The Reach of Experience: Sacramental Personhood and Worlds to Come

one of the enduring lessons of the twentieth century's philosophical focus on language is that how a question is asked is at least as important as how it is answered, for the question carries with it assumptions about what can be known, what should be known, and what is the best approach to an answer.Very often the road to clear understanding requires a circling back to examine the prereflective assumptions implicit in the question that prompted and programmed inquiry, and a subsequent revision of the question.This paper approaches the question of life after death from a perspective that differs somewhat from the more usual range of concerns that prompt the question.Those concerns are very familiar and very real.Life and love are values that we relish and whose loss is like a plunge into hopeless darkness.Death as a negative finality is the apotheosis of that loss-an affront to all we hold dear-and so we hope, wish, dream, and believe, in Whittier's words, "that life is ever lord of death and love can never lose its own" (Whittier 401).As long as human beings can care enough for life and love to be spiritually threatened and metaphysically insulted by their destruction, the question of life after death will stay alive and well.But there's a problem with answers that spring from the deep pathos that occasion our question about the finality of death.Any set of beliefs that is dictated by emotional needs is questionable and at the very least in need of more credible foundations.I am not saying that emotions are devoid of cognitive significance, but they do not live and speak by themselves.They are rooted in structures of personal life and must be interpreted relative to the experiential matrices to which they belong.Kant said that philosophy must concern itself with the question "What can I hope for?" (Kant 635).When that question genuinely engages us in critical reflection, we move beyond a glorified reporting of "what I emotionally need to believe."