The fact that I have been in “funeral mode” this past week means that I have also been thinking about one of my favorite modern poets — Mary Oliver, who died just six years ago. For anyone unfamiliar with her work, she wrote beautifully and powerfully about the natural world, the pain and joy of relationships, and of the reality of the gift of life. I leave the matter of her faith to God, but the fruits of her spirituality as expressed through her poetry have reverberated deeply through persons of a variety of faiths, including myself. Whenever I hear of death, I cannot help but recall a few lines of one of her poems, aptly called “When Death Comes.” In it, she acknowledges the pain that will inevitably accompany death, but she also reframes her (and our) perspective as the poem comes to a close:
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
As a follower of Jesus, this last line really strikes home. Though some people try to emphasize things like “Jesus was in the world but not of the world,” the fact is that Jesus did not just “visit” this world. Jesus invested himself deeply in this world, living more fully in it than most of us manage. The whole point of the incarnation involved Jesus opening up something new within creation — to have lived so completely in it that the very fabric of reality is changed. Jesus did not come to earth to “tread lightly,” snapping some Kodachromes to show the angelic host back home.
He was not a tourist, and neither are we, as the Body of Christ. We are not on this earth to visit. We are instead on this earth because God desires to use us to fulfill God’s purposes — purposes that both include and stretch beyond each of us individual human beings. Our faith should affect the way we live our lives. It ought to change how we shop and eat and work and “recreate.” There is no dimension of our life so mundane that our submission to the rule of Jesus should not affect it.
In The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard offered this critical assessment:
“Where we spontaneously look for ‘information’ on how to live shows how we truly feel and who we really have confidence in. And nothing more forcibly demonstrates the extent to which we automatically assume the irrelevance of Jesus as teacher for our ‘real’ lives.”
If Jesus is our teacher, then it is to Jesus we should look for information on how to live our “real” lives. He is, after all, the one who we confess showed us how to truly live. And that means that it may only be through his tutelage that we discover how to move beyond “tourist” to “citizen” and “partner with Christ” in the world that God is shaping right now.
At the end of my days in this body, “I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”
Pastor Michael