The Peace Prayer concludes with a simple reminder: “For it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.” More than a mere summary of the prayer’s second stanza with its call to kenotic selflessness, this verse points to the resurrection, the foundation of Christian hope knitted into the very sinews of every deciduous ash, aspen, beech, birch, cherry, elm, and hickory tree. Perhaps the ancient Greeks and Romans had intuited God’s revelation in the book of nature: the Olympic crown, the perishable wreath referred to by Paul in the first letter to the Corinthians, was woven of evergreen laurel branches, perhaps foreshadowing the imperishable crown of eternity. Life never ends. Never.
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