I received an e-mail recently from the president of the seminary I attended that one of my professors is dying. He was diagnosed with cancer recently and began chemo, but is now in hospice care.

Most of the people I have known who have died have died suddenly. I wonder what it is like to have a deathbed and know you’re laying on it, to see your life coming to an end. I wonder what it is like to know that all the work you’ve done on your legacy is finished, and now it is out of your hands.

I wonder what it is like for my professor to know that people all over the country have been notified that he is dying. I wonder if he is aware that each of the messages and letters he has received represents ten, or a hundred, or more, people who are thinking about him but who don’t know what to say.

This man, my professor, wrote a foundational text on Christian theology, a book that is read by seminary students, Sunday School classes, and church groups all over the world. He has taught people, I can’t even imagine how many, from the classroom and the pulpit and the page. Does that bring him some peace, knowing that many of his ideas have taken hold in this world? Is there a sense of completion as he looks back, or did he carry inside himself just one more edition of the book? Or in this time beyond treatment and last-minute cures, with family and friends by his side, do those things cease to matter? We are told that he is at peace, that he feels comfort in the arms of his Creator. Is that true? Has the professor, who tended to our questions and doubts, come to a place where questions are no more?

This is a man who regularly spoke up about the importance of heretics. “Heretics may be right and they may be wrong, but they need to be listened to, because they are showing you some aspect of truth that the tradition is neglecting.” I wonder if he stands on the threshold between life and death more certain of the truths on which he grounded his life, or more awed by the mystery into which he will soon find himself. What would he say about those type-written lecture notes that he used for years and years? Do they seem a true and humble offering to his God? Or do they seem utterly inadequate in the rosy light of dusk, like a rendering of the Sistine Chapel ceiling in crayon?

Many of us are praying and watching, keeping an unseen vigil as we go about our daily lives. He is teaching us still, in the manner of his death. It’s silly, but I imagine that when the time comes he will disappear into the cornfield like James Earl Jones’s character in Field of Dreams. He will poke a hand in and withdraw it quickly, perhaps because of what he feels there, perhaps because he worries he’s been too bold. Then he will look back at those he’s leaving behind, smile, turn, and walk away, laughing. The laughing will persist even when we don’t see him anymore.

My professor was a student of Karl Barth, truly one of the great Protestant minds of the twentieth century. I can also say that I had the privilege of studying under one of the great ones. We will miss him.