Our Dead
EVERY family, every circle has its dead, those that have passed away, those that have been carried out to the grave, who were once their own, in whose love they rejoiced, and whom God took away.
Is there not something lovely in it, when after such a dying, the memory of him who went from us, lives on in such a family and among such friends?
That indeed they are gone, but that they are held in mind, and sometimes in sad reflection, in inquiring imagination, or in hushed conversation you almost have glimpses of their form.
You might say: This must of itself be so, this must be the case with all.
Who would forget his beloved dead?
And truly, when the day after the demise you see sometimes the overwhelming emotion of pain of heart, and that passionate outcry of grief, you would think that forgetting would be impossible.
Yet experience teaches differently.
Of course there is difference here. Difference of all kinds. No rule can apply to all, nor with respect to all the dead.
A young infant, that is transferred from the cradle to the little coffin, cannot continue to live in the memory, as the child, that grew up and matured under you, and whom in his riper years you lost.
According as the inner life of the family is emotional or reserved, the impression of a loss by death is deeper or less deep.
The place which your dead occupied in your heart, can have been greater or smaller, and as thereby the measure of your loss was determined, the measure of your mourning keeps pace with the measure of your loss.
The man, who at once returns to the busy world, is more readily diverted from the remembrance of his dead, than the woman, who sits pensively down in her chamber or wanders about the house.
With those who are younger the outbreak of grief at first is generally more passionate, with those of older years not so abundant in shedding of tears, but for this very reason sometimes the more lasting.
And so memory, that under the stimulus of mourning affects the heart, is generally defined by three data, i.e., by the actual worth of him who died, by the gift of appreciative love on the part of those who remained behind, and by the nature of all sorts of circumstances of life.
MEANWHILE, apart from the cause, the complaint is surely not too exaggerated, that the remembrance of our dead is rather too weak than too strong.
There are exceptions. In a too sentimental family even less fortunate exceptions. When all sorts of things which the deceased left behind are kept as relics, if not openly exhibited. When all sorts of pictures set in wreaths of immortelles decorate walls. And a picture of the grave is placed by the side of it. And at the grave a sort of brief ritual is celebrated. Whereby a certain cult of the dead originates, so altogether in conflict with Jesus’ saying: “Let the dead bury their dead, go and preach thou the Kingdom of God.”
This is a sickly utterance of sentiment, which fortunately is but rarely seen among us.
But for the rest at one funeral service after another it is confidently stated that, though he is dead, the deceased shall live in the grateful remembrance of all. Yet there are few words that by later developments are so bitterly given the lie as this grandiloquence at the grave.
It is rather to be wondered at, within how short a time after the funeral the name and the remembrance of the deceased is dropped from conversation and from mind. And when you come two or three years later, a new member in the circle would scarcely perceive, that only so recently a death occurred in that circle, and that at an open grave there had been such passionate weeping.
It was with this, as with the stone that broke the mirror of the water. A momentary plump into and a bubbling up of the water. Then a circle forming itself around that point, and ever widening itself. Until in its widening it became ever fainter, and less observable. And it did not take long, before the waters flowed on and on, as though never a stone had been sunk in them.
ESPECIALLY in our days this is grievous. The quickened pulse-beat of life makes the blood circulate too hurriedly, so that there is no time for thought. The present day crowds out the remembrance of yesterday. What time then is left for pensive remembrance of those who were with us years ago?
Yet the complaint about that speedy forgetting of our dead has come to us already from antiquity. In all sorts of lands and under all sorts of religious forms it has been tried to bring an end to this evil.
In ancient Rome the ashes of the cremated body in a stone vase reposed on a shelf in one’s reception-hall. The service of the Penates, as it was called.
In China all the holier sense of the people was directed to such religious ritual and veneration of the dead.
Before all things else Radboud at his baptism thought of how he might come to his forefathers.
By costly graves, and visits at those graves, and beautifying of those graves similar remembrances of the dead are kept alive in all southern lands.
And how by her “All souls,” and by masses for the dead, the Church of Rome has tried to work in like direction, is known by all.
