Beyond Rivalry

I am posting and commenting on excerpts from James Alison's Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatological Imagination (1996) every day for a while. Part I here

Alison on how death holds us in thrall:

"The [physical] marks, then, of Jesus's death were something like trophies: it was his whole human life, including his death, which was made alive and presented before the disciples as a sign that he had in fact conquered death. This not only meant that he had personally conquered death, which he had manifestly done, but that, in addition, the whole mechanism by which death retains people in its thrall had been shown to be unnecessary.  Whatever death is, it is not something which has to structure every human life from within (as in fact it does), but rather it is an empty shell, a bark without a bite. None of us has any reason to fear being dead, something which will unquestionably happen to all of us, since that state cannot separate us effectively from the real source of life." (He quotes Heb. 2:14-15 here) (p. 29)

My comments: 

I need more convincing that because Jesus was alive after being dead, "the whole mechanism ... has been shown to be unnecessary."  I don't quite see the logical argument for that (even having read most of the book). Just because one guy, the son of God, was resurrected, a. we all will be, and b. being resurrected is as good or better than not dying? I don't see it. 

Yet, I don't need more convincing that "whatever death is, it is not something which has to structure every human life from within." I feel that in every part of my being, that nothing can separate us from "the real source of life," about which Alison talks much more later. I think part of the "reason" (non-reason) I feel this is because when I dream at night, though I am not conscious, I have the experience that I am conscious, that I am fully alive, active, and "me" (though perhaps a very different "me" from my daytime personality). I have the vivid nightly experience of completely inhabiting some other place and time (or some timeless non-place) even as I seem unconscious, even as my body is apparently resting and restoring itself, even as the remembrance of my life in that other timeless non-place often fades away once my consciousness takes over again. That liminal place between sleeping and waking is one way I can imagine dying to be. Maybe I am dying in some way each night ... My dream life feels so rich and "effervescently vivacious" (as Alison later repeatedly describes God) that I often feel that I am immersed in the source of life. Until I wake up and it's another morning, the dark and cold start of another day of being a non-flying, time-limited, identity-bound human being in paradise. ;-)

Alison says (p. 63):

"Heaven is a dwelling in the Father which is possible only for those for whom death has come to be a non-definitive, non-toxic part of the story."  When we dwell here, we live such that we are "always prepared to run the risk of being expelled rather than participating in any human solidarity in expulsion." (p. 65) 

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Update 3/20: Along these lines, came across this today:

"I used to wake up at 4 A.M. and start sneezing, sometimes for five hours. I tried to find out what sort of allergy I had but finally came to the conclusion that it must be an allergy to consciousness." -- James Thurber