Infinity Between The Numbers
Category: Faith...
Posted Saturday, May 22, 2004 at 05:22 PM [GMT-6]

We attended a funeral this morning, a memorial service for the mother of a dear friend. The pastor conducting the service read part of a poem which sounded familiar, entitled "The Dash." I just googled it and the complete poem is here, on the author's website.

If you don't have the time to follow the link, the point of the poem is that on a headstone, the dash is much more important than the dates it separates. The dash represents the content of the person's life.

It's not classic literature, but it accomplished what any literature should strive for: it caused me to ponder things larger than myself. It caused me to think about how we are able to influence one another through actions and words small and large, and how those influences can perhaps ripple through still other lives, in ways and to extents that we can't begin to imagine.

Donne famously wrote, "No man is an island, entire of itself..." And that dash between our beginning and ending dates does scarce justice to our effect on our fellow travelers, if we care to accept the truth of our belonging.

For those who seek to please God by acting justly, loving mercy and walking humbly with our Creator, I believe there's a more fitting separator between date of birth and date of death. The dash may be appropriate when the temporal span of a life is viewed within the context of eternity, but the infinity symbol better captures the true impact of that life.