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Life After Loss of Self
It was like a bomb had gone off in the lower half of my body. I couldn’t feel my legs anymore, my throat was numb, hot, burning. My forehead crinkled, and I could feel blood pulsing through me, hear a high-pitched faint beep in my ears like something had literally exploded within me.
What I became was a walking dissociation. Words came out, but I couldn’t recognize them. Letters written, news broken; I got in my car and drove, smiled, prayed, went through the motions of the shattered pieces of a life I no longer recognized, that was slipping between my fingers like shrapnel.
This is what tormenting feels like in the place of the dead — in one of the most haunting parables in the New Testament is the story of Poor Lazarus and the Rich Man (Luke 16:10–31). This kind of story is like Charles Dickens’ Ghost of Christmas Future on steroids with an even more terrifying resurrection plot-twist.
To summarize: A rich man passes a poor beggar named Lazarus outside the gate of his lavish mansion every day and ignores him, not sharing an iota of his wealth with the starving, sick, structurally marginalized neighbor in front of him.
You can picture it: ritzy person dressed to the nines in a luxury SUV passes by the person in rags, reaching out a frail hand every day, only to be denied and looked over on their way to somewhere more…
