FRAGILITY

Recently a teacher at our school experienced an especially heart-breaking loss in her family. A little girl--three years old--was sick with a fever, a pretty typical thing this time of year. Her parents thought it was a just an ordinary virus and put her down for a nap. She never woke up.

Some years ago, my own brother, a healthy, funny, and fun-loving man stepped out to cross a street on a dark night and was hit by a car. He died instantly. He was just forty years old.

We can all come up with stories like this, stories that cause us to raise our voices to heaven and ask, "Why?"

Who could possibly offer the parents of that little girl comfort in the face of what happened? To this day my mother counts the cards and phone calls her children make to her on her birthday, on Mothers' Day, and Christmas--and she subtracts the ones that don't arrive from my brother. Her heart is permanently broken.

These incidents demonstrate the awful fragility of human life. We are so easily snuffed out, "like the grass on the housetops" we flourish for a moment and then we are gone, as the Psalmist proclaims. One moment we are there amidst our loved ones and the next we are being lowered into the earth never to be seen or heard from again. At least in this world.

And this last remark leads us to the particular hope of the Orthodox Christian people--a hope that proclaims in spite of our terrible fragility we are not merely dust. By becomming one of us God, in Christ, has also taken upon Himself our fragile nature and united it to His own immortal and infinitely powerful nature. In the drama of His Passion, Death, and Resurrection He has shown us that in the end we do not simply wither away like the grass on the housetops. Our voices will one day be heard in the midst of our loved ones again--and then there shall be "no more tears or crying....but life eternal".

Why is it so important to hold to an Orthodox faith in Christ? Because nothing else will suffice. Nothing else will guarantee that we are more than just dirt, food for the worms.

When someone says that it doesn't really matter what you believe they are not telling the truth. If someone says that you can be a Christian and deny that Jesus is God and that He rose bodily from the dead, they are lying. If someone says the body is just a shell and what really counts is the soul, they are preaching heresy.

Why? Just ask the grieving mothers of this world. The only hope they have, the only hope any of us have, of touching, hearing, seeing those beloved, fragile children ("fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters....") who have gone before us is grounded in the FACT that He is Who He said He is.

What those mothers want, what we all want, is to know that our fragility will not last forever; that someday we shall be solid and strong and that nothing will ever separate us from one another or from God ever again.