Life After Death . . .

One of the great things about being an ordained clergy person, especially one serving in a parish setting, is that you get to spend at least a portion of your days thinking about cool things.  (Most people imagine that we actually spend a whole lot more of our time doing that than we actually do -- phones calls, e-mail, and scheduling meetings takes up quite a chunk, truth be told.)  The best part, though, is that not only do we get to spend at least a portion of our days thinking about cool things, but that this is multiplied because quite often when a member of the church finds herself or himself thinking about cool things they send a link along.

This happened the other day when a wonderful member of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church read this quite provocative piece in the Opinionator of the New York Times:  The Importance of the Afterlife.  Seriously.  The author, Samuel Scheffler, explores the notion that what really matters to most of us most of the time is not our own survival, nor even necessarily the survival of our loved ones, but the more nebulous notion of the survival of our species.  One of my favorite lines is, "Although some people can afford not to depend on the kindness of strangers, virtually everyone depends on the future existence of strangers."

I think that this is just such an extremely interesting notion to consider -- what would it mean to you, to how you live your life, if you knew that the human species was not going to survive much past your own demise?  If you knew that, after you, there just weren't going to be any new people coming along?

So . . . thanks, Bob, for sharing this with me.  I hope everyone else finds it as interesting as we did.

Pax tecum,

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