In the intermediate state of the soul after death, we’ll have no eyelids to close

A chiastic meditation on triadic transformation

Α. Breath-and-dust duality

We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come, amen... — but in order for that life to come, a moment of death must first occur. Before Sunday must come Saturday. Before the body and soul reunite, realizing their original created oneness, they first must separate in tragedy for sin’s sake. The body must spend a day in the tomb, the soul a day in hades. Do you think that the Church Fathers emphasize the duality of soul and body because of Platonism — they who teach the resurrection of the flesh contrary to multifarious Hellenizing heresies? No, they do so because Moses teaches that the human being is composed of dust and breath; they do so because Christ dies on the Cross. They do so because of the Hebrew sabbath and what it means.

The way we spend our six days of preparation determines how we experience this sabbath, for good or ill. And the way we experience the sabbath determines how we receive the Lord’s day that follows. The sabbath is transformative — it’s supposed to be. So how do we prepare for it, while there’s time? How do we prepare for bodily death?

Β. On pleasure seeking

You’ve heard of phantom limb pain? That’s when someone who has survived the loss of a limb can’t stop feeling the limb they no longer have. Now imagine losing not just a limb but your whole body. What do you think happens when your whole body is amputated? If you’re a materialist, this scenario doesn’t present a problem; for you, humans have souls no different from animals in that they are mere energies of the body coterminous with the body. Howbeit those of us who recognize that materialism is wrong and that humans are substantially different from animals must face the consequences of the human soul’s breath extending beyond the body’s return to dust.

If you’ve trained your soul to delight more in the comforts and pleasures of the body than in things more appropriate to it, such as that which is righteous, true, and lasting, you’re going to have a very hard time in death. A soul that loves to sate the stomach won’t in death have a stomach to sate. A soul that lives not for love but for the feel of flesh and the excitement of the loins will be utterly bereft once cut off from the means of touching. Imagine being consumed by an itch you can’t scratch. Addicts in withdrawal know this feeling. Theirs is a foretaste of death. And we all should learn from their experience, regardless of how innocent our addictions appear by social comparison. All our addictions, however minute, will be illuminated in death. You’ll have no eyelids to blind yourself from the truth. Even a little itch on the surface of your nose can become the source of madness if not addressed.

Χ. Despair or humility

I recognize hearing this message can drive to despair the souls accustomed to taking comfort in the flesh rather than in the mercy of God. Stories of the toll-houses, when the spirits of the air afflict the soul’s disembodied breath with accusations of all the carnal attachments never purified, appear cruel and loathsome to the faithless and proud. Nevertheless the separation of our soul from the body will illuminate all our addictions — both carnal and psychological. As we will not be able to close our eyelids to the carnal habits, so the ways in which we rationalized them will also be exposed. All the ways we twisted and contorted our soul in order to reach down to the dust and embrace it will be forced straight by the light, quickly and violently.

Those who made their souls pliant with humility will receive this realignment with abundant relief and thanksgiving. Even if it’s psychologically painful, the pain will hurt so good, such joy does the humble soul have in the revelation of truth. Such souls know the stories of the toll-houses not merely for the attacks of the foul spirits of the air, but for the heroism of the angels that defend the humble from such volleys. If you are proud, if you trust in yourself instead of the mercy of God, you don’t envision that your guardian angel can save you from the accusers. Instead you hear the stories of demons more powerful than you exacting payment and so despair of overcoming them. Rejecting despair, not out of humility but out of pride, you may even reject the immensely instructive story of the toll-houses — and thus abide in all your addictions, never knowing real forgiveness. The humiliation of carnal passions, if owned up to, is designed to fix the heart’s relationship with God and the cosmos. The spiritual life has a starting place the war against carnal passions such as gluttony and lust, but it only proceeds forward with the fear, trust, and love proper to humility. The relief of psychological realignment, meanwhile, may be perfected in death, but only for those who make a good beginning of it now in the days of preparation.

