection. Bishop Ware is quite cautious to leave death as a mystery. Unlike some Orthodox writers, he does not attempt to tell us in any detail what awaits in the time before we are resurrected. His concept of resurrection is also less prosaic than Jehovah’s Witnesses, who seem ready to continue life much as it was before. Ware, based on Jesus, sees the resurrected body as spiritual, able to be either somewhere or everywhere at will, to contract to a physical form or expand to a subtlety where even thoughts cannot touch it. That is pretty much how Okawa describes the ascended Christ too, although of course they have very different opinions on his role in history from now on. And if there is any doubt about that, I have long ago entered into a pact with Christ, which he has kept even when I took it fairly leisurely. Until I meet him face to face in his heavenly kingdom, if I so do, until then our covenant will remain, unless he gets fed up with me first. So far, so good.

But to return to the topic of death: To my shame, the truth is that without the shadow of death, I would quite certainly never have entered into any such covenant in the first place. It may sound very differently now, but I am actually not very religious by nature. A philosopher, yes. That is probably in my blood. My father was a amateur philosopher, and there were several such in his family. Those of his relatives who were of a religious bent were so in a philosophical way, and I guess I have their blood in my veins still. But my passion was always for science, and I had little room for what could not be seen or at least logically inferred in some way.

But if Jesus is the Good Shepherd, then it seems to me that death was his shepherd dog. Let me tell you though that I abhor death as much as the next man, if not more so. For I grew up in its shadow. I knew it from two angles. The one was from growing up on a farm. The goat kids I had petted and played with, I later saw them slain, cut open, their blood being gathered in a bucket, their still warm intestines pulled out and thrown behind the barn, their eyes empty in death. For good measure, I would see them again at the dinner table. Cooked heads is a delicacy on Norway’s west coast, so I got to see even those eyes again. Death was not abstract to me. As far as I was concerned at the time, it was my friends that lay there, and would never play with me again.

The other half was my childhood asthma. From I was a toddler and several years onward, I would get asthma attacks and fight for breath not just if I played too roughly, but often in the night or morning (probably from exciting dreams). I knew, certainly by instinct though I may also have been told, that if I did not manage to keep breathing, I would die. Death was not something that just happened to animals: She was waiting each night in my bed, like the fiancee in an arranged marriage patiently waiting for the day when our union would be consummated. At the time, medicine was not as advanced as now, and especially in the outskirts of a poor nation as ours was back then. My parents were told that it was likely I would never grow up, although if I survived, I would be rid of the asthma. Somehow I also learned this. In retrospect that was probably a good thing.

And so I grew up in the valley of the shadow of death, and I was scared out of my mind.

Without this immediate feeling of mortality, I might never have sought religion in my youth. And if I had not tasted the sweetness of spirit, if I had not at least to some meager degree learned to replace pleasure of the flesh with happiness of the soul, which is so much richer as it is deeper, I would today be as unhappy as any man. This is what I think.

It is not many years since I believed that some people like me were simply made with a naturally higher happiness level. Today I think that is rubbish. Well, I think some people may indeed be so. Generally to have a lower optimum stimulation level is conductive to happiness if you live in times of peace with law and order. But if you are under divine – or demonic – influence for twenty or thirty years, your mind and even your physical brain will begin to change accordingly. You can contest the reality of spirit, but modern science shows that something happens in the brains of monks who meditate regularly. This physical change comes from somewhere. Even if you give it another name to avoid the scary concept of spirit, it is still something and you need to accept this. What you need to accept is the law of karma, or fruit. Good trees give good fruit, and good seeds grow up to good trees. This is the chain of cause and effect, which easterners call Karma. (Look ma, my karma ran over your dogma!)

Thus, as humiliating as this is to confess, in my life death was like a shepherd dog that rounds up the straying sheep and inclines it to go back to the shepherd.

The beauty of Christianity is just this, that the stray sheep is the one that gets all the attention. While the Buddha teaches people to save themselves, and perhaps this is an adequate doctrine for the 99 sheep, Jesus seeks out the stray to such an extent that the last become the first, and hos go before bros into the kingdom of Heaven.

But me, I did not even make it as far as to a successful stray. Before I had strayed very far, the shepherd dog always found me and chased me bleating back again. Now that is humiliating. But at least I have found a large measure of happiness in my life, and I know the direction where there is far more of it. May we all meet there, already in this life and from then onward.

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