seems to be an antibirth, the devastating and absolute negation of all for which birth hopes. Fortunately, as Vigen Guroian observes, “God, not nothingness, is the beginning, ground, and ‘end point’ of all persons.… We come from God and are bound to return to God. But even if unrepentance obstructs our way back to God, our fate is not nothingness.”57 In itself, then, dying does not cut us off from Christ’s body, and dying is not the last word for the cosmos either: God has promised that the general