"And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act," says the Lord.
--Ezekiel 37:13-14
"Do not go gentle into that good night," said the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas of his dying father. If death is a "good night", wouldn't it be a reasonable idea to slip into it gently? If death is a "bad night," we might resist and do the opposite of going into it gently.
We don't want our loved ones to go. Perhaps we're convinced that death is a "good night," but we want our dear ones alive, awake, and well. But the mortality rates holds steady at one hundred percent -- even as we try to keep the truth of that at some tiny spot in the far reaches of the mind and soul.
What's it like to have the hand of the Lord upon you? The prophet Ezekiel knew. The Lord's spirit brought him to the middle of a valley, and the valley was full of bones. The prophet had vivid evidence of the mortality rate. Can these bones lives? asks the Spirit of the Lord. Ezekiel didn't know, but he figured that the Lord did.
Ezekiel knew some things and he didn't know some things about the Lord. But any incomplete knowledge would be made complete one day, for the graves will open; the Spirit will come, and we shall live on our own soil. Then, says the Lord, you shall know.
The miracle of the first Pentecost propels our knowledge along. We are not so incomplete in knowledge as we once were, and the Spirit's gifts throughout our lives will add more and more! The Spirit, thus, leads us gently into that good night which is but the precursor of the dawn, the dawn of our resurrection of the body and life everlasting!
PD
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