Art, Death, and Life

I love a good, immersive novel. I grew up reading and have never stopped, and I'm not sure what people who don't read do, actually. I mean, how do you then live? Anyway. After years in publishing, I understood that life mirrors art and art mirrors life and they're all mashed up together (in general culture, anyway; in Christian publishing this relationship can be artificial and prescriptive to the point of forced, which is why "Christian art" usually suffers by comparison, but I digress). That life and art mirror each other is useful information.

Several contemporary mainstream adult novels I've read lately have included death in the narrative. All of them portrayed the "results" of death in one of two ways: as annihilation; or as becoming a ghost, who, while not being perceived in the world of the living anymore, is perceived by other dead and doesn't have it too bad at all. They may miss people, and food, but hey, they can fit through a keyhole, and they can "move on" once they have mourned the life they knew and are ready to leave it behind. 

Not that these concepts of death are new to me, but it's instructive to keep tabs on the world's perceptions, assumptions, errors, and lies. The more people outside of the Lord read these things, the more apt they are to assume them, sometimes more subliminally than consciously, and the less apt they are to fear death. Which they should. Because it's only in Christ that we not only don't fear death, but welcome it in the way Dietrich Bonhoeffer said: "Death is the supreme festival on the road to freedom." I'm not Catholic, but I have a better understanding of feast days now. When you consider the Christian's entire existence, our death day is going to be the major pivot from the mortal to the unbelievably blessed immortal. 

It'll be a pivot for those without Christ, too, but in the opposite direction, from mortal life to the unspeakable horror of unending existence without love. And they don't know. And there are more of them than there are of us. Jesus said the road is narrow and [relatively] few find it, but that doesn't mean we don't wish for more of them to join us. God isn't willing that any should perish. 

Lots of more conservative Christians shun general-culture art. And I get it; I do. Some should simply not be consumed, we need to be mature and discerning, and when someone considers it sin it becomes sin for them (Romans 14). But when the Holy Spirit grants us freedom to peruse it, it can help us keep our finger on the pulse of the lost. It can keep them in front of our faces, eyes, and minds, which gathering into little Christian subcultural conclaves tends not to do. It can give us vocabulary to speak with them. It can direct our prayer. I'm going to accept the challenge to myself to let it do just that.