On another occasion, I remember going to a different hospital where the driveway wound through a long cemetery (hardly a comforting notion for the sick!). Many times I have caught the stench of decaying flesh when walking past a hospital on a hot, sunny day; or found myself trapped in a parade of cars proceeding to a funeral.

Yesterday I was walking to my office. On most days, people congregate outside the morgue waiting to receive the deceased’s body. There are usually tears, almost always singing. As I walked past the group yesterday there was a woman hunched in half, sobbing uncontrollably. It is hard to describe what this did to me. One moment I was deep in my thoughts about a project or idea, and the next I am consumed by her grief. Death is more than a sterile topic (to be avoided except when necessary) … but is personal, communal, and stands in the middle of our daily life as if to announce, “all is not right with the world.”

We need to listen to this voice… even as it mocks us.

I don’t want to sensationalize death; nor do I care to suggest that we should give it undue attention, as if to intimate that death has the final word. We know that in the end LIFE prevails. God will pronounce His authoritative “no” to human suffering; and the eternal “yes” to life in Christ.

But along the way, and until we come to the consummation of all things, we need to learn from people who do not insulate themselves from death. For the vast majority of Christians in the world, death brings opportunities for “weeping with those who weep.” Exposure to death does not numb them to the realities of loss, nor dispose them to futility; rather, it equips them with resources in which to move into others people’s lives with the compassion of Christ. My friends have taught me these lessons. They don’t always get it “right.” We all stumble awkwardly around the topic. I am also not suggesting that African culture is somehow superior to Western societies (we need to oppose all such polarities). I just know that the visibility of death has done good things within me. I am being shaken out of my self-interested slumber to feel the pains of others (like what happened yesterday). I have learned to cry again. Others have ministered to me when I have suffered loss. My prayers have moved away from my immediate (and sometimes trivial) concerns to the plight of the poor, the widows, orphans, and others who face daily atrocities of human suffering. I am not where I should be, but the pathway to my office is helping.

Finally, “death” is more than a physical condition. Our bodies are inter-woven into an extensive multi-faceted fabric that unites us with the entire cosmos. If Christians are going to proclaim LIFE in the midst of DEATH, we cannot do so armed with only well-intentioned spiritual sayings (“Its okay, she is in a better place now”); nor relying solely on the authority of scientific medicine (“just take this medicine;” or “take this treatment”). Both may be true, but they hardly help us look at deeper issues. We, in the West, cannot just throw money at death, and thus find our selves guilty of a “false generosity” that tries to solve people’s problems without looking at the causes (here I make illusion to the words of Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed). Nor can those trapped in poverty afford to just throw up their hands, and say “It is God’s will.” Death needs to move us into global injustices, poverty, gluttony, famine, selfishness, agricultural development, greed, economic inequities, holistic health, spiritual shallowness, and yes, … theology.

Health is more than the absence of sickness, but “wholeness.” As God’s agents of shalom in the world, Christians need to confront death wherever it exists, in its personal, bodily, spiritual, relational, emotional, and environmental forms. But we also need the visibility of death to compel us deeper into daily liturgies of lamentation: for our sins, … the good of each other … but also for the rest of creation which “groans” awaiting the redemption of the children of God.

You see, my daily pathway may be littered with emotional minefields but it is doing a world of good within me.