In comparing food-industry experiences, my brother and I have concluded that there are only two kinds of people: those ready to die and those who are not. And people who aren't ready to die make a big deal about everything.
That the dish arrives late, that a to-go bag is deprived of its plastic fork, that a particular seat is either too near, not near enough, or improperly angled towards the window — these things matter very little, especially compared to, say, child-slavery in the cobalt mines of Africa. They certainly don't require screaming up the corporate ladder until some name-tagged manager waddles down with a placating coupon. Still, unreason reigns, and the world is stuffed with men and women who bristle and bite at Things Going Wrong; who stand ready to rain God’s anti-Sodomic fury on whatever uniformed sucker forgot the sauce-packet.
Death makes doofuses of the living. Many Americans — a growing number, if you believe the polls — believe that this life is it, that death licks the plate clean, that the grim reaper takes the closing shift, after whose awful clocking out the existential eatery shall blink its “open” sign no more. For such death-haunted people, minor annoyances become unbearable sufferings. If such a man loses his favorite appetizer today, he may have lost it for all eternity. And even if he avoids the scythe tomorrow, and is able to order zucchini fries once more, the fact that death scrawls “The End” over his proverbial last page means that any loss within life is an irreconcilable diminishment of the whole book. He will never get his days back, and, by extension, he will never retrieve those lost zucchini fries, however many marinara-dipped moments he enjoys afterwards. “Rage against the dying of the light,” some post-Christian poet suggested, and we have taken him up on it, not so much on our deathbeds as at our Dairy Queens.
The Resurrection of the Dead is more than a strange doctrine; a claim which will either be verified as true or deprived of the living people necessary to do the verifying. It is also a basic attitude — a hard, cool pebble, picked up in the morning and held tightly throughout the day. Believing in it reminds us to revolt against the ways of death, not later, but now. If we rise from the dead, it becomes impossible to think of a particular loss as a chunk of granite, hacked away from the fixed, finite, and something-like-seventy-five-year old edifice we call “our life,” forever defacing the whole. Loss becomes more like a hole in the ground or a sapling torn from the forest floor: more leaves will fall, worms will come, and new seeds will grow. All loss becomes loss-for-now. Unbelievers know this about believers, and mime their faith at funeral homes, deciding suddenly, and somewhat vaguely, that a dead loved one is “in a better place” — that a restoration will come.
The doctrine of the Resurrection should not make the Christian unaffected or calloused. It is not, after all, that the Christian believes that loss is not real. Such nonsense is for Buddhists, stoics, or venture-capitalist bros trained to call their every loss an esoteric gain — a learning experience on their way to a guaranteed future of more money. Indeed, one sees this in the weirdo, quasi-astrological cult of business which has produced, as its prominent characters, the girl-boss, the protein-peddler, the Instagram influencer, and the young woman clawing at her social-media friendships to work off a debt of skin-care products. They have, as a common script, the denial of loss as loss. They explain, in feverish bouts of posting, how they used to have fear, anxiety, debt, and stubborn belly fat; how they gained the conviction that they could manifest their dreams and desires into the universe; how their current six-figure income has shone the light of success back into their past and revealed all of those dark, murky negatives as positive stepping-stones towards a realized, wealthy, and self-esteem-filled future.
This work apes the power of the Resurrection, but without much existential success. After all, there is no reason one could not add growing sick, losing one's memory, and dying as the likely end of any skin-care success-story, a final failure which casts its light on all those steps towards self-realization, revealing them, in truth, as steps towards coffin-rot.
Christianity is not like this. It does not undo loss by inserting it within a narrative of success. The Christian is both commanded to “weep with those who weep” and to look forward to a future in which “every tear will be wiped away.” He does not, except by unfortunate catechesis, deny that the tears are, in fact, tears. Neither does he, except by neglecting the faith, imagine that the tears will remain unwiped. Indeed, what characterizes the Resurrection is the fact that it destroys death — not some stepping-stone which is really not so bad, but the horrid, seamy, child-stealing, grandfather-killing murderer of all. Leave it to others to say that death is not really the end, only a passing into the smothering embrace of the cosmic whole. Christianity has seen fit to call it a scorpion, whose sting Christ circumcises. His followers lean into the difficulty of accepting these two propositions as true: that loss is really loss and that all that is lost shall be found.
As such, I’ve always fancied the Christian, were he ever to become Christian, as the ideal critic of the age. For it is rather apparent that the powers of this earth are about the business of taking things away from people. As a social body, we suffer the collective loss of health, property, ownership, arable soil, skill, attention-span, family, wealth, intellect, and cultural heritage, to name a few of the goods culled into the hands of the wealthy few at the expense of the entire Church. The Christian can bear all this with dignity. The deprivation of goods has been guaranteed to the Christian, whose Master has said: “In the world you will have trouble.” The actual experience of loss is always a confirmation that one is, in fact, part of a creation which yearns for the Resurrection. This allows a man to bear loss, from the missing sauce-packet and up to the constraint of the gulags, as the very orientation of the world towards its restoration: all will be made well.
But this placidity is not flaccidity, and the Christian cannot do what the world is about the business of doing: denying that loss really is loss. This denial of death should anger the Christian as much as the denial of the Resurrection, as a shell-game by which real goods are stolen and replaced with substitutes: ownership with rent, skill with the activation of capital-intensive devices, profit with wages, family with social services and queer bonds of kinship, productive property with money, manufacturing with the service industry, particular work with generalized jobs, entertainment with advertisement, community with computers, and so on and thus forth. The Christian weeps for these deaths, and in weeping says of all the substitutionary comforts the world offers: these are not the same. But even as he weeps, he has the power to live in peace, saying of all this loss and evil, in the spirit of the Resurrection: it's no big deal.