I recently took a survey aimed at assessing the impact of my personal beliefs about God. Among other things, it asked about my emotions and attitudes toward death. Part of the study was trying to see if reminding people about their religion changed those attitudes, but in either case i honestly don't fear death. I know i will die someday and in the time before then i need to become the person who will joyfully enter Heaven. I know people who have dodged certain death by God's grace, so it just doesn't scare me.
At the end of the study they explained that they were trying to assess the impact of reminding people about their religion and also of making them work through a difficult emotional problem before being asked a series of 'react to this situation' questions. They said half of the participants were asked about difficult subjects like death and the other half were asked about a routine experience like going to the dentist...
At the mere mention of the dentist, i immediately started to feel anxious even though the study was over and i wasn't asked to recount any specific experiences. I don't have a phobia or anything extreme, but the prospect of cavities and fillings makes me nervous. I fear not being able to understand my research. I fear having to uproot my family. And i am always nervous around traffic cops. But i don't fear death and i don't experience any of the feelings of aimlessness or helplessness that the survey was trying to elicit. In the moment, that struck me as odd.
There are certain types of knowledge that are easier to apply to big, universal things than small, everyday things. For example, the principles of mechanics are laughably simple, a few conservation laws and some formalism for counting energy. Their study reveals some profounds insights into the sorts of thing which can and can't happen in a classical Universe. And yet, it is very easy for a novice to write a specific classical mechanics problem that an expert finds difficult to solve (e.g. a pendulum hanging from another pendulum, a top-heavy top). This is a well-known phenomenon in physics, but for some reason it was very strange to encounter it in a spiritual setting. We don't think of our gut reactions as something we have to "work through". They are, by definition, instantaneous. But as i've mentioned before, becoming the kind of person who reacts instantaneously in a godly way is a process we will spend the rest of our lives "working out with fear and trembling" (Phil 2:12). At least for me, its a process that has worked from the top down. Getting from the existence of an almighty, loving God to enough faith to confront death turned out to be comparatively simple. Getting to enough peace to confront the dentist has proven somewhat more challenging.
