Saturday, February 14, 1998

Lessons from the death of Rock and Roll Daniel

By TOM EHRICH / Religion News Service

UNDATED -- The house seems quiet when I return from an evening of teaching. My 6-year-old son sits glumly in a corner of a sofa. I wonder if he has misbehaved.

"Hey, sweet boy," I say.

"Rock and Roll Daniel died," he says. Ah, the gerbil to whom my son gave a grand name.

"Do you want to see him?" he asks. He takes me into his bedroom and lifts Rock out of his cage. The gerbil is wrapped in cloth.

"Rock was the best pet I ever had," he says through tears. I hold my son. We agree to have a burial right away. We proceed to the front garden, where Rock and Roll Daniel joins the hamster Scruffy next to a statue of St. Francis. My son says a prayer.

"I would give anything to get Rock back," says a sad boy at bedtime.

Death is powerful. Death changes everything. Death forces us to see our own frailty. Death seems unfair, an intrusion of some dread outside force, against which even safe homes and locked doors aren't enough. Death snatches away more than the one life.

Christianity is such a clutter of theologies and theories, stale arguments and bitter feelings, a history with more violence than grace, and, for many, a bleak parsing of words in search of victory in a never-ending war of right opinion.

But the central belief -- the core truth that not even prideful theology or vain pursuit of grandeur can erase -- is that Jesus died and rose again. He endured the worst of human torment, entered into that most dread of conditions -- and then appeared again.

He stood among his friends, showed them his battered body, and bade them "Shalom!"

In Christian faith, it is Jesus' victory over death, not the locking of doors, that gives hope.

In Jewish faith, as I understand it, the defining moments also involve God's victory over death. God heard the cries of his people in Egypt and set them free. God set Zion as a beacon to the lost nations. God found his people in captivity and led them home.

Believers often see tribal superiority as the meaning of such moments. From that conceit comes a willingness to inflict suffering on others. But then comes death -- not nameless death, but a pet, a parent, a spouse, a child -- and the conceit of superiority yields little comfort.

In my experience, congregations are at their best in times of death. Budget-drafting, leadership elections, church politics, decisions on hymnody and liturgy, salary-setting and building projects bring out our worst. But when someone dies, we discover compassion and put aside hostilities. Weddings are about flash and pride; funerals are about life and hope.

Death, in a sense, saves us from ourselves. I watch my own generation. We thought life was about eternal youth, then career success, now financial security. But then our parents started to die, and material abundance meant nothing. Friends are dying. We cannot help but know that we are next. Not even planning a successful retirement will thwart the great equalizer.

I don't believe wrong opinion holds any danger for faith in America. Our danger is shallowness -- a faith that is simply convenience, self-affirmation, mindless comfort, background music for the soul.

Dealing with death cuts through that shallowness, for death, more than any other moment, is when we discover our need of God. Tinsel and tracts won't do. We need the real thing.

Death saves more than congregations. In politics, we ignore what politicians say. We know their words are merely air, appealing to our worst instincts. But we remember keenly where we were when President Roosevelt's body rolled through town, when President Kennedy was shot, when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, or when a war of national pride sent a casket to our neighborhood or our home.

It is death that gives politics its perspective. It is weariness with death that ends wars.

It is death that cuts through all conceits and informs us we aren't God, that we are, as the burial liturgy says, but dust. In the end, we are not rivals for the spoils of war; we are partners in dealing with mortality.

(Tom Ehrich is the author of "On a Journey," daily meditations available through Journey Publishing Co. If you have feedback or want to suggest a question for a future column, send e-mail to: journey@interpath.com)