How They Stay with Us
“So close heaven lies that when my sight is clear,
I think I see the gleaming strand; I know I feel that those who’ve gone from here
Come near enough to touch my hand. I often think but for our veiled eyes,
We should find that heaven right ‘round about us lies.”
Death is ever bearing away the fresh and fair and beautiful ones of earth, and leaving hearts bleeding, and homes desolate. Apart from the religion of Christ, there is no light in the darkness of bereavement. The best that philosophy can do is to try to forget the grief. Science can do nothing better. But the word of God lights the lamps of true consolation in the gloom of Christian sorrow.
In Christ we never really lose our friends who pass away from us in the vanishing of death. They go from our sight, but they are ours still. They were never so lovely in life, when they walked before us, as they are now, when only love’s eyes can see them. They live in our memory, in our very soul; and it is in transfigured beauty that they dwell with us. We do not think any more of the faults and blemishes which we used to see in them so clearly when they were with us; death’s hand has swept all these away. At the same time every lovely feature in them shines out now like a star in the sky at night, and all the good things they ever did are remembered, and appear radiant as angel ministries. Such strange power has love under the quickening touch of death’s hand.
There is another way in which our beloved ones stay with us after they have vanished from sight in death’s mists. Everything they have touched becomes in a certain sense sacramental. Their names are written everywhere. They have left part of themselves, as it were, on each familiar thing or scene with which in life they were associated. Wherever we move we are reminded of them. Here is a path where their feet walked. Here is a tree under which they sat. Here is a book they read, with the pencil marks indicating the thoughts that pleased them. Here is a garment their hands made, or a picture they painted, or some bit of work they did. About the house everything is sacred because of the memories it awakens.
The friends are not altogether gone from us who are brought back so vividly to our memory by the things and the places amid which they once walked. Mrs. Margaret E. Sangster has written tenderly of this staying of our friends with us in the familiar scenes on which they left the touch of their life: —
They never quite leave us, our friends who have passed Through the shadows of death to the sunlight above; A thousand sweet memories are holding them fast To the places they blessed with their presence and love.
The work which they left, and the books which they
read, Speak mutely, though still with an eloquence rare; And the songs that they sung, and the dear words that
they said, Yet linger and sigh on the desolate air.
Nor do we lose altogether the influence upon us of those who have passed from us. True, we hear no more the whisper of warning, the loving counsel, the chiding when we have done wrong, the urgent, inspiriting word when our courage has failed us, the commendation when we have done well. Yet, in a sense, the influence on us of our friends who have gone is still very potent. Many a son has been saved from ruin by the memory of a mother’s pale face, speaking without words its loving entreaty and its earnest warning. Many persons are urged to high endeavors and to noble attainments and achievements by the thoughts of their dear ones dwelling deep in the holy peace and joy of God. A mother who for a year had had a precious little child in heaven said that she had never known such a year of calm, restful peace. She believed in the actual existence of her darling in the blessedness of heaven, and the realizing of this had kept her own heart in quiet confidence amid all life’s cares and trials. Even her sorrow she had forgotten; it had been
HOW THEY STAY WITH US. 21$
swallowed up, like the night’s darkness in the morning’s glory, by the triumphant assurance that her little one was living with Christ. These thoughts are well expressed in the same poem from which quotation has already been made: —
And oft when alone, and oft in the throng,
Or when evil allures us, or sin draweth nigh,
A whisper comes gently, “Nay, do not the wrong,”
And we feel that our weakness is pitied on high.
We toil at our tasks in the burden and heat Of life’s passionate noon. They are folded in peace. It is well. We rejoice that their heaven is sweet. And one day for us all the bitter will cease.
There is yet another sense in which our departed Christian friends stay with us after they have vanished from earth. We know that they are still living, that they still remember us and still love us, though we are in a sense separated from them. Love is stronger than death; and love binds us and them in close and holy bonds, though they have passed over the valley, and we yet stay on this side. Through the longest years this tie is not destroyed. We do not forget our friends; they do not forget us. Thus we have them still, and never quite lose them in the years that we have to walk without them. Then by and by we shall have them again in blessed reality, when death touches us in turn, and we pass over into the same glorious joy in which they are dwelling.
A large part of the blessed hope of heaven is its reunions. The Bible gives us many glimpses of the glory and beauty of the home that awaits us. We are told of streets of gold, of gates of pearl, of a river of the water of life, of a crystal sea — all that earth can find of splendor is brought into the picture to heighten our conception of the glories of heaven. But that which makes heaven dear to those who have loved ones there is not so much the promise of all this splendor of beauty, as the hope of again getting with the dear friends who are in the midst of all this incomparable beauty. As the Rev. W. C. Gannett puts it, “the dear togetherness” is the sweetest thing in the hope of heaven.
I dreamed of Paradise — and still, Though sun lay soft on vale and hill, And trees were green and rivers bright, The one dear thing that made delight By sun or stars or Eden weather, Was just that we two were together.
I dreamed of heaven — with God so near!
The angels trod the shining sphere.
And each was beautiful; the days
Were choral work, were choral praise: And yet in heaven’s far-shining weather The best was still — we were together!
Do we get the most and the best possible in our bereavements from the truths which Christ brings to us? Does not our faith’s vision often become so dim with our tears that we lose sight altogether of the immortality into which our Christian dead have entered? We say we believe in the endless life; but too often it is such a shadowy, nebulous thought which we have of it that no comfort comes to us from it. We really mourn our departed friends as lost, while we go on saying in our creed, “I believe in the life everlasting.” Yet we are robbing our own hearts of the comforts that God has provided when we do not take to ourselves the blessed hopes and consolations of our Christian faith. We really hold no living friends with such a sure clasp as that which makes our sainted ones ours. There are many ways of losing living friends; but those who have passed into God’s keeping are forever beyond the possibility of being lost to us. Whittier has written in “Snowbound:” —
And yet, dear heart, remembering thee,
Am I not richer than of old?
Safe in thy immortaHty,
What change can reach the wealth I hold?
What chance can mar the pearl and gold Thy love hath left in trust with me? And while in life’s late afternoon,
Where cool and long the shadows grow, I walk to meet the night that soon
Shall shape and shadow overflow,
I cannot feel that thou art far
Since near at need the angels are;
And when the sunset gates unbar,
Shall I not see thee waiting stand.
And, white against the evening star.
The welcome of thy beckoning hand?