Finding God In Unexpected Places

Chapter 1 Rumors of Another World According to Greek mythology, people once knew in advance their exact day of death. Everyone on earth lived with a deep sense of melancholy, for mortality hung like a sword suspended above them. All that changed when Prometheus introduced the gift of fire. Now humans could reach beyond themselves to control their destinies; they could strive to be like the gods. Caught up in excitement over these new possibilities, people soon lost the knowledge of their death day. Have we moderns lost even more? Have we lost, in fact, the sense that we will die at all? Although some authors argue as much (such as social theorist Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death), I have found that behind the noise of daily life, rumors of another world can still be heard. The whispers of death persist, and I have heard them, I believe, in three unlikely places: a health club, a political action group, and a hospital therapy group. I have even detected the overtonesbut only overtonesof theology in these unexpected places. I joined the Chicago Health Club after a foot injury forced me to find alternatives to running. It took a while to adjust to the artificiality of the place. Patrons lined up to use high-tech rowing machines, complete with video screens and animation pace boats, though Lake Michigan, a real lake requiring real oars, lay empty just four blocks away. In another room, people working out at Stairmaster machines duplicated the act of climbing stairs--this in a dense patch of high-rise buildings. And I marveled at the technology that adds computer-programmed excitement to the everyday feat of bicycling. I marveled, too, at the human bodies using all these machines: the gorgeous women wearing black and hot pink leotards, and the huge hunks of masculinity who clustered around the weight machines. Mirrored glass, appropriately, sheathed the walls, and a quick glance revealed dozens of eyes checking out the results of all the sweating and grunting, on themselves and on their neighbors. The health club is a modern temple, complete with initiation rites and elaborate rituals, its objects of worship on constant and glorious display. I detected a trace of theology there, for such devotion to the human form gives evidence of the genius of a Creator who designed with aesthetic flair. The human person is worth preserving. And yet, in the end, the health club stands as a pagan temple. Its members strive to preserve only one part of the person: the body, the least enduring part of all. Ernest Becker wrote his book and died before the exercise craze gripped America, but I imagine he would see in health clubs a blatant symptom of death-denial. Health clubs, along with cosmetic surgery, baldness retardants, skin creams, and an endless proliferation of magazines on sports, swimsuits, and dieting help direct our attention away from death toward life. Life in this body. And if we all strive together to preserve our bodies, then perhaps science will one day achieve the unthinkable: perhaps it will conquer mortality and permit us to live forever, like Gulliver's toothless, hairless, memoryless race of Struldbruggs. Once, as I was pedaling nowhere on a computerized bicycle, I thought of Kierkegaard's comment that the knowledge of one's own death is the essential fact that distinguishes us from animals. I looked around the exercise room wondering just how distinguished from the animals we modern humans are. The frenzied activity I was participating in at that momentwas it merely one more way of denying or postponing death? As a nation, do we grow sleek and healthy so that we do not have to think about the day our muscular bodies will be, not pumping iron, but lying stiff in a casket? Martin Luther told his followers, "Even in the best of health we should have death always before ourYancey, Philip is the author of 'Finding God In Unexpected Places', published 2005 under ISBN 9781578569618 and ISBN 1578569613.