Summary: <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> Nothing<br> in life is certain but death and taxes. But if death is something we all face<br> at some point, and grief is part of the human experience, we talk about them<br> surprisingly little. In fact, it’s something we don’t necessarily do all that<br> well as a culture.<br> <br> <br> “The word<br> death is not pronounced in New York, in Paris, in London, because it burns the<br> lips,” wrote the poet Octavio Paz in 1961. His words still ring true today. <br> <br> <br> Some of<br> us, like musician Phil Davidson, eventually find a way to deal with sorrow<br> after the loss of a loved one.<br> <br> <br> “I could hear the foghorns of the ships that were leaving Belfast<br> harbour and going out to sea,” Phil says about that night after he last saw Agnes,<br> his grandmother, alive. <br> <br> <br> “I was lying there just thinking about my<br> grandmother, I could hear these foghorns, and I’m thinking these ships are kind<br> of all lost at sea. I thought that’s a great kind of analogy of how I was feeling<br> – I felt really lost at sea at that point, but she was also lost at sea as well.”<br> <br> <br> So he got up and started writing Ballymena<br> Agnes. It was his way of connecting with his emotions and working through his<br> grief.<br> <br> <br> For philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff, it<br> has been a different journey. His son died at 25 years of age in a mountain<br> climbing accident. <br> <br> <br> When he turned to philosophical attempts to<br> explain this loss, he didn’t find any of them compelling.<br> <br> <br> “So I live with unanswered questions,” he<br> says. “I continue to have faith in that there is a creator of this universe and<br> that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, but how I fit that altogether with the<br> early death of a beloved son … I live with the question.”<br> <br> <br> In this episode,<br> we explore the tension that is presented in the face of death. On the one hand,<br> the Christian faith says that death is much worse than we think and our<br> instincts are right, it’s really not ok. But it also says that there’s far more<br> hope and comfort to be found in the face of death, more than we might imagine.<br> <br> <br> SUBSCRIBE<br> to our podcast: <a href="http://bit.ly/lifeandfaithpodcast">http://bit.ly/lifeandfaithpodcast</a><br> <br> <br> <br> LISTEN to<br> music by Phil Davidson: <a href="http://bit.ly/phildavidsonfb">http://bit.ly/phildavidsonfb</a><br> <br> <br> <br> PURCHASE Nicholas Wolterstorff’s ‘Lament for a Son’: <a href="http://amzn.to/1Vh6TMd">http://amzn.to/1Vh6TMd</a> <br> <br> <br>
