No One Is Dead

This isn’t about Nelson Mandela. It’s not even about Christmas.

It’s about the fact that no one has ever died.

None.
Everyone is alive.

Specifically, every soul is alive. 

Think about it.

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This truth struck me a couple of months ago while I mused on how many people have lived on earth since the beginning of time: How many people have there been, ever? 

Any answer depends on how long ago one believes the earth came into existence, but most estimates are in the billions. Billions of people, I thought. All…alive.

Once conceived, we’re forever alive. Of course our bodies die, but we don't. We will live forever.

As with Hubble’s Law that the universe is constantly expanding, the number of souls in existence is ever-expanding, ever growing bigger. No created soul is ever un-created.

Spacey, I know. But this isn't some late Halloween-themed post. And it isn't particularly a Christmasey one, either.

In Matthew 25, Jesus talks about a future time when “all the nations will be gathered before Him” for a time of reckoning (25:32, italics mine). After all people are called to account, Jesus makes the statement that people will “go away into [either] eternal punishment [or] eternal life” (25:46). Eternal. Even people who have died earthly deaths are still alive in another form. Earth is just a temporary stop that the real "us"--the essence of who we are--makes before arriving at our eternal destiny.

This thought struck me again afresh yesterday as I read 2 Corinthians 5:10: “For we must all appear before the tribunal of Christ, so that each may be repaid for what he has done in the body, whether good or worthless.” We’ll be repaid according to how we lived when we were encased in bodies. It reminded me that the human body is a "form" of us but is not the real us. 

The first 15 verses of 2 Corinthians chapter 5 in the Holman Christian Standard Bible are under the heading “Our Future After Death.” The New American Standard Bible refers to the whole chapter as “The Temporal and Eternal.” Everyone has a future after death. Everyone is eternal.

It's not that I never understood this until recently; I first comprehended the idea of life-after-death roughly twenty years ago. It's just that not until recently did I grasp more of its implications.

This epiphany has taken on new meaning since I moved to Russia.

On one hand, this life-ing realization is timely because in St. Petersburg I am surrounded by more people than I ever have been in my life. I love living on a busy street in the 4th largest city in Europe. I brush shoulders with hundreds if not thousands of people a day, depending on where I’m going. These conditions thrill the heart of a people-person such as me, one who doesn't mind traffic or crowds because she loves the sense of vibrancy and energy that come from a high volume of people. I couldn't ask for a more ideal living situation at this phase in my adulthood. I am consistently bombarded with life. 

This is the metro across from my apartment which daily attracts at least this many people during rush hour.

But on the other hand, I feel as though I’m around less life than I ever have been. You see, the realization that life is continually expanding is a thought that flies in the face of a “closed” culture such as in Russia. Only 22 years after the Soviet Regime, Russians on the whole are not accustomed “open” mannerisms such as those practiced in western cultures. 

I understand that Russians are not as abrupt or unfriendly as they seem to outsiders from “warmer” cultures; they simply have different cultural expressions. Russian professor and blogger Eugenia Vlasova explains that “people smiling at you in the USA…do not mean anything other than an overall neutral attitude toward you[;] […] By contrast, in Russia, no smile is a sign of a neutral politeness, [but] a smile is always informative.” 

I understand that the same meaning is expressed in two entirely different ways by two cultures, but there is something to be said for a national with a history different from, often darker than, and with more unreached people groups than the USA. A smile, especially in Soviet times, always carried meaning. It sometimes meant that someone knew something about you, and it could be more sinister than sincere. 

Hand-in-hand with the lack of smiles is the lack of eye-contact. Of course, this partly comes with living in a big city: people don’t have the time or ability to acknowledge and wave at others like they do in small-town Montana, where I’ve grown up. Here, in packed metro cars, sandwiched between two people with not even enough room to take my hands out of my coat pockets, I look around and see that none of the people are making eye contact with one another. We are mere inches away from each other’s faces but are staring in opposing directions (Then again, with people that close, it may be a little weird to make eye-contact. ;) ). But even in un-crowded metro cars, eye-contacts are few and far between. 

