Immortality

A fellow Christian blogger recently wrote…

My grandmother impacted me. She changed who I am. I think most people who know me would consider me both gentle and provocative. I don’t generally let my kids win when we play games. I am changing the world through these, and many more important ways. I will be dead someday. And the people who I impact will change the world, too.

I truly believe we will live forever in a much more literal way. There is that kind of immortality. But that doesn’t diminish this kind of immortality. Yes, I remember my grandmother. But more than that, I’ve been changed by her, made a better person by her. This is no small thing, and it’s a much bigger thing than mere memories. [Italics added.]

Not to detract or even contradict what he was expressing, it made me think the thoughts he wrote through to another level of reality, that which is emphasized in my Orthodox faith, and I left the following comment which I'd like to share as a ramble on immortality…

Immortality, in the sense usually meant by some types of Christians and other “spiritual” seekers, is either a “die and go to heaven” or a “die and be admitted into a higher plane of being” mentality, neither of which have any substance in reality.

Something which I think you are hinting at in this post is, on the other hand, closer to the truth than what most people, Christians included, are willing to admit: Real immortality is much closer to the immortality of fame in the human world than it is to the mythical or fairy-tale versions of immortality one finds in religion.

Immortality as fame means that your name will never die out, that people will remember you, at least your name, for hundreds, even thousands, of years. Though we may not know much about Confucius, Julius Caesar, or William Shakespeare, most of us know the names as household words almost. And not a few people actually do know these men through familiarity with their thoughts. And if any part of us should deserve immortality, I think it must be our thought, that which made us what we are. So, the famous men and women of history, in their thousands, have immortality among us as long as the human race lasts. And how?

They are immortal because of memory.

We remember them. We remember and pass on, generation by generation, this memory of them. Does our remembering these people confer on them anything like real immortality, that is, eternal life? Well, no, it doesn’t. That’s where the comparison has run its course. But where it leaves off, something else takes over.

In the Orthodox Church, at every service of the Divine Liturgy we hear the words proclaimed, “May the Lord remember you in His Kingdom, now and always and unto the ages of ages!” as the priests and deacons process through the temple bearing in their hands the bread and wine which will become, by the operation of the Holy Spirit, the mystery of Christ’s Body and Blood. While they’re carrying it, it isn’t that yet, it’s still just bread and wine, though the bread has already been divided into dozens of small chunks, each piece having been prayed over in memory of human beings, alive or dead, prayed over and brought to God’s attention, for His help. So, in an odd sort of way, the bread at least has already ceased being ordinary bread; it has started on its journey, having become by this stage true prosphora or offering.

We also, in the Orthodox service, pray this prayer before receiving communion, “…but as the thief I confess to you, Lord, remember me in Your Kingdom.”

Hence we see that, in Orthodox Christian terms anyway, the place of memory or remembrance in the reality of eternal life is absolutely essential. While our remembrance of famous people gives them a figurative immortality, because we are just creatures ourselves, it is God’s remembrance of us that gives us real immortality, real eternal life. We exist even now because it is God who is thinking of us, upholding the reality of our being by His thought, by His memory. When we come to the end of our physical lives, it is the same:
God remembers us, and hence we live.

In scripture, there is very little content as to the nature of “heaven” or the life immortal, or eternal life, only the word of Jesus, who says to us that it is in Him that we live forever.

In Him? And how is this? By His thinking of us, again, by memory, as the thief cried out, “Remember me when You come into Your Kingdom!” and Jesus’ response, “This day you will be with Me in paradise!”

We really have nothing else to go on.
Even the whole of the Old Testament gives no assurances, only expressions of faith and hope in God’s mercy, “This I know, that my Redeemer lives, and from my flesh I will look on God” (Job) or even of agnostic abandon, “Who knows if the spirit of man goes up, and the soul of the beast down to the earth” (Ecclesiastes).

It all hinges on memory, that YHWH, the Holy One of Israel, remembers us.

And if He remembers us,
we indeed are immortal.



“Receive me today, O Son of God, as partaker of Thy Mystical Supper, for I will not speak of Thy Mystery to Thine enemies; neither will I give Thee a kiss as did Judas, but like the thief will I confess Thee: Remember me,
O Lord, in Thy Kingdom.”