J. Todd Billings - The End of the Christian Life: How Embracing Our Mortality Frees Us to Truly Live

To desire eternal life with all the passion of the spirit.

To keep death daily before ones eyes.

The Rule of St. Benedict

We are all dying. This seems obvious enough, at least in the abstract. Yet in our day even this abstraction is denied by some. A Silicon Valley research foundation called SENS pursues the ambitious mission to prevent and reverse age-related ill-health. For de Grey, death must be approached not as the intractable end but as a tool to be taken out of the toolbox when its convenient. Should we live each day with an awareness of death, a mortal end that shapes each season of our life? For de Grey, such an awareness seems antithetical to full human flourishing.

Imagine this in your own life. If you knew you could live to be one thousand, with your body oscillating between the biological ages of twenty and twenty-five, when would you start to think about death? Perhaps the first 990 years would be full of safety and pleasure, like Disneyland without the high prices. If you no longer had to fear death because of aging, you would likely consider a life of hundreds of years to be what you deserve. However, even apart from the question of how much wealth and resources you would need, this vision of flourishing, upon reflection, is illusory. What about violence, virus pandemics, car accidents, and natural disasters? Would not the fear of these ways to die be magnified? Is it even possible to live as if there is no end in sight?

Although de Greys mission of enabling a millennium-long life is far from mainstream in the medical community, it crystallizes a vision of human flourishing that many of us assume in our day-to-day livesnamely, that death doesnt apply to us, nor does it apply to those we love. And because it doesnt apply to us, we think we can live in a world sanitized from the reality of death, leaving it as a topic for Hollywood dramas and the news media.

However, if someone close to you has died unexpectedly or has faced a terminal diagnosis, you may have begun the process of being shaken out of this illusion. The hard fact of dying, or of living in a disease-afflicted body, punctures and deflates our hopes for the life we thought we hadperhaps the life we thought we deserved. It breaks us open. As a result, we might want to close the wound and try to return to a death-denying life, sanitized from regular reflection upon our mortal limits and our end.

For Christians, however, coming to terms with this open wound actually teaches us how to properly live and hope as creatures. Only those who know they are dying can properly trust in Gods promise of eternal life. Christians throughout the ages have recognized this self-deceptive tendency to deny ones mortality in day-to-day life. Memento mori , they said. Remember death. In the sixth century, Benedict of Nursia gave monastic Christians the imperative quoted at the beginning of this introduction: Keep death daily before ones eyes. Over a millennium later, New England pastor Jonathan Edwards made a regular practice of intentionally reflecting on his mortality, writing that he was resolved