"For I am your passing guest, / an alien, like all my forebears." This is from Psalm 39 (the New Revised Standard Version). The King James Version has it thus: "for I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were." This suggests that our being is temporary. We come into it, and eventually leave it behind. This makes sense. Being, as we experience it, is fundamentally temporary, and the myth of Tithonus reveals how, under the conditions of life as we experience it, unending duration would be a horror. But surely, whatever measure of it we are granted is deserving of gratitude. Christians tend to think of death as a threshold to another, everlasting and immaterial mode of being. In fact, though, Christianity does not promise immortality in the sense of continuing to exist after death as something called a soul. It promises resurrection of the body. Not at all the same thing.
Post revised and bumped.
Post revised and bumped.
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