CHAPTER XXIII
RADIANCIES OF DEATH
For centuries the human mind has been afraid, disturbed, distressed, at the thought of death; the uncertainty of the beyond; "shall we know each other there?" and the thousand and one questions that have arisen as to what life, if any, there is beyond the grave. Years ago, in my own innerness, all sense of fear, of disturbance, of distress at the thought of death vanished, never again to appear. I have no resentment at the thought of death, either for myself, or those I love. I expect it for us all, and am neither surprised nor hurt when it comes. There may be the sense of physical loss, but that is all. There is no sense of real loss of anything except the temporal, the physical, that which, in the very course of Nature, must pass through the change we call Death.
Hence I feel I have definite and positive radiancies upon this subject, which I am assured will bring comfort and peace to those who can enter into the spirit of them, and accept the same assurances that have come to me.
The first of these that I would radiate with clearness and fullness is that man is a spiritual being and not physical. Much of the fear, dread, distress, pain of death has come from the mistaken belief that man is physical. Death has come and robbed us of the life of the physical. The flesh has become cold, inanimate, lifeless, therefore dead and lost to us. The mother has grieved herself into sickness and a ruined life because of the death of her babe. Husbands have wept long for the wives they thought they had lost. Sorrow, grief, sadness, woe—these seem the natural accompaniments of death. Our customs, our language, our literature, our poetry, our art, are full of the expressions of this thought—the trappings of woe, the solemn countenance, the hushed voice, the somber garments, the widow's weeds, the black band of bereavement, the hearse, the funeral marches, the watch of the dead, the lighted candles, the solemn funeral addresses, the tears, the grief that will not be comforted, all speak of the sadness attributed to death. Tennyson's In Memoriam, Browning's La Saziaz, and hundreds, thousands, of lesser poems have been written on the woe, the grief, the cruelty of death.
While I long for the physical presence of my beloved ones as much as do other men, I would radiate my belief, my restful assurance, in the love that exists, persists, lives, after what we call the death of the body, and that, therefore, to me, save for the loss of the physical presence, there is absolutely no death, no need for sorrow, grief, pain, or woe.
As birth itself is a death of the embryonic life, so is death a birth into the life beyond—the life of the spirit, the life, free, unhampered, unhindered by the flesh. Browning expresses it perfectly in his wonderful Pisgah Sight, where he stands and looks "over Jordan" into the Promised Land:
Good to forgive,