Resurrection? To What Do We Klingon?

©2010, Randall A. Beeler

12 Now if Christ be preached, that he arose again from the dead, how do some among you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? 13 But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen again. 14 And if Christ be not risen again, then is our preaching vain: and your faith is also vain … 19 If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable. (1Cor 15, DRE)

This morning, I watched a Tivo'ed re-run of The Bonding, a Star Trek: Next Generation episode originally aired in 1989. Relating the death of a widowed female archaeologist crew member on a planet's surface, the story revolves around the grieving of: her 12-year-old son, Jeremy; Lieutenant Worf (himself an orphan), who was in charge of the away team; Captain Picard; and Wesley Crusher, a young ensign who is, in the midst of this tragedy, reliving the death of his own father.

Their mourning is complicated by the intrusion of an alien life form that seeks to sweep away young Jeremy to the planet's surface to recreate for him an unending simulation of his former happy home life with both parents. The players valiantly rescue Jeremy from this fiction and convince the alien that death and loss are part of human life.

The episode concludes with Wesley assuring Jeremy that Jeremy's parents live on in Jeremy's heart, and with Worf spiritually adopting Jeremy through an ancient Klingon bonding ceremony that treasures the memory of their collective lost family members.

Ringing throughout this portrait of life in the advanced and enlightened 24th Century is the finality that "death is a part of life," and that the only immortality we can attain is through our properly grieving and retaining their memory.

The Klingon liturgy at the end belies a comfortable reconciliation with this finality. If the only solace comes through bonding with the living who share an analogous grief and thereby keep our ancestors immortal in our hearts, why the ceremony? Why even the memory? Does not that memory die when we die? We can remember loved ones from our living contact with them, but what of ancestors removed generations from us? Is such liturgy merely a vain process of keeping alive a perception, a smoked-mirror glimpse? If so, then such a glimpse is emphatically not our loved ones, but only our perception of them filtered through a ceremonial data retention.

Apparently, the advanced 24th Century has returned to the 4th Century B.C., for these are exactly the sentiments of the virtuous pagan Greco-Roman world. Our only immortality is kept by the vestal virgins or retained in the Elysian Fields of our collective memory.


Yet, they are but memories—and not our loved ones. So we too will become not more ourselves upon death but only live on as a memory that is itself not us.

Such is the despair that news of Christ's resurrection dispelled in the ancient world:

20 But now Christ is risen from the dead, the firstfruits of them that sleep: 21 For by a man came death: and by a man the resurrection of the dead. 22 And as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all shall be made alive. 23 But every one in his own order: the firstfruits, Christ: then they that are of Christ, who have believed in his coming. (1Cor 15, DRE)

Christ's resurrection is not merely His resurrection—but ours. The Church is His Resurrected Body, alive in a world of many who fear that all we have to keep are wispy memories.

Yet, the world persists in memorializing that ancient despair, for the world rejects Christ and can thereby resort only to empty liturgies and bodiless memories.

So, is the means of restoring the world to hope merely a matter of proper proclamation and rhetoric? Are we to resurrect our own, better episodes of Star Trek—and world history and world future?


We the Church celebrate the Mass, the Holy Sacrifice of Christ's Body and Blood. Our very lives among all our brothers and sisters are substantial, bodily, persistently concrete reminders of resurrection in our midst. We are worth more than many sparrows and many vain memories.

11 This commandment, that I command you this day is not above you, nor far off from you: 12 Nor is it in heaven, that you should say: Which of us can go up to heaven to bring it unto us, and we may hear and fulfil it in work? 13 Nor is it beyond the sea: that you may excuse yourself, and say: Which of us can cross the sea, and bring it unto us: that we may hear, and do that which is commanded? 14 But the word is very near unto you, in your mouth and in your heart, that you may do it. (Deut 30, DRE)

We are to do it—not merely preach it, argue it, or episode it. We are it. We, the Church, are the reality that dispels the fictional despair we can all too readily ceremonialize ourselves into.

This is the Comedy, the Good News, the Happy-Ending-Kingdom of God that is already upon us. Live, love, and breathe this resurrection to all in the Name of Christ. Amen.