Death as the Secret of Life

From Dr. Leithart's Blog:

A little more than month before his death, the poet and preacher John Donne ascended the pulpit at Saint Paul's in London on the first Friday of Lent, already ashen due to the stomach cancer that would shortly kill him, to deliver his farewell sermon, entitled "Death's Duel." In that sermon, he characterized life as a series of deaths: "all our periods and transitions in this life, are so many passages from death to death."

At birth, Donne said, we emerge from the death-like sleep of the womb: "our very birth and entrance into this life is exitus à morte, an issue from death." We emerge from the death of the womb only to enter into death: "this deliverance, from that death, the death of the womb, is an entrance, a delivering over to another death, the manifold deaths of this world." Infants come into the world wrapped like corpses. As Donne put it, "we have a winding‑sheet in our mother's womb which grows with us from our conception, and we come into the world wound up in that winding‑sheet, for we come to seek a grave."

Donne had it right. Death doesn't only come at the end of life. Death punctuates life. Death is the secret of life. We die to childhood, die to youth, die to singlehood, die to parenthood, die to a career, die as we are torn from dying friends and family members, die to high school. Perhaps we even have the privilege of dying through slander or persecution. Life is a series of transitions through death, and these deaths are the only possible passage to maturity. If we don't die to childhood, we remain children forever; nothing is more pathetic than the middle-aged former sports star who has never died to high school football. Through these deaths, and only on the other side of these deaths, is the glory that God brings, a glory that is ever new.