Birthdays and funerals have a way of betraying our disposition towards life. In celebrating our own life and in mourning the deaths of others, we communicate the value we place on a particular person's life. However, when we consider what a birthday or a funeral ought to be, we see something deeper about what is valued, not about particular people, but in life itself.
As different as birthdays and funerals are, their occasions necrotize in nearly the same manner. How often do birthdays become occasions for self-indulgence? The birthdayer, especially when older, demanding gifts or demanding their own way of doing things. The twenty-one year-old, finally of drinking age, uses the occasion to ingest as much toxin as their body is capable of. All of these scenarios indicate a people completely convinced that life was nothing more than an opportunity to pleasure themselves. Funerals, in the same manner, look back on a person's life, not with sobriety but as a "celebration of life" to numb the sting of any real consideration of that to which our lives are pointing. Those who spend their lives indulging, without the due consideration of the inevitability of death, come to the end having no alternative except to point back to life as one final attempt at indulgence through nostalgia.
This is our harrowing predicament. We are too scared to face the unknown of death, we believe there is nothing else, or we simply desire to kill ourselves in indulgence, and in all cases we drown ourselves in hedonism. This disposition towards life finds no possibility for redeeming suffering, no purpose outside itself, and no lasting joy.
There is, however, a clear alternative. A life that does not continually look back in on itself is the only life that can outlive death. This challenge goes deeper than we realize. It is one thing to forsake pleasure and self-indulgence, but it is another thing entirely to forsake it for the right reason. If we forsake our life for the sake of saving it, we find ourselves back at the beginning, we were simply performing a convoluted attempt to save our own life. However, when the purpose of life points outside itself from the beginning, we have the possibility of saving it. This is, at least in part, how Christ offers a way out and saves us from the curse of death. Our lives can once more find true purpose in something that will outlast us. In Him we find life, first because He has overcome death, and therefore transcends all the temporal limitations of human life, but secondly because there is no life apart from Him. All other causes, ideological, philosophical, or any other sort, fundamentally require that humanity continues to perpetuate them. This dependence on a sustained humanity is fundamentally of the same kind as our original problem, it either simply prolongs the issue or creates a superstructure with the same core deficiency. This crisis of purpose leads us to the conclusion that only a being that is both fully human so as to share our blight and fully God so as to transcend us is the only solution.
It is against this backdrop that when we consider the nature of our birthdays and funerals that we take care not to be wrapped up in personality. Our lives cannot be solely for our own sake, and a dead body has ceased to be significant, therefore when celebrating our birthdays, consider how we can make it an occasion to look outside of ourselves, considering the good of those around us and how God would have us act. Likewise, funerals will find their celebration only when they compel us to cast our eyes, not to a coffin or to the past, but to look up to Christ, because in Him, and in Him alone, do we find both life and death will be redeemed.