Reading 2021-12-06

Metadata

• Ref:: The Atlantic
• Title:: Growing My Faith in the Face of Death
• Author:: Timothy Keller
• Year of publication:: 2021
• Category:: Blog
• Topic::

Notes from reading

A significant number of believers in God find their faith shaken or destroyed when they learn that they will die at a time and in a way that seems unfair to them.

One of the first things I learned was that religious faith does not automatically provide solace in times of crisis. A belief in God and an afterlife does not become spontaneously comforting and existentially strengthening. Despite my rational, conscious acknowledgment that I would die someday, the shattering reality of a fatal diagnosis provoked a remarkably strong psychological denial of mortality.

Death is an abstraction to us, something technically true but unimaginable as a personal reality.

So when the certainty of your mortality and death finally breaks through, is there a way to face it without debilitating fear? Is there a way to spend the time you have left growing into greater grace, love, and wisdom? I believe there is, but it requires both intellectual and emotional engagement: head work and heart work.

I use the terms head and heart to mean reasoning and feeling, adapting to the modern view that these two things are independent faculties. The Hebrew scriptures, however, see the heart as the seat of the mind, will, and emotions.

the less we attempt to make this world into a heaven, the more we are able to enjoy it.

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Note: I wonder what should I do if I learned that I already had an agent of death growing inside me?