Altogether efforts, which, though they ended in wrong paths, yet provisionally sprang from the need, to strengthen the remembrances of our dead, to revive and to maintain them.
It is so hard to be obliged to think: “When tomorrow I die, in a year’s time perhaps there will no one think of me.”
Also the family-tie became so loose by this frequent sinful forgetting.
And, moreover, did not our love among the living become suspect, when that love, put to the test by death, so quickly allowed its flame to be extinguished?
ALSO among us, Christians of the Reformation, tenderness in this respect might well be somewhat greater.
When Jesus stands at the grave of Lazarus, and deeply moved weeps over the death of His friend, there is least of all in this an approval of that coldness and callousness that so frequently marks behavior among us at the bier and at the open grave.
And when the apostles of the Lord so frequently speak of those who have gone before and have fallen asleep in Jesus, it is clearly evident, that thought of our brethren and sisters, who have fallen asleep in Christ, is inseparable from the drawings of love in God’s child.
Undoubtedly, he who lives from the spirit of our fathers, maintains also at the grave the high commandment, that God alone must be great, and that even the most dearly beloved dead for no single moment may cast a shadow across the honor of God’s name.
Therefore we do not decorate our graves, we deem flowers offensive on a casket, and in death we will see death, in the grave the grave, both in serious reality before us.
That seriousness we dare to face, because we are of Christ.
And so with the thought of our own dying it is not longing in the first place, to see our dead again. When the heart is right, and at times home-sickness after heaven draws, it must be a desire to “depart and be with Christ.”
David sang it out in his song, not that he would delight himself with the likeness of his dead, but that he would eternally delight himself with the likeness of his God.
The great and first and high commandment admits of nothing else.
In life and death our Lord’s, and therefore in life and in death God the first and God the last in our thought, in our imagination, in our remembrance, in our home-sickness.
That, that alone, at the grave, at the approach of death, and at the remembrance of our dead, after the spirit of the fathers, is life according to God’s holy Word.
BUT along this very way the remembrance of those who have fallen asleep in Christ, of itself springs up within us, especially where those early dead were ours, and were given us of God.
About those who did not fall asleep in Jesus, we are silent.
We do not judge. Even where we did not observe that they fell asleep in Jesus, no one of us can say, what in the latest gasp took place between God and that soul.
The mysteries of the soul and the mystery of God’s grace lie so deep.
To Him, and not to us, the judgment.
But when he who dies, so far as we know died away in his sin, without faith, then there also is no tie for us between the deceased and our God, and in our expectation of a heaven, which is entirely lost in God, the thought of our dead can have no place. Even if this were possible, it would draw us away from God, which must not be.
Surprises can, and surprises there will be at our awakening in eternity. Also, alas, bitter disappointments. But this remains till later. Here on earth in our remembrances we may not do otherwise than count with what we can believe.
And then it is they “who have fallen asleep in Jesus,” who of themselves are present with us in our devotional lifting up of soul to our High Priest, and through Him to our God.
Not merely: I shall die, and then be with God, as though Christ were alone, and thus no count with the mystical body of Christ is necessary, but God in Christ, and for His sake the just made perfect. Seth, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Peter and John and Paul, all anointed and justified, to us they are not dead, but they are all alive, and we shall live with them (1 Thess. 4, 14).
And to that company of redeemed of earlier ages are joined our own beloveds, who went away from us, for so much as they have fallen asleep in Jesus. A father or mother, a brother or sister, a child, sometimes known but for a moment, a friend who was a bosom-friend. All that numerous company of pilgrims, who walked with us by the way, and before us entered the gate of heaven.
In them mingles then your faith with the personal love of your heart, to keep their remembrances alive, and through them make yourself conversant with heaven above.
On earth ever poorer with respect to loved ones and friends, as the wind blows across the fields and every time again makes a flower drop from its stem.
But in the eternal, on the other side of the grave ever richer, until here at length you no longer feel yourself at home, but at home above, where your God in Christ is, and with and around Him all God’s elect, and among those elect also they who are yours, who here below you were permitted to possess but for a little while, that you might love them forever before the face of God.
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