Canter Bridge

It is almost impossible, at death’s door, to imagine life.

Death always boasts its inevitability. Stripped of its loud theatrics, death is not half as fearsome. But it prefers that secret not get out.

When we read and sing the psalms, we rehearse the testimony of men and women—as real as us, only from long ago—who themselves were overwhelmed by death’s absolute claim, only to watch in surprise as YHWH reversed matters in an instant.

Blessed be the Lord, who daily bears us up; God is our salvation.

Sela. Our God is a God of salvation, and to GOD, the Lord, belongs escape from death (Psalm 68:19–20 NRSV)

One might be permitted a retrospective chill, looking back on death’s apparent moment, for how close we came to being sucked into it. To have escaped from death, no matter how convincingly or how long ago, is to have done so just barely. By the skin of one’s teeth.

Death is a braggart, but no less sinister a foe for its need to exaggerate.

Whether one’s own brush with death came via a sudden externality, the acid tongue of one who once loved us, a return from addiction’s steep slope, or that broken depression that claims every fear as its own, it is good to pause and remember how close it all came.

Good grief, I almost died. Good grief, we nearly lost ourselves completely.

Then having paused—and shuddered at how things might have been—we sing:

Our God is a God of salvation, and to GOD, the Lord, belongs escape from death.