I've found that simply being in close proximity with other people does not equate to a feeling of liveliness. In fact, it shoots holes in the life of community God designed for us—holes through which death seeps in.

It’s not simply the lack of eye-contact or upturned lips that expresses a death-in-life; it’s the darker history that plays into these.

The Soviet Union replaced the Russian Empire in 1922. Before that time, the Russian Orthodox Church was closely linked with the State in terms of power and status. In a move to eliminate religious influence, the Communist party officially eliminated religion from national life and replaced it with atheism. Though technically the right to believe was never officially outlawed, the Soviet regime’s religious policy was to obliterate religious institutions and ideas and to enforce such a stance with harsh legal penalties.

After Hitler’s invasion of the USSR in 1941, some churches were reopened. But in the 1950s under Kruschev, anti-religious persecution took its second wind. Persecution waned in the 60s and drew new strength in the 70s, but in the 80s Gorbachev started returning church buildings to the Church for religious purposes. Missionaries have only been allowed in Russia in roughly the past two decades.

I can’t speak for Mother Russia’s beginnings—I don’t know how much more open people were before the Soviet regime came, and I’m not saying that the sole or even main reason for Russian’s closed-ness was the intense religious persecution during the Communist era. Being a foreigner myself, it’s often hard for me to distinguish between what is culturally instinctive to Russians and what has been imposed on Russians in the past half-century which they’ve now absorbed into their cultural framework. But I do understand some of the imprints that Communism has left on Russia’s historical landscape.

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When people don't look each other in the eye, the few exceptions suddenly become anomalies, and I, confessedly a natural stare-er, don't want to attract unnecessary attention as a young, single girl living in the middle of a big city. So, partly for self-preservation, I don't unbridledly stare at others. Passing by throngs of people every day on the way to school, church, or the grocery store, it's easy for me to develop a type of callousness as I navigate through my daily activities. I can move about my day with such a frame of mind as if I'm not really seeing other people. But if I'm not acknowledging others' existence, am I remembering that I am brushing shoulders with eternal beings? 

C. S. Lewis was also captured by the epiphany of the eternal, and he exhorts us to recognize the everlasting in each one of us: "There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors" (Lewis, The Weight of Glory).

Sometimes I scare myself when I wonder if I'm letting culture deaden me to the fact that I'm surrounded by life: Okay, I’m surrounded by immortality. So what?

I fear growing accustomed to staring at traffic lights rather than the humans they direct.

Well, “[f]rom now on, then, we do not know anyone in a purely human way” (2 Corinthians 5:16). Up until this point, the Apostle Paul has explained that everyone has a certain future after death and that our bodies are only a temporary housing for the us that lives forever. He explains that the bodily state “groans,” is “burdened,” and is prepared to “be swallowed up by life” (v. 4). 

Russia is unlike any other country I’ve ever experienced. In its wake, fallen communism left the biggest nation in the world in need of seeing grace, unconditional love, and leadership by servanthood—concepts foreign to the majority of Russia’s history—lived out. 

But I guess if they haven’t seen it demonstrated, it’s a little hard for them to start practicing it on their own.

May we never know people in a merely “purely human way,” as means to an end, as machinery, as just more faces in the crowd. May we never mistake functionality for personhood. God prepared for all of us eternal beings “an eternal dwelling in the heavens,” (2 Corinthians 5:1) and living without that knowledge will leave us never fully confident and never fully satisfied (5:8). 

When I see thousands of downturned faces, I am reminded that our bodily shells look as hollow as they truly are on the inside when they're not illuminated by Christ. 

Open your eyes to the life all around you. Stare it in the face. Don't pass it by on your way to do something else. 

Recognize that life is your mission, and you deal with immortals. We all pass on from earth, but we don't die. 

No one.

Ever.

Recognizing the eternal,

Renée