He gives life and He gives death

“yuhyi wa yumit” [ He gives life and He gives death]

I care about this because I regularly assume life to be life…me, things, people, the world, what i am aware of, what i feel, what i love, hope for, fear, overcome…the ups and downs..i live it all..here as adventure, there as routine, here as joy, there as resilience and so on…i consume life and it consumes me…I have loved life and living beings and I have experienced loss – loss of life – and have found it unbearably painful, devastating, a burden upon my soul/neck, a wound and injury without any remedy or repair or respite, a despair that darkens everything around me and inside me. In what I experience and what I can postulate/imagine in thought, I fould life beloved to me as long as its there and found it ‘just there’ and I found death shocking and merciless and also ‘there’ (in experience more than in thought because I tended to forget it and turn away from it as much as possible whenver it made its appearance in my experience in the death of a loved one or in my mind as memories of times past or worries about dying and leaving everything and everyone). i have tasted and lived a life that i saw as given by no one, i have seen life around me as given by no one. I have seen death as given by no one. I have exerienced and thought about life and death as things that happen and as things whose existence needed no further thought or meaning. And to experience life and death in that way has hurt me and caused me such pain that I have felt a need to look at life and death again and again and ask of them this: what are you? what do you say? what are you doing? what shall i do with you? are you here to hurt me? I care about the claim that “He gives life and He gives death” because it invites me to shatter my self-destructive view that life and death are both final and absolute realities themselves, that they just happen to be alternating between each other and I am caught in the cruelty of this arbitrary alternation. The claim that life has a living giver-of-life from whom also death proceeds is immensely relieving and rational – rational because it can relieve the soul of the harm of seeing death as a rival to, and ultimately triumphant over, my life and the life of all I love. Whenever i have seen or realized that life is being given and He is giving life, I have been able to also see and realize that death is also given and life has therefore not been overcome by death but has been preserved and secured with the giver of life. When i see life as being given, I put myself and all things in the hands of that giver of life and so long as that hand, that power and will and knowledge and life exists in my eyes, death is also something that is being given. life and death are transcended as i make the pilgirimage to the sacred house – the house of the One from which life and death proceed and where His every-livingness and His mercy and pure existence, without imperfection and end, is found. In that pure existence, all things find eternal existence in my eyes and their deaths do not darken my world. The best thing that I have been able to so far think to myself when confronted with actual or imagined death is to think ‘He gives life, He gives death’. It is my only hope and suport. It is as rational as someone walking where there is light to avoid falling into an endless ditch oneself and dragging everything beautiful into that ditch of non-existence.