If you're a Star Trek fan (I was, since my daughter was and there was therefore no way to avoid it), you may remember that every now and then a couple of Klingons would find themselves in a tight spot, and then would grin and say to each other "It is a good day to die." If there was a death with honor facing them, they were ready for it.
I always liked that attitude. Seemed to me it was also the Christian attitude, not a desire for death but a lighthearted acceptance of it, if that's what you had to do to keep following Christ. Glad did I live and gladly die / And I laid me down with a will.
We just got home from a concert featuring music of the Elizabethan/Jacobean composer John Dowland, in which the final line of one of the songs was another echo of the same sentiment:
He never happie liv'd that cannot love to die.
Not morbid at all, I think; sublimely free and humane.
In 1867, Matthew Arnold wrote "Dover Beach", a haunting poem evoking the "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of the Sea of Faith. As a boomer who finished Catholic elementary school in 1964 and then watched my Church falter, I've found the roar all too audible. So here I wait, listening for the whispers of that Sea's invincible return.
