Lazarus: Life, Death, Faith

The Lazarus Project: a Novel by Aleksandar Hemon was the book I happened to be reading when we got the news that Steve’s sister Karen had died. I took it with me to California, but read little of it until the long flight back to Florida, when I became totally engaged. Hemon, a Bosnian refugee who learned English as an adult and won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2004, is a magnificently gifted writer. In the midst of mourning Karen, I copied out several passages that resonated with my tender feelings.

Splendorous temples were built on the belief that death does not erase the traces of those who lived, that someone up there busies himself with keeping tabs, and is going to send down Mr. Christ or some other delusional prophet to resurrect all of the disintegrated nobodies. The promise is that even when every trace of your life vanishes absolutely and completely, God will remember you, that he might devote a speck of thought to you while reposing between putting up universes.” [p. 107]

Karen would have rejected such skepticism. She had complete faith that a loving God awaited her in Heaven. I find that degree of faith hard to achieve. I believe in a Divine Spirit, but like the Buddhists I have met in the monthly Interfaith Cafe in Delray Beach, Florida, I just don’t know what happens to us after we die. I do know that we are composed of stardust and I suspect that to stardust we will return. Here’s Hemon again:

 My dreams were but a means of forgetting, they were branches tied to the galloping horses of our days, the emptying of the garbage so that tomorrow–assuming there would be a tomorrow–could be filled up with new life. You die, you forget, you wake up new. And if I cared about God, I would be tempted to think that remembering was sinful. For what else could it be, what would remembering all those gorgeous moments when this world was fully present at your fingertips be but a beautiful sin? [p. 127]

That last sentence made me think of Joe, who had so many “gorgeous moments” with Karen, that he is now so painfully remembering. If remembering such moments is a sin, then I want to be a sinner. Because Karen’s death was so sudden, more of Hemon’s words struck with special force.

Death must be pleasant, the pain and shock of its infliction notwithstanding. But that pain belonged to life, the body had to be alive to feel it. I wondered if George’s [a character in the novel] living body and its pain would be undone when he died,…if he would experience the bliss of release and relief, the joy of completion and transformation, of dumping the garbage of existence…the postorgasmic moment of absolute peace, of coming home, the moment when the fog of life floats away like gunsmoke and everything is finally nothing.

Perhaps that was what Mr. Christ deprived Lazarus of. He may have been okay dead; it was all over, he was home. Maybe Mr. Christ was showing off to Lazarus’s sisters; maybe he wanted to show that he was the boss of death, as he was the boss of life. Either way he couldn’t just leave Lazarus alone. Once Lazarus was thrown out of the comfy bed of eternity, he wandered the world, forever homeless, forever afraid to fall asleep, dreaming of dreaming….[p. 178-79]

Such  an outrageous, challenging book! It made me re-read the eleventh chapter of the Book of John, the story of Jesus raising Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha, from the dead, only days before He himself was put to death. Then I wrote to my friend Joanne Hutton, who knows a lot about theology and had also just read Hemon’s book: