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TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks on Life After Death (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 05. The Oldest Question
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The Oldest Question
Where is her There's a narrow pine box, and a slender strip of green sod. But he is not there. Or, is he? He, where is he!
It's the oldest question, that is the oldest tense human question. It has been wrung out in every generation by grief, staring dry-eyed or sobbing, over the sod strip, out into the gray beyond.
Our earliest mother knelt broken-hearted by the body of her boy. It was a triple grief with her. Her boy was dead, grief enough that. But it was through passionate violence, and, worse yet, violence by his own brother. War had an early start.
Grief had its first birthplace in a mother's broken heart. No, not its first. Its first birth-place was in the heart of God, when His prodigal world went away from the old fire-side. But then that was a mother heart a father mother heart, and a broken heart too.
Yet, it was the first human heart. And again you must say, not even that. For God's heart is a human heart, as well as more. We get our human heart from His human heart, we made in his likeness.
That question, and that grief, have never quit since that day just outside the Eden gate. The grief sobs out its ceaseless requiem regardless of clock or clime. And the question intrudes its sharp cutting point into the most sacred hour and corner.
The Greeks were masters of the world. Their sense of beauty has never been surpassed. Their chiselled marble, chaste architecture, and noble teachings, set the world's standard. But their answer to this old question couldn't still the tumult in their own broken hearts.
Quite gone, he had, they said. It's the end. There's nothing beyond. So their brains, though their hearts never accepted the answer. There was a sharp break between the two, never bridged by any philosophy.
Others of them disagreed. But the best thing they could do was picturing a cheerless, aimless, colorless existence that was itself repellant. That was the best answer that the best Greek wisdom and culture could bring.
The Romans were masters of force, sheer brutal force, organized with rarest skill. Their force mastered the Greeks but it couldn't force any mastery here. The question forced them to admit themselves mastered, out-done, in the presence of its breaking grief. They trod the same path hewed out by Greek philosophy. They had no light to relieve the gray gloom.
The earlier dwellers on the Nile saw no bet-ter light. They could pierce the sky with their rare pyramidal engineering. But their longing tear-bedimmed eyes could pierce ahead past the line of the grave not the tiniest scratch, nor the faintest gleam.
The Euphrates sages stopped dumb at the same place, hoping, wishing, wondering but skeptical. The Phoenicians could shape an alphabet to be carried through one national culture after another up to our own English. But they couldn't shape a teaching about the future that could ease the heart tug at the gateway of the grave.
And the later teachers up to this hour, following the same path of reasoned research, have nothing to add to those earlier thinkers. The best they can bring is a vague uncertainty. Wearisome comforters are they all, like job's friends.
The candle's snuffed out. He has gone, for good and all. That's the end. Or, you can dimly see him wandering aimlessly about in a gray gloom that only adds a touch of bitterness to the heart's grief.
It's a cheerless answer. The cold light of reason is well called cold. This is the best and the most that its lantern can do, or, at any rate, has done, in the night of man's sorrow. It's a repellant look out into the dark night.
But stop. That's not all. There is another answer. And it's an answer that answers. There's no beggarly begging of the question here. And it stands in sharpest contrast to these others. They are vague. It is positive and clear. There's an element of thoughtful measured certainty, that begins to ease the heart at once.
Indeed certainty is a marked characteristic of this answer. There is a sheer certainty that is startling and refreshing. Already the air clears. The clouds scurry. Sunlight begins to edge the clouds with its cheery golden glint.