Having Died, He Yet Lives
It's no fun to appreciate to the full truth of the materialist proposition that I don't have a body, I am a body. —Christopher Hitchens, famed atheist, in Mortality
I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me, though he may die, yet he shall live. Amen, amen, if anyone keeps my word, he shall never see death.—Jesus of Nazareth
This year marks the twentieth year since my younger brother put a gun to his head and left the rest of us. Twenty years, and it still takes me less than two seconds to put myself back on that apartment stairway, banging furiously on a door that I knew wouldn't be opened, collapsing under the anvil of the unfathomable. Just two seconds to be tossed about yet again by that ferocious onslaught of grief. But I know that having died, he yet lives.
I bless his name and plumb the depths of praise,
Raising my hands up in worship to him,
For guaranteed is his awakening.
O live he shall! Never to die again.
