A Universal Quickening

“I charge thee therefore before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom.”

– Timothy 4:1

I remember hearing this scripture from the pulpit of First United Methodist Church in Maryville, Tennessee, where I grew up. It frightened me, stirred me into thinking about how Jesus might judge my life. I was probably 11 or 12, and I remember I felt a hot awareness of the various sins to which Jesus would have access, including looking over at a neighbor’s paper during a quiz and wondering what it would be like to kiss our student teacher. This version of Jesus – in a black robe behind a mahogany bench, like my uncle, who was our criminal court judge – overlay the comforting version I’d had of Jesus just moments before, the one who had long hair and liked his wine, who we’d sang about loving the little children.

The phrase “who shall judge the quick and the dead” was really at the dark heart of it – a phrase that conjured visions of shootouts in the Westerns I was watching in those days. It was the early 90s, and Tombstone and Wyatt Earp had been box office hits, with lots of memorable quotes (“My mama told me never to put off ‘til tomorrow who you could kill today,”) and staggering, gunshot-riddled deaths. How fortunate I was that, in the place of my childhood in the 80s and 90s, this was only the stuff of the movies and my imagination.

Back then, I thought “quick” was about being fast enough to not end up dead. In Jesus’s day, I imagined it would have meant escaping a soldier’s sword or a runaway donkey cart. It gave me a claustrophobic sense of destiny - that there was no escape for us, and even those that nimbly and cleverly evaded death would be judged by this sober Jesus.

While I often cracked jokes to manage life’s uncomfortable moments, I was a very serious kid internally, and I wore my Christianity like a yoke, my fear of judgment for my pedestrian sins and “impure thoughts” heavy. The youth group I attended had a pastor that was enthusiastically focused on saving us from eternal damnation. “The quick and the dead” resonated with me; I felt I needed to hurry up, to be fast about being good, to both evade death and my own demons. It created a moral Catch-22 I couldn’t quite untangle through my regular methods of being nice to my sister and dropping a few dollars of my chore money into the offering plate.

In my adolescent interpretation, I didn’t realize that “the quick” was not termed as such for its speed. The root comes from the Old English cwic and Old Norse kvikr, both meaning “living, alive, animate.” The quick aren’t necessarily fast or clever, they are just alive – in that precious, fleeting state that distinguishes them from the dead. The additional meaning of speed or haste did not evolve until the 1300s, leading to our modern use.

The scripture I encountered isn’t the only one using this phrase. In the First Epistle of Peter, there is an even more illustrative warning: “When we walked in lasciviousness, lusts, excess of wine, revellings, banquetings, and abominable idolatries… Who shall give account to him that is ready to judge the quick and the dead?” Again in Acts, Peter speaks of Jesus returning to judge the quick and the dead, and similar lines surface in the Apostles and Nicene Creeds.

It's not only the phrase, but also the topic that these verses hold in common – they revolve around judgement. Judgement resonated with my young mind. Like many kids and adolescents, I had a desire to neatly divide the world into the good and the bad. I thought that if I was righteous and made morally sound decisions, this would be enough to make a good life and to be on the right side of God.  

As I’ve gotten older, I see that easy classifications are often just that – too easy. In my experience, much more dangerous than the draw of dramatic Biblical sins – orgiastic excesses and golden idols – is the lull of life passing not just quickly, but unremarkably. Most of us aren’t really bad folks that need to worry about our eternal salvation; we are more realistically in danger of succumbing to unsatisfying jobs and relationships, obligations overtaking dreams and routine eating up precious years.

For the adult me, the question isn’t: How can we be most morally pure to please God?

But rather: How can we live with awareness of life’s brevity to best honor our time on earth?

My own mortality has recently come into focus for good reason: I am pregnant. In some ways, children can help us cope with the knowledge of our own end. At the same time, they remind us of our limitations. Creating another human is a physical experience. Over the weeks and months, I watch the lithe body of my youth expanding into something fuller and slower. This makes me aware of myself as an organic thing - one that can miraculously create life and also changes with age: to soften, sag, and eventually decompose.

A few weeks ago, I felt “the quickening” – the first distinguishable stirrings of the baby. It was a pressure, a flutter – the movement of something alive and separate, a feeling both alien and natural.  

Now that we have sophisticated tests and ultrasounds, the quickening doesn’t tell us anything medically significant. And yet, that does not rob it of its power. The stirring of my future daughter made concrete the previously theoretical idea that the creature growing inside me is a unique being, of her own will and strength. The moment also made real this new role as mother, one that I am told can be both incredibly fulfilling and potentially self-sacrificial. I hear mothers warn of “losing yourself” and feeling cast in a supporting role in the story of their own life. This draws my attention to my time on earth as a writer, an adventurer, and a person with my own goals and dreams.

With this in mind, I believe we could all afford to experience a metaphorical quickening. A moment to be awakened to our living state and the brief opportunity it presents.

This awareness doesn’t have to be prompted by a pregnancy or a painful loss, though both can have that effect. We can be awakened by a poem, a Bible verse, or a beloved book. At a recent reading at the English bookshop in Lausanne, Andrew experienced this sort of moment. He met an older woman who sat in rapt attention to the author, asking lots of questions and engaging in the discussion. Afterward, she stayed to chat and laughed about moving so slowly these days that others “could hardly tell she was alive.” Andrew commented that maybe moving slowly was exactly what was making her so alive and aware – taking the time to read carefully, to ask thoughtful questions, to walk slowly and notice the world around her. Her face lit up.

Embracing quickness is not about what I thought it was as a kid. It is not about living fast. It is about living fully. It’s not about fearing death, but finding what makes us feel most alive and doing that during our time on Earth. Jesus did this by loving radically and serving others. We might do it through art, service, parenting, prayer or adventure.

Mary Oliver, a poet who lived close to nature and according to her own calling, expresses the sentiment beautifully here, in the latter half of her poem, “The Summer Day.”

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?