Day sixty six

I sometimes wonder if I should stop reading. Yesterday I read that undiagnosed abdominal pains can be a sign of pancreatic cancer. I had already thought about pancreatic cancer. When people were telling me how worried I was about prostate cancer and how relieved I was to be told it wasn't cancer, I was thinking that was the least of my problems. The abdominal pains still remain undiagnosed.

So death is on my mind again, and I was reminded of the Anglican Funeral Service that contains the words, "In the midst of life we are in death". According to Wikipedia that possibly comes from a Gregorian chant, inspired by a battle song of Notker the Stammerer (wonderful name - he could have written "Hey Jude!).

And thinking of being "in death", the latest edition of the Psychology magazine, "The Psychologist", arrived through my door yesterday and in it there is an interview with a neurologist who has just written a book called, "The Mind Electric". The author says, in the interview, that she no longer accepts binaries (that is a bandwagon that many people have jumped on), even in terms of life and death. She said that she no longer sees people as either alive or dead (I have conducted a lot of funerals, many of them cremations - I hope they were all dead). Instead, this neurologist says, we are on a life-death spectrum. We are all somewhere between alive and dead.

You can hear my scepticism in the previous paragraph, but thinking about the Bible and the Anglican Funeral Liturgy, there is some truth in what she says.

According to the Bible: God told Adam (Genesis 2: 17), in the day that you eat of it you shall die.’ (NRSV). 2 Peter 3: 8 tells us, with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day. Genesis 5: 5 tells us that Adam lived 930 years. He didn’t make it to the end of the day. God created us for eternity, so 930 years is nothing. We are all on the spectrum:  "In the midst of life we are in death".

Ephesians 2: 1-2 tells us, As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient.

We are born spiritually dead. We need to be spiritually born again. But still we are on that spectrum.

I used the illustration, in a church service once, about the flower display. I pointed out that all the flowers in the display are dead. They died when they were cut. It will take about a week before anyone notices they are dead.

We are the same. We are all somewhere on that spectrum. I feel like I'm getting towards the wrong end.

Interestingly, last night at 22:23 exactly I had 2 texts from the hospital reminding me of my appointment next Tuesday, so they haven't forgotten me.

Meanwhile, enjoy another day on the life-death spectrum!