Article January 2, 2006 Issue

BEYOND GRIEF—continuity

BY TONY LOBL

Having become a Christian later in life, I quickly found the focus on Jesus and his ressurrection to be one of the most thought-provoking aspects of my new faith. The Biblical letters of the Apostle Paul were particularly insightful (see I Cor. 15). It seemed to me that as Paul preached Jesus' story everywhere he went, he kept getting back to the resurrection as the bedrock of Christianity.

Why, I wondered, was this so important? Why would Jesus' resurrection be such a major issue? Yet thinking deeply about it and about the immortality it teaches—simply because they are often mentioned in the Bible—helped prepare me for the time when my mother unexpectedly passed on.

Amid the emotional impact of that event, I realized at the time that I had already been dealing with the issues surrounding death, just by thinking about Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection. I had already begun to think beyond the idea of death as a final point of oblivion. I was already seeing a continuity of life in God—life that is not packaged in a little body, but is spiritual. The true individuality and nature of each of us exist as reflections of divine Spirit, eternal Life.