Disappearance is usually felt as something bad. When things disappear, we sense the pull of death, the call of the dust, the loss of the palpable good. I have recently been moving house after many years in one place, with all its accumulations. Things, often intimate things, are left behind, given away, sent to the trash, a landfill that sometimes feels like the biblical valley from which the smoke of smoldering fires rises, and in which the worm turns. Regret wells up. Christians are encouraged to use this regret for self-knowledge: Life is transient, memento mori, read your Ecclesiastes and ponder heavenly things.
All this is surely right. But I wonder if disappearance can be more than sorrow or sorrow’s purgative tool. Disappearing things, disappearing people, the very reality of something that was but no longer is: Perhaps this can act as something positive, a very encounter with God.
I heard a famous paleontologist comment on how “sad” it is that so many living things disappeared from the earth in the Late Devonian extinction more than 300 million years ago. Seventy percent of living species vanished; no one knows why. This was one of several great pre-dinosaur extinctions. Others followed. It is “sad” that we shall never see, know, touch, or smell the occupants of a profligately exuberant biosphere now gone. Perhaps the generations following Noah, having heard the story, also felt sad. At best there remains a faint echo in the soil, the fading tracery of a vast unknown tract of reality that once was. The paleontologist’s comment implied there was no agent overseeing this outstretched series of extinct phenomena, no providential hand able to make things worse or better, let alone hold them together. Only human sadness presides, a seeming self-moving force, impotent in its regrets. Unless, that is, one believes in God as the Creator of all that is and has been. Then everything becomes complicated, but also strangely hopeful.
