In the Flesh: On Mortality as Life

Could it be that the truth of life, that is to say life's depth and breadth and its center, comes not from a detachment from the material and finite but rather from an attachment to the very same? That, for example, Jesus' admonitions not to fear are not a call for us as subject to act against our death and loss but rather for us as object of the promise to receive that promise so that or so as to embrace our mortality as friend rather than enemy. It is to realize as Martin Hagglund in his new book This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom seems to me to argue, full life comes when, not in spite of but because we know we will not have life forever. When Paul in the New Testament Bible book of First Corinthians states that the last enemy to be destroyed is death, and this destruction by Jesus and his resurrection, he is saying that death becomes friend not by it's elimination but by it's embrace. Could it be that the profundity we see and recognize and are drawn to that is the incarnation, the divine in the flesh, the immortal in the mortal, is precisely that all of life is found only in life, not a life after death, and that the only hope we have for a real or authentic and full life comes not in having it never end but in realizing and embracing that it does?