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Living With Death (or, "Squirrels, Apples, and Bacon")

by James Barringer  
5/01/2010 / Christian Living

We as a culture have a strange relationship with death.

I was thinking of this today as I strolled down a sidewalk near my house, on the way to get some lunch, and happened to pass a dead squirrel. It had been dead for quite a while; some fur was left on it, but its lips had rotted away to reveal a grimace of pointy teeth, and unnaturally white femurs were visible in its legs. It was, to be honest, a little gross, as you've probably discovered while you've been reading this.

Author Donald Miller observed this phenomenon in his book "Searching for God Knows What." "I saw a commercial the other day trying to sell me life insurance, 'in case the unthinkable should happen.' But that's the thing: death isn't unthinkable. It happens to everybody. What does it say about a culture when they look at the inevitable and call it unthinkable?"

Yet most of us also have no problem going to the movies and watching people being killed in some of the most gruesome ways imaginable. Many of my friends, specifically my Christian ones, will refuse to watch a movie with sex in it, and some will even draw the line at profanity, but virtually none of us have a problem watching a movie where people get shot. Yet I'm fairly sure that, had my friends been walking next to me on the way to get lunch, almost all the girls and maybe some of the guys would have been mildly disgusted by a dead animal.

Yet death itself cannot be considered objectively disgusting. There are doctors who voluntarily spend all day around humans who have been grievously injured to the point of being nearly hamburger, and quite a few of these people die underneath the doctor's own hands. There are some people who have no problem with death, whether animal or even human. Whether a person is disgusted by it is largely subjective.

More than anything else, I think this speaks to the sanitized nature of life in the United States. In other countries, or even in the parts of the US where people raise their own crops and livestock, it's not out of the ordinary for people to give their barnyard animals names, to spend months or years grooming and feeding them, knowing full well that the poor cow is going to be a T-bone before Christmas. One of my friends in Texas - obviously it had to be Texas, right? - had a pig named Bacon, who his kids helped raise, before they invited a bunch of friends over for a pig roast where poor Bacon was, shall we say, the guest of honor. Neither my friend nor his children had any problem with this, but I bet that if you thought of someone slaughtering your beloved pet, you'd probably flip out.

This is neither good or bad; it's merely evidence that we don't encounter death as frequently as people in other cultures do. As a result, we have, as I have already said, a strange relationship with it. On the one hand, we're terrified of it, to the point that people will spend untold amounts of money attempting to extend their lives, and some even go to the point of cryogenically freezing themselves so they can be thawed out once science knows how to make them immortal. (Spoiler alert: it doesn't work.) On the other hand, we have no problem watching movies where the body counts spiral into the hundreds. Many Christians supported the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which to date have claimed the lives of over five thousand Americans and an estimated 100,000 Iraqi and Afghani civilians. We seem to be okay with death as long as it's sterilized: as long as it's happening to a stranger on a screen, or as long as it's merely numbers on a casualty report or images on the evening news. Seeing death in person, though, even if it's merely a squirrel, is revolting. It's an odd double standard.

Ancient cultures had far less of a problem with death, probably because they were around it more often as I have mentioned, and probably also because they were more in touch with the land. See, what they understood and what we seem not to is that death is necessary for life. Every time you eat meat, an animal dies. Every time you eat vegetables, a plant dies. Our bodies are merely giant power plants, except instead of ingesting coal or natural gas, we consume organic matter, which is to say things that were alive until we needed them not to be. Basically, plants and animals die so that you don't have to.

You could, if you were fond of poetics, say that death is necessary for life. I don't just mean that we have to kill in order to live. Take, for instance, an apple tree. If you want a second apple tree, you have to pluck the apple off from the tree - killing it - and then chop it apart to get at the seeds, which you can then drop in the ground. But you can't have a tree without killing the apple. We don't think about this, either; we just head down to the grocery store and buy a bag of apples without a second thought about the floral carnage involved.

What we see when we look at nature, then, is a system in which everything dies. It's also a curious system in which the only way to live is to undergo death first. The seed inside that apple would never become a tree if the apple wasn't broken off the tree first. I think this is the real reason why ancient cultures had an easier time understanding the gospel message. The idea that someone or something has to die in order for you to live, or that you yourself have to die before you can live, is pretty alien to us because we don't encounter those kinds of death on an up-close-and-personal basis.

Yet they are the essence of Christianity. Jesus was the sacrificial lamb that was slaughtered on the cross and then raised again so that we could live. Yet the Bible also says that we are, so to speak, the apple. When we accept Christ, we are "a new creation: the old is gone, and the new has come," Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5. The old you has to die so that the new you can live. We're just like apples: we have to be torn off the old tree so that we can be replanted to grow and thrive. Not only do Jesus and Paul talk about dying to sin for the sake of new life here on earth, but they also speak of our earthly death being merely the beginning of eternal joy and peace, the time when our malfunctioning meatbag is finally thrown aside in exchange for a glorified body. Like we have once died spiritually to sin and come alive in Christ, so also we have to die physically in order to come alive with Christ.

As I have said, we as a culture have a strange relationship with death. We're distanced from it, in a way that people have historically not been, so that we don't have to experience it on a daily basis anymore, don't have to butcher cows or pluck apples with our own hands anymore. Yet we can't escape death, can we? Everyone and everything still dies, and we know it. Because death is inevitable but foreign to us, we have our uniquely American passive-aggressive relationship with it, where it fascinates us on a movie screen but terrifies us in real life.

I wonder if this helps explain the American resistance to the gospel message. It's not merely that Americans are pluralistic, although we are, or that they don't like talking about sin, although we don't. I think the answer may simply be that we don't understand death properly. We don't have daily reminders of how inevitable it is. Yet you can't get away from the gospel message without it. Christ died for us, and then we die to self, because the wages of sin is death. I think this is why the happy-go-lucky "God wants you to be happy and healthy and rich" pseudo-gospel goes over so well in America. It's all about life, but life is only half the story. Yet in a culture so insulated from death, maybe it's the only half most of us can truly relate to.

How else can we explain our odd relationship with death? Why would we happily order a ham sandwich but go queasy if we actually had to slaughter poor Bacon ourselves? Why do vegetarians wig out about animal rights while slaughtering plants by the millions? Why are people so reluctant to talk about what will happen when they die but so eager to tell you how drunk they're going to get next weekend? The only possible answer is that we just don't understand death. Yet you can't give the gospel, and you can't live the Christian life, without it. You may never kill a pig with your hands, but you can kill your unclean thoughts, brutally murder your ungodly habits. You can live in the victory of the new life that you gained when your old self was nailed to the cross with Jesus. Like the ancients understood, death is everywhere, and it's the key to life. Even if you never see it physically, you can live it spiritually. When you realize that death is actually the beginning of life, you may never see death in the same way.

Jim Barringer is a 38-year-old writer, musician, and teacher. More of his work can be found at facebook.com/jmbarringer. This work may be reprinted for any purpose so long as this bio and statement of copyright is included.

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