My uncle Gerry Dullea died last Sunday night. He was 75. As is too often the case, it didn’t end well for Gerry. Details aside, he was breaking down all over the place. His body just disintegrated – in the literal sense of no longer functioning in an integral and integrated fashion. He’d been living alone since his wife died ten years ago, and had spent much of that time either ill or seriously ill. Gerry was pretty much a mess.
I’ve lost ten uncles during my lifetime; Gerry was the last one. I feel differently about losing Gerry than I have about losing any of the others: I’m grieving more deeply, even than I have for uncles I liked better than Gerry – and there were several. Somehow, I was closer to Gerry. It seemed like he was closer to immediate family, probably because he was a good bit younger than the other local uncles, didn’t get married until I was in high school, and never did have any children.
He met his future wife Ervene while pursuing an MA at Lehigh University between 1965-1967, then went to Syracuse for a few years to earn a PhD, after which he moved to the Bangor area and taught English at the University of Maine at Orono. At Orono, Gerry became immersed in the world of organized competitive chess, writing a weekly chess column for the Bangor Daily News with fellow professor George Cunningham. He stayed at Orono until 1976, the year he and Ervene married, after which he joined her at Bloomsburg (PA) State College.
He only stayed at Bloomsburg for a year, however, before he left teaching, temporarily taking up cabinet making, and then taking on administrative positions with the United States Chess Federation in New Windsor, NY, serving as Executive Director from 1979-1987. It’s not clear to me what he did after that, but he seemingly bounced around in various business consulting roles. Gerry and Ervene kept two residences (Bloomsburg and New Windsor) until Ervene’s death, after which Gerry moved back to Bloomsburg.
Ervene had been a Shakespeare scholar and amateur pianist, and when she died, a “service” – as these things are tritely called – was held at the local Presbyterian church at which she had been a choir member. The service consisted of several hymns, some instrumental musical pieces, and half a dozen readings from Shakespeare. Afterwards, her “ashes” – as these things are euphemistically called – were spread in her backyard garden. There will be no “service” for Gerry, per his own request, but his remains will likewise be spread in the backyard. There is no indication that any warning will be provided prospective purchasers of the property that a pair of pulverized skeletons occupy the topsoil. I can’t help but brood on the conviction that human beings deserve better than to be treated like so much compost in death, even when the deceased themselves never understood such treatment as a degradation.
Gerry must have been a pretty smart guy. I have no idea what his ranking was among American chess players, but he clearly committed a lot of mental energy attempting to master the game of strategy. But as both of us got older, it became clear to me that he suffered from the chronic hollowness of the modern intellectual elite, especially those in the academy. I’m sure he fancied himself an enthusiast for the life of the mind, but he had no use for, had no patience for, had no clue concerning the life of the spirit, apart from which the “life of the mind” is little more than a hollow triviality. After his passing, one of my cousins remembered him for his “awesome” comic book collection. And he spent his intellectual might wrapped up in the finer points of a board game. All the while, certain members of my family will remember him primarily for his very audible remark during my sister Mary’s funeral Mass, at the conclusion of the deacon’s homily, lamenting what a bag of pointless wind he’d just been subjected to. Gerry was not above playing the grown fool.
Fool is a harsh word, and perhaps one unsuited for attribution to the deceased, or at least to the recently deceased, but it’s not wrong: Scripture tells us, more than once, that “The fool says in his heart ‘There is no God'”. I think that proverb has a lot to do with my lingering sadness over Gerry’s death. I don’t buy the popular Disney-esque vision, so prevalent among modern people concerning death and death’s ramifications, that “they all lived happily ever after”. I don’t believe for a minute that death is but a mere trifling, through which everyone passes to reach some utopian soiree. Whatever happens at death, it entails a violence that rips apart the corporeal self from the life – or soul – which animates it. This terminal event cannot possibly be as trivial and inconsequential as so many Disney-fied, sentimental moderns want to believe. Nor do I believe the nihilist materialism embraced by most of the rest of moderns, by guys like Gerry, with its obliviousness to the fundamentally spiritual character of the human person. I believe, rather, in the resurrection prefigured in the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, as witnessed to by his earthly disciples from Easter morning down to this day. But that means I believe in a resurrection, before all else, to judgment.
That is to say that I believe in justice, that I believe in the ultimate triumph of the truth: Magna est veritas, et prevalebit. In the 5th chapter of the Gospel of St John, Jesus famously contrasts the resurrection of life with the resurrection of judgment, but this does not imply that the resurrection of life is independent of judgment, for He is contrasting the fates of those who have done good with those who have done evil, deeds which can and must be judged in the pure light of the consuming fire of truth. So, I am not using the term resurrection to judgment as a contrast to the resurrection of life, but as a reference to the judgment that illuminates the character of an individual’s resurrected state in the light of truth, a light which strips away all illusion and deceit, all pretense and conceit. In that light of truth, God will judge the secret thoughts of all (Rom 2:16), and every careless word uttered will be made to be accounted for (Mt 12:36), and at that time, from everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required (Lk 12:46). We will all be judged.
