Canter Bridge

Human beings are designed for eternity. Whether by procreation or resurrection, our longing for eternality surpasses our desire to return to the dust from whence we came.

We are not built for this short space. The truncation of eternity is death’s tragedy.

If the dead are not raised,
‘Let us eat and drink,
for tomorrow we die.’

So does the apostle express himself at a point deep within his depiction of Christ’s resurrection as promissory note laid down in fealty to our own eventual triumph over death’s frustrating grip. Like Dostoyevsky’s famous Ivan, he has found his moral Archimedian point. If it is not an investment in eternity, then all discipline and self-sacrifice, all satisfaction deferred, is a pious farce. We who practices such things are a laughing stock.

Long before Paul borrowed these words and invented others in order to convince a distracted Corinthian community that clarity comes courtesy of resurrection’s good morning, Israel’s sages articulated a variant longing for prolongation:

A wise child makes a glad father,
but a foolish child is a mother’s grief.

Posterity comes also by procreation and its decades-long consequence, the training of a child’s chaotic mind to subject itself to creation’s fruitful patterns. Wisdom, in this discourse, is the ability to understand YHWH’s world and to live effectively in it. Happy is the parent who sees her son or daughter walk this way.

The parables are acutely observant of accumulated experience. Indeed, revelation that does not come through patient attention applied over decades’ course is virtually unknown to the anthologist of proverbs. When he speaks of a fool’s father’s heartache, he distills into few words the despair of multiple neighbors whose betrayed yearnings for posterity it has been his occasion to watch.

When we train our children and then in due course struggle to let them go, it is no animal instinct we follow. It is rather a longing for eternity designed into our genes, almost incapable of overriding. We delight in a child’s good steps with a joy somewhat akin to the Creator’s. We throw down a swig of eternity and savor its fire.

For a moment we see forever.