Kurt and I weren't the closest of friends, but I knew him well enough to be devastated by his death. For such a quiet person, he was so excited about having a child.
For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.
Well, we can't afford blindness anymore. There are tens of thousands of thugs who loathe liberty and love death, and want to annihilate Western civilization.
That the God-man died for his people, and that His death is their life, is an idea which was in some degree foreshadowed by the older mystical sacrifices.
The exact time of death, I think, is not something that matters so much at this moment for we will be reliving John Paul's life for many days and weeks and even years and decades and centuries to come.
