Eternal dwellings, eternal belonging
AM Psalm 1, 2, 3 • PM Psalm 4, 7
Exod. 14:21-31 • 1 Pet. 1:1-12 • John 14:(1-7)8-17
April 20, 1851 was Easter Sunday. A pandemic didn't keep people out of church, but a mysterious illness, thought to be tuberculosis by medical historians, wracked the body of Charles Darwin's beloved 10-year-old daughter Annie. “God bless her,” he wrote to his wife Emma when Annie died on Wednesday of Easter week, though he had lost his faith at this point in his life. When Annie was buried on Friday he declined to attend the funeral. The Anglican burial rites held no comfort for him; the assurances of resurrection offered false hope.
A “painful void” existed between Charles and Emma Darwin because of his doubts and eventual unbelief. “I should be most unhappy if I thought we did not belong to each other forever,” she wrote in a letter he kept and sometimes reread. The day before my grandfather died last November my mom voiced similar distress. “I don’t believe he was saved,” she said. I swallowed my own doubts and responded: “I believe God was in Christ Jesus reconciling the world to Himself, and I don't think there's anything Grandpa ever did that could separate him from God forever.”
John 14:1-6 is among the readings suggested for funerals. “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?” I believe there was a dwelling place prepared for my grandfather. There was a place ready for Darwin, despite his agnosticism and the religious establishment’s disapproval. Too many dwelling places are being filled too quickly with the victims of this pandemic. Imagining our friends and family trading hospital rooms for heavenly rooms may not comfort us now, but the rooms are prepared for us anyway because we belong to God forever.
Written by Kathryn Haydon
Kathryn studies rice quality and disease as a PhD candidate in Plant Science at the University of Arkansas and can't wait to sing in the St. Paul's choir again when we can all be safe together. The quotes and historical information were taken from David Quammen's book The Reluctant Mr. Darwin. Quammen also wrote Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, an extremely prescient book published in 2012. The overlap in topics in his published work and this reflection is just an interesting/tragic coincidence.