Is Fred dead?John's Garvey's reflections on death and life after death ("Ashes to Ashes Ashes to Ashes may refer to: As a metaphor:
adj. Characterized by erudition; learned. See Synonyms at learned. [Middle English erudit, from Latin , but his own position on personal survival after bodily death remains unclear. Does he deny that there is any life at all between bodily death and the general resurrection ("The corpse is ... Fred, dead")? Or does he endorse Schmemann's suggestion that there may be a soul separate from the body that is asleep in the interval? On either view he must reject the ancient tradition of praying to the saints: Either nobody's there or nobody's awake to hear the prayer. And then, of course, it's just a foolish mockery Mockery Abas changed into lizard for mocking Demeter. [Rom. Myth: Metamorphoses, Zimmerman, 1] Beckmesser pompous object of practical jokes. [Ger. during the Orthodox canonization canonization (kăn'ənĭzā`shən), in the Roman Catholic Church, process by which a person is classified as a saint. It is now performed at Rome alone, although in the Middle Ages and earlier bishops elsewhere used to canonize. ceremony to switch from praying for the saint to praying to the saint, saying "Holy Father, pray to God for us." THOMAS O. MITCHELL Wilmington, N.C. The author replies: I don't know Don't know (DK, DKed) "Don't know the trade." A Street expression used whenever one party lacks knowledge of a trade or receives conflicting instructions from the other party. that it makes sense to speak in terms of a period of time between death and resurrection. As I tried to indicate in my essay, without a physical body we may have nothing to do with the space-time continuum, with a "what happens when." The dead we ask to pray for us, whether saints or any of the beloved dead, are alive in a way we cannot possibly imagine. Our faith is simply that God is the God of the living. In God all has been accomplished--and we haven't arrived there yet. As to how we get from here to there, I have no idea, but it will have everything to do with God's will Noun 1. God's Will - the omnipotence of a divine being omnipotence - the state of being omnipotent; having unlimited power and nothing to do with my imagination. Schmemann's idea of death as a sleep, as dormition, does not make a mockery of the idea of prayer to the saints, but has a long Orthodox heritage. JOHN GARVEY |
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