In a more agnostic culture than the one I grew up with it's a challenge to know how to talk meaningfully about something so enormous when we don't really understand it. There is a scepticism about the after life these days. But however sceptical people may be about heaven and hell, it always feels brutal to speak of the total extinction of personality, when the personality concerned is someone you know. Whether we believe or don't believe about life after death we tend to soften the language of finality, to resort to metaphor, to saying death is like this or like that even the death is not like anything. That is its majesty. As a priest who conducts funerals I find the language of faith, with poetry, music and acts of remembrance are what allow us to make the transition between life and deaths to discover that death, though a change of state, is not the end of being."
