PROCESSION OF DEATH

The Final Journey

ACOFFIN is being carried aloft towards the grave. It seems like a journey, not just from one point to another, but from man’s beginning to his end.

When man is born, he immediately has recourse to a mother’s compassion and a father’s protection. He grows up among friends and relatives. On reaching adulthood he forges ahead on his chosen path through life.

His journey continues until finally death comes. Those relatives who had supported him through life now carry him to his final resting place. They lay him under a mound of earth where he is alone; where there is just him and his Lord.

Up till that point, he had been confronted with humans like himself; now he is face to face with God infinitely greater than him. Till then he had been in a world where he had power of his own, but now he finds himself absolutely powerless. Man, the most helpless of creatures, will come before God the All-Powerful—a meeting so awesome that it is almost beyond imagining.


Man, the most helpless of creatures, will come face to face with a God infinitely greater than him. A meeting so awesome that it is almost beyond imagining

People are continually dying here on earth. Not a day goes by without our seeing or hearing of the death of someone. Yet we fail to realize the implications of death. This is because we lack a living mental picture of Heaven and Hell. We are preoccupied with unrelated, matters—busy making homes for ourselves instead of looking to our eternal home; we are only concerned with worldly profitmaking and not caring to do enough to earn the life everlasting; we are too involved with improving our position in society rather than to consolidate our relation with God. We think of every human being in the same worldly terms, so when a person dies, we feel only a sense of loss that one who gave so much to the world has been taken away from it. We see man in relation to this ephemeral world, but fail to see him in relation to the next eternal world. How then can we realize the true implications of death? How can we see that, as one is laid to “rest”, one is, in fact, being led to one’s meeting with the Lord and one’s eternal fate?