Loss & Eternity
For some reason, the track “Like Shadows” by Ooyy and Gemini has been doing rounds in my head since I first heard it as background music to travel video.
At one level, it was fitting considering the transience that comes with tourism, under the bourgeois desire to secure some sense of permanence and “never wanting to leave”. Interestingly, this very tension between transience and permanence is picked up in two lines in the chorus:
We felt like shadows…
With no tomorrow, how could it hurt so much?
There is not only a tension between permanence and transience; the reference with “no tomorrow” pointed out to me a tension between temporality and eternity. What is more, that plaintive question “how could it hurt so much”, at least to me, spoke of the pain of what was lost in the passage from transience into eternity.
Little wonder then, that this became my mental soundtrack as I typed out my essay on the movie Inside Out for Church Life Journal and in more academic form in Religions on the experience of loss not only as an existential category, but a real experience of the end of all time, or more theologically, the last things or eschatology. Loss is not simply the permanent absence of things, places, people and lives we once had, but is a visceral undergoing of that inbreaking of that more permanent loss of all things, places, people and lives.
The death of loss, thereby becomes a crucial entry point not only in this world, but a threshold that takes us into the next. More encouragingly, however, what I did not write then that I realise now is that, in Byung Chul Han’s terms, the negativity of absence very easily slides into the negativity of otherness.
Even more to the point, it slides into what he calls the “negativity of the other”, and the presence of that other in the form of the one that takes in all those losses. As the coincidence of opposites, Christ then steps in as the crucial juncture not only between permanent absence, but also permanent restoration, even if that restoration is not in the way we expect.
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