Ο. On pain avoiding

You probably know, as I do, a soul who was raised in an abusive environment, who as a result is motivated more by aversion to pain than attraction to pleasure. She (for all souls are feminine relative to God) fears dying, but looks forward to death. She thinks of death as a cessation of pain, like bodily rest, to which she is very attached. I would think any soul averse to pain could relate to this description. This is another one of those addictions that rules over our soul. Indeed death can be a cessation of pain — it’s designed for that purpose — but only if we have shifted our understanding of pain from the carnal to the spiritual axis. Pain for the soul is separation from God, separation from what is righteous, true, and lasting. Pain for the soul is the cessation of discernment between spiritual and material things. Recall what I wrote in my very first journal entry here, how the body through the senses discerns between pleasure and pain, whereas the soul through the mind discerns between spiritual and material, between different levels of ontological circumscription, between that which lasts and that which doesn’t. Those who, out of aversion to pain, look forward to death merely as the summit of bodily rest, will suffer in death as greatly as any pleasure-seeker lacking a body with which to feel pleasure. If it’s bodily rest you’re attached to, it’s important to consider that in death you’ll have no body to rest in. You’ll yearn for the feeling of relaxation when your head and neck find support in a pillow and when muscles throughout your body release their tension. You’ll desire to close your eyelids and quell the neurons in your brain. But none of these functions will be accessible to you. The mind’s eye proper to the soul won’t be able to reach your brain or your eyelids to take rest in them. You will be faced with the reality that you have misdefined what true rest is.

But bodily rest is not in itself bad. No pleasure, conceived either positively as pleasure or negatively as the cessation of pain, is in itself bad. The badness exists in the soul’s preference for pleasure-seeking and pain-avoiding over witness to the truth, expressed in the manner of our lives, in the sinful habits that we form and from which we do not resist. That’s where the destruction is wrought. Indeed, that the body can discern between pleasure and pain is perfectly good and right. It’s designed to be a teacher of fallen souls, so that we take this pattern of pleasure and pain and learn from it how attractive is the way of life and how repugnant is the way of death. The trick is to learn how to be like St. Paul, who wrote, “I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (Phil. 4:11–13).

Ω. Breath-and-dust unity

I remember a couple years ago, right in the middle of summer, we had what felt like a full month’s worth of fair weather. Temperatures were transparent to the body, light breezes brought life to tree branches, and sun dappled the earth. Rains came overnight, cleansing the air and feeding the soil. When the weather could have been hot and oppressive, or perhaps tempestuous and difficult, it rather was warm, gentle, and beautiful. For a full month. The experience was overabundantly pleasant. I think back to that time, and I love that pleasant weather. I love it not for the pleasure it afforded my senses but for what that pleasure meant — what the memory of that pleasure continues to mean. To have these experiences of ease is to learn of God’s love for us and His hope for us. He has prepared for us a life without death, where there is neither sickness, nor sorrow, nor sighing. But in order to get there, we must realize our end. We must realize that we end, that we are creatures of an endless Creator, that we do not exist of ourselves, for ourselves, so as to serve the pleasure of ourselves. For that purpose there is a sabbath at week’s end, for which we are given the full week to prepare.

But the seventh-day rest is only an ephemeral end. The eighth-day resurrection awaits thereafter. So, one might wonder, when all flesh is restored and souls reunite with their bodies, will the pleasure-seekers and pain-avoiders be able to return to their habits with the same alacrity? Not after the trauma of death, no, they won’t. The luminous revelation of the soul’s proper alignment, separate from the body, will not be possible to forget. All carnal pleasure-seeking and pain-avoiding will become as impossible to maintain as the rationalizations for them, and all that will remain for those who have strived for nothing else will be the spiritual pain of the soul’s malfunction, permeating even the body’s flesh. But those who rejoice in the Lord’s justice will be showered with mercy — the Lord’s mercy which endures forever and shines from before all eternity. The soul through the mind is designed to discern between the eternal and the ephemeral, but this mercy is from beyond either of the two. The Lord’s day that comes after the sabbath is beyond any joy, any rest, we could have hoped for or expected. The Lord becomes one with His creation, without losing the distinction between the two, and so with the soul and the body — permeated by divinity, their union in bliss will be complete.