Sunday, January 11, 2009

My Sister-in-Law’s Father

…is dying, she says in her email. She is a realist, I believe, in that she knows his death is inevitable. I also believe that her family, and during all her life, has had faith in the concept of God and an afterlife. She doesn’t sound afraid and neither does her father and her emails speak of faith.

He has reached the stage in his cancer, and his 80-plus years, that he sleeps most of the time and is heavily medicated for pain. She relates that he has been having “crazy” dreams (her quotes, and maybe his too) that he saw his younger brother, Rick, who died in 2001. Rick is waiting for him, he says. Personally, I don’t find those dreams all that “crazy.”

There is a lot we don’t know about human life and this universe we live in. It is just as plausible that there is life after death as not. In a universe that contains a mysterious, invisible “dark energy” that pushes all physical matter farther apart it is just as plausible that there is “spiritual energy” in life that holds life together into infinity. The universe is so mysterious and life is such a miracle that it is simply unfathomable.

So, I must believe that those who claim that life is finite, existing only during the short years on earth or other life-bearing planets, the atheists in our world, are simply lying to themselves. I think they will be sad with disillusion if they believe that until the day they die and never have a spiritual awakening. They, like me, are spiritual beings experiencing a physical existence whether they know it or not. Atheism, like spirituality, is simply a belief, and nothing more. You only have to look at the life of Mattie Stepanek to understand that there is more.

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