P4L text A6:CXPTRC final
4/1/10
12:47
Page 1
I
t was a sunny day in Richmond Park, happy people were strolling by the ponds, eating ice-creams and watching children riding bikes. But up in the gloomy woods, surrounded by his grief-stricken family, an old man slowly emptied a casket of ashes among the trees. They were saying farewell to a beloved wife, mother and grandmother. This brutal contrast between joy in the sunshine and grief in the shadows reveals the familiar tragedy of human life: our loves and laughs get reduced to ashes... by death. We cope with this in different ways.
Sometimes we feel afraid of death. However hard we diet and train, however long the medics keep us alive, whether we die starving in Sudan, fighting in Afghanistan or sunbathing in Milan, the “Grim Reaper” gets us all one day. Sometimes we despair. Most of us cherish hopes of life beyond the grave with loved ones in God’s paradise. But the cynics tell us there’s no such place; the atheists tell us there’s no such God; the religions can’t agree on how to get there—and our consciences tell us that we wouldn’t get in. 1