There is a beautiful Sufi parable recounted by Huston Smith in The World's Religions. A river, the story goes, passed through fields and over mountains, across meadows, until finally it reached the desert and could go no further. It poured itself out against the sand but the sand always absorbed it. It could not cross the desert to the ocean beyond, no matter how hard it tried. It asked aloud, "How can I pass through this desert?" The wind, blowing by, answered, "I know how to get to the ocean, but to get there, you must become like me, traveling through the air." The river despaired, saying, "If I give myself up to the air then I will no longer be a river! I will no longer be what I am." The wind only shrugged. Realizing finally that it had no other choice, the river let go and became vapor, rising up into the air, carried along by the wind until it formed clouds and rained down into the ocean. And as this happened, the river realized that it was not simply a river: it was water. 

I read that parable today, within hours of learning that two members of my family are suffering their own bodily crises. Our young bodies feel immortal, and oh how we love them for that, but as we age, the "way of all flesh" begins to take on its true inescapability. One of these relatives has cancer; it plays cat and mouse with his body, receding here and advancing there. It is horrifying to realize that our bodies are colluding with nature's intent to dispose of us; of this I have no doubt. Our bodies are temporary things; we know this, but can hardly accept it. We will all die, all of us, and we will all be ultimately forgotten. Pity poor Salieri, desperate for the renown and immortality of the great composers, alive today only in the biography of his arch-rival. In a hundred years, no one will know his name. In a thousand, no one will remember Mozart. You honestly think anyone's going to remember you?

Listen--to avoid thinking of death is to give death its greatest victory. If you want to live authentically, you must confront the fact that you are mortal, fragile, and that the life you know is going to end. If it were not so, our lives would be so radically different, we would not recognize them. Consider this: to be who you are requires your death. If you were not destined to die, you would be someone wholly different; you would scarcely recognize yourself. Embrace the knowledge of your mortality; it makes you distinctly human.All the urgency, the passion, the lust we feel for and within our bodies depend on their transience, their impermanence.

Is our death like that of the river in the Sufi parable? Are our strainings for longevity and immortality as futile as the river dashing itself against the insatiable desert? And perhaps most importantly, if we rise up out of our banks and greet the wind, will we dissipate forever, or will we--quite the opposite--only then come to recognize the true extent of our existence?

Is a desperate hope for continued existence the driving factor behind all religion, as the atheists tell us? Well, yes. And no. If by this hope we mean the desire to enter into something that is far greater than ourselves rather than be moored to our solipsistic individual essences, then yes. But if by this we mean that we have simply convinced ourselves of this truth in order to keep from feeling scared, I reject it. It's so much more complicated than that.

If, say, there is a Heaven, and you and I meet there, what will our meeting be like? Will I possess the same body? No, I will not. My body will crumble and decompose and become bug soup. Will I have the same possessions, the same perceptions, the same desires? Again, no. What I have will be gone; what I perceive and what I want are so deeply tied to my physical presence that they are the very things that convince me that I have a physical presence in the first place. Will I remember then, what I remember now? Perhaps, but in this radical new life everything I know now will be cast in a radically new light. Whatever illumination comes as a result of passing from this life seems to me guaranteed to obliterate my current understanding of who and what I am. So, you might rightly ask, will it even be me that you meet?

All of this boils down to what you mean by "me." If religion can be summed up as a response to a single question, then the question is, "What am I?" There seem to be three primary possible answers to the question. The Eastern response is that I am a projection of something vast, eternal, and universal into an illusory world of matter; a projection that naively believes that it is an individual. The Western response is to say that I am an immortal spirit dressed in the clothing of flesh, and that when I die, that spirit will be released back to the holy one who created it. The modernist view, of course, is that I am a creature of pure happenstance, generated from the processes of an inanimate universe, and that my consciousness and self-perception are emergent features of my complex makeup.

But if you think about it, these answers--though at first glance irreconcileable--all amount to pretty much the same thing. It is really more a question of differing emphasis than of contradiction. In each version, the physical body is doomed.  This truth is beyond question; all of us, especially those whose bodies are under careful scrutiny by doctors and nurses, are only too aware that the body is temporary; practially evanescent. Those of us who see the decay that the years have etched into our bodies, in the form of gray hairs and sagging stomachs and crow's feet, have experienced a taste of this decay firsthand.

Where there appears to be irreconcileable dissent is in the matter of what survives death. For the religious, this is merely a matter of perspective: are you a tree, or are you part of the forest? Are you a drop of water, or a part of the ocean? Are you a cell, or are you part of a body? In practice, one gathers, the difference is minimal, and whatever there is of us that does survive our bodies' deaths will be completely at home with the result, since most every religion that has ever existed has come to view death as a form of reconciliation with the eternal. In the big picture, the details of that reconciliation are irrelevant, because whatever form it takes will be a homecoming, a re-establishment of a pre-existing condition. What you were before is what you will become and what, truly, you have always been.

For the nonbeliever, all the same conditions hold. It is simply that for the atheist, the set of "that which remains" is null, and for the agnostic, it is unknowable. For the atheist, it is just as Eric Idle cajoles over the closing credits of Life of Brian: "You know, you come from nothing, you're going back to nothing. What have you lost? Nothing!" But, we may well ask, of what is this "nothing" composed? This is actually a fair question. Physics has learned that there is no emptiness in nature. There is no such thing as a pure vacuum. Empty space is, it turns out, a fiction. If we say that this "nothing" is the lack of all sensory input and continuity of consciousness, then we're still talking about the same thing as the religious folks. All we can empirically say about this nothingness is that it is the absence of something--namely our physical existence--which, if you've been paying attention, is the case no matter who you talk to. Since none of us has the slightest idea what it would be like to exist without a physical body, the net effect of any kind of afterlife is still the nullification of what currently is, or seems to be.

What is inside of us, what is in our hearts, is a reflection of the eternal. For you and me, this may mean faith in Jesus Christ. For a Taoist it might mean seeking oneness with The Way. For a Buddhist it might mean pursuing nirvana or satori. For an atheist it might mean seeking a complete understanding of the nature of the Universe and the means by which humankind creates meaning out of meaninglessness. I know that many will disagree with me, but I am convinced that these are all the same goal, translated into different worldviews. They are different approaches up the same mountain; the appear to be vastly different, even irreconcileable, while climbing, but at the summit, they converge into a single spot. I believe that all human beings harbor a hope for sanctification; anyone who did not would be a nihilist in the truest sense of the word. And to be a true nihilist is incompatible with being human.

No matter what, when you die, the central part of you will return to its natural state, away from the painful separation therefrom that being a fleshbound human entails. Such a release, such a reconciliation cannot be anything other than sweet, regardless of what form it takes. Everything in nature takes joy in restoring itself.

And yet, and yet. None of these words mean much to someone who is terrified that the tiny dark spots on the x-ray will turn out to be bone cancer. Equanimous pontification about mortality is the purview of the well. Fear and pain are as impervious to our worldly powers of reason as is death itself, and what comes beyond. And as with fear and pain, I believe that the only appropriate way to approach death and the afterlife is not with reason, but with our faculties of love and compassion. Not with our ideas, but with our virtues. Not with our minds, but with our hearts. Fear will yield to compassion. Pain will yield to tenderness. And death itself will yield--even death--to hope and to faith and, especially, to love.