But in using the term resurrection to judgment, I also intended to imply that I understand human beings to be corporeal beings, as is clearly implied in the idea of resurrection. We are not spirits trapped in material bodies which we dispense of at death in order to advance to an ethereal utopia. Rather, we are corporeal beings animated by souls belonging not only to the material order, but belonging also to the order of intellection and willing, to the order of meaning and purpose, the spiritual order, the order of truth and love. This belonging is wrought in the imago Dei that differentiates each of us as persons, brought about in the divine act of our creation at the moment of our conception, of our coming into being in the created order as unique beings, belonging to both the material and spiritual orders of creation. Our bodies are very much constituent aspects of our being, and whatever we do with – or to – our bodies, we do to ourselves. Of course, that which we do with or to our minds we likewise do to ourselves, and decisively so, but to speak of a resurrection is to point quite specifically at the unambiguously corporeal.
What the resurrection to life promises is not freedom from the body, but the reintegration of the human being’s corporeal and spiritual natures, as a nullifier of death. In the resurrected Christ, we see attestation to a resurrected body of a new and very different sort, to be sure, but to a body nonetheless: to a body free from the ravishes and even the limitations of the fallen world, not because it is free from matter, but because it is free from sin and the consequences of sin, which is so because the animating soul – the spirit – is, like Christ’s, bound up with God in deep and abiding and transformative communion. The promise of the resurrection is the promise of a fully human life – body and soul – free from the alienation from God wrought by sin – both personal and original – and thus free to be continually, eternally, made perfect in knowledge: the knowledge of truth, and the knowledge of love.
That brings us back to the triumph of truth, to a resurrection to judgment, and to the facile utopianism of modern day Gnostics and Pelagians. Confronted with the idea of a judgmental God, modern re-inventors of ancient heresies recoil in horror, aghast at the thought that anybody – let alone God – might judge them to be anything less than good enough. Yet, this is both to lack proper self-discernment, and to completely misunderstand the judgment of God. Two simple truths need to be elucidated here. The first is that God’s judgment, or justice, is precisely that which sets things right, that which vindicates the oppressed, which establishes righteousness in the glorious freedom of absolute truth, which is indeed righteousness itself. It is that very truth which, in being known, makes us free (Jn 8:32). But God’s justice is not anything other than the consuming fire of truth (Dt 4:24).
The second truth is that the condition of mankind is such that, in the absence of sanctifying grace, the human being is alienated from God. That is a simple and self-evident fact, which death both attests to and punctuates. The true measure of how “good” somebody might be is not a measure to be taken against a scale of human values, or against a laundry list of sanctioned and/or censured moral behaviors – never mind to be measured against the deceptive conceits of self-regard. No, the true measure of one’s goodness is the measure of how godly one is, simply because God alone is good. He is goodness itself. And His goodness, or sanctity, or holiness, is exactly that which accomplishes, in those docile to the prompting of His grace, that very closeness to God in which, through God’s own free gift of Self, the human person transcends the alienation from God inherent in the human situation, and enters into the communion with God which the resurrection of life promises to complete and fulfill. Apart from God, there is no “life after death”, there is only apartness from God, who, Incarnate, declared: “I am the resurrection and the life” (Jn 11:25). Apartness from God, or alienation from God, is not any kind of everlasting soiree, but is ultimately an incomparable – and even incomprehensible – poverty and privation. It is what Scripture calls the second death.
It seems to be true that not everybody wants to be close to God. One might argue that, at some level, the desire to be close to God does indeed exist in all persons, and perhaps it does, but it seems unarguable that a conflicting desire to be far from God, even to be rid of God – even to destroy or overthrow God – sometimes prevails in the wills of men and women. It is not possible to know to what extent these conflicting desires can coexist, or to know what finally constitutes a fundamental disposition for or against God, but it again seems unarguable that it is possible for such a fundamental disposition against God to be made, and it is likewise unarguable that God would respect the freedom of the individual person to make such a choice. God does not force Himself on anyone. He offers Himself in love; He does not coerce. And thus it is possible, in rejecting God, to fundamentally refuse the communion with God which constitutes the resurrection of life, which is ultimately the only true “life after death”. That rejection of the very basis of the resurrection of life necessarily and inescapably leaves the individual to face what Jesus referred to as the resurrection of judgment, or as many English translations have it, the resurrection of condemnation. This is – and should be – a sobering consideration. It is scandalous that so many today belittle the menace of condemnation as being beneath their consideration. That could prove foolish.
I have no way of knowing the state of my uncle Gerry’s soul. It’s entirely possible that praying for him is a complete waste of time as far as it goes for him. I think that haunting possibility is much of the reason for the depth of my continuing sadness at Gerry’s death. Yet, there is no way for me to know, and furthermore, I myself am very much in need of the increase in charity that a commitment to intercede for Gerry entails, so I will certainly continue to pray for him, and will even have a Mass offered for him – as unlikely it might be that he would have sought such a thing in his lifetime. His time is up now, and he is either locked into a permanent alienation from all that is true, good, and beautiful, or he is coming to grips with his failures, great and small, and redressing them. The idea that he might be joining the angels and saints in heaven today, praising and worshipping the thrice-holy God, seems absurd. But nothing permits anyone from declaring that it could never be. That dialog is strictly between God and Gerry. But it sure looks like checkmate for Gerdull, and that is depressing.