We sense what death is: death is loss. It's feels like an ending... except... that it isn't, actually. What did Jesus tell one of the thieves who was being crucified with him?
"Today shalt thou be with Me in paradise." (Luke 23:43)
In the teachings of the New Church, this is elaborated:
“When a person dies, he does not really die; he merely lays aside the body that has served him for his use in the world and passes into the next life in a body which serves him for his use there” (Arcana Coelestia 6008).
We're invited to believe that death is not, in fact, an ending at all. This truth has the power to sweep up our hearts like a wind from heaven. It's inspiring, but it's also hard to reconcile with the physical experience of death.
The inner meaning of the Word is full of teachings about death that feel like contradictions, or paradoxes. For example, we’re told that in the internal sense, burial symbolizes resurrection (Arcana Coelestia 2916). How can that be? Burial and resurrection move in different directions. One is a laying down, the other is a raising up. But they happen simultaneously: as the body dies the spirit rises. And in the minds of the angels, the life of the spirit utterly outshines and outweighs the life of the body. So when the angels read of burial, they don’t think of the body that is laid in the earth. Instead, they see what is raised up. Death, in the internal sense, is flipped around.
In Genesis, God says to Jacob,
“Joseph will put his hand on your eyes.” (Genesis 46:4)
In ancient Hebrew culture it was customary to place a hand on people’s eyes when they were dying. God’s statement to Jacob is an idiom which means that Joseph, his son, will be with him when he dies, and will bear the responsibility of burying him. Yet once again, the internal sense of the Word flips this symbolism. Putting a hand on the eyes symbolizes imparting life — and that the gesture has this symbolism because it was done when people were dying!
Here's a description of this, again from "Arcana Coelestia":
“Putting a hand on the eyes” is used to mean that the external or bodily senses will be closed and the internal senses opened, thus that a raising up will be effected and life will thereby be imparted. A hand was placed on people’s eyes when they were dying because “death” meant an awakening into life…. (Arcana Coelestia 6008)
If we were to watch someone place their hand over the eyes of a loved one at the moment of their death, that gesture would probably strike us as a symbolic and final closing of the dying person’s eyes — a tender, solemn gesture. But as one set of eyes closes, another is opened. The hand that shuts is, in a deeper and truer sense, a hand that opens.
Death is not what it seems. God knows that we see death with our natural eyes, and that learning to see more deeply takes us a while. God knows that we miss the people who have gone on to the spiritual world before us. He comforts us when we grieve. And in conjunction with that comfort, He reminds us again and again in His Word that the end of life in this world is a beginning.
