One of the most fundamental questions which no man and no generation will ever be free from wondering about is that regarding life after death. Is there life after death? Or is there only death after life? Does death have the last say? Or will life ever conquer death?

From one hand we see everything tending towards an end, towards destruction and death. Physically, man grows to maturity and then starts his way towards decay, until he faces death, no matter how much programmes of well being and medicine increase the average life-span of man.

Yet, from the other hand, there is that deep desire inbuilt in man’s very heart for immortality. No matter how much he experiences the toil and suffering of life, he cannot quench his hope for everlasting life. Such a hope is not a question of reasoning, in the sense that man finds himself resorting to it for consolation, or in the sense that he can do without not to suffer even further. There is almost a hope that goes beyond hope. Man tends to hope even when everything around him shows him the absurdity of hope.

Why does the question of whether there is life after death preoccupies man? Because the truest and most meaningful experiences of life leads him to believe in the immortality of life, even though he can never be sure. And because he can never bring himself to renounce life after death without living a contradiction.

It seems that our culture is dominated by this sense of contradiction. It seems as if our culture has lost all hope of any life beyond death. No wonder that our culture has been described as the culture of death.

Modernism tended to replace faith and religion by ideologies, which at least attempted to give reasonable answers to man’s basic questions. But the post-modernism of to-day has lost its trust even in human reason, in his ideologies; leaving him buried in the darkest tomb of death.

Can anyone trace back the journey that man has followed for him to arrive here, in the culture of death? Was it a mental journey, tracing back to some false assumption? Or was it some convenient compromising behaviour?

Maybe if it were some false reasoning, we would still be in a position to reason back and find the error. But to enter into the habit of behaving unreasonably would risk that some day we loose our capacity of reason.

Therefore, I imagine a day, in this culture of death, when the only possible way of “loving”, of having sexual intercourse, even if it is just an erotic experience, would be under the influence of alcohol or drugs (am I that far?). Because how can you live consciously with such an “ecstasy”, at which man’s deepest desire is that it will never end, in a culture of death?

This leads me to probe into a possibility, which I would like to share with those who still have some hope to reason things out: Could marriage ever leads us out of the culture of death? Could the love of one man and one woman, a love that goes beyond sexual union, or else, a love where sexual union is just an expression and not an end in itself, saves humanity of the culture of death and helps humanity to rediscover his true destiny? In other words, could it be that there is more to marriage than just a human, earthly and temporal experience?

Fr Paul Fenech