You no doubt are familiar with the Vikings.  Although the Vikings have been traditionally viewed as rapacious pillagers of the monasteries and villages of the Middle Ages, and they were, the Vikings were also instrumental in connecting many parts of Western and Central Asia to the cultural values of medieval Europe.  It was a Viking tribe that established the nation of Russia; it was a Viking tribe that linked, through trade and exchange, Northern Europe with the fledgling nations of the southern Mediterranean.  And so on.

    Beyond this, the Vikings had a rather curious way of viewing death.  They laughed at it.  To view death with levity, they believed, was to die bravely.  It was to pass out of this world in distinguished fashion.  Without fear, without hesitation, but rather grasping boldly the fullness of this new adventure.

    So did a Viking king once say, "The Gods will invite me in, in death there is no sighing . . . the hours of life have passed, laughing shall I die."

    When given a choice, most of us would not necessarily welcome death, much less laugh about it.  From an earthly vantage point, death is so frightfully final.  That's this Viking's point:  all the more incumbent upon a person to enter into it with mirth.  If, as this Viking observes, the "Gods" have invited us into this finale of life destinies, laughing can we we indeed die.

    For absent any material vision of the afterlife, laughing, heartily, demonstratively, and clearly, at what comes next is indeed the most human way to know it.

    Faith rarely understands, fully, what it now sees.