Life and Death

Farley Mowatt and his new bride traveled through Europe a few years after World War II seeking memoria of battles and stories of a time recently past. Farley served with the Canadian Army in Italy. Terror of war was rekindled as he walked the battlefield on which he was nearly killed.

Another battle, hardly known outside of France, took much effort to discover. Local residents would not talk about it; the memories were too fresh and cut too deeply.

The area sits high atop a plateau, protected on all sides by steep escarpments and reached, at the time, only by treacherous, unpaved roads. The French Resistance exploited its natural defenses from which to launch vicious and nearly-successful raids on the Germans spread out on the plains below. Their tactics succeeded to the point that the Germans were forced to divert troops from Normandy Beach to quell the resisters.

Finally, the Germans had enough. They mounted a full-scale assault on the fortress. In days of bloody battles, they finally defeated the partisans. Soldiers, resistance fighters and civilians alike were rounded up and slaughtered.

they found small cairns of stones along the roads labeled with the names of the murdered. They were grim reminders of a time when a whole nation became a serial killer.

As a child, riding in my parents' auto, we drove through lush green canyons of corn growing from the rich Iowa loam. Dotting the roadside were crosses; here one, there five. I was horrified to learn these crosses marked the site of an accident in which someone was killed. In my childish mind I saw five crosses where our family met their untimely demise.

The end point of a life, marked in France with stones, in Iowa with crosses are memorials to purposeful murder and auto accidents. Two autos, the wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time, the purposeful seeking and slaughter of war--is death truly accidental, a coincidence of time and place and circumstance? Is it a destined event, planned from eternity? The narrator of Johnny's Got His Gun says, "Somewhere there is a factory manufacturing the shell with my number on it."1

If death is unplanned, then we have every right to fear the next moment, the next car ride, the next landing, the uncaught serial killer. If my death is marked on His calendar I need have no fear; I am in His loving hands. I am convinced that He knows our time, that, as our birth, so our death is planned and anticipated. He gathers into His fatherly arms each at her appointed time and place. Some view God through this latter perspective with anger and dread. I think it is one more way in which He asks us to trust in His benevolent love. Like a mother singing a soothing song to her fretful infant, He assures us that He will gather us into His loving arms at the right time. Knowing this, having confidence in this, we can cease our restless fretful anxiety. We can relax into that awakening-into-His-arms which we call death.

Death is but the harvest of this earth, the fruitful harvest of life on this desolated planet.

"Since his days are determined, the number of his months is with You; And his limits You have set so that he cannot pass."2

"The LORD knows the days of the blameless, and their inheritance will be forever.

LORD, make me to know my end and what is the extent of my days; Let me know how transient I am."3

10/20/12

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