From stbenedictstable.ca, conversation with the late Robert Farrar Capon:

He spoke quite powerfully about learning from that, and of having to work through something of a faith crisis. Several times, he made reference to mortality and to the reality of our all dying; something which has long been a big part of his theological horizon but which had now become personal. “This has been a year for me to realize that I am not ‘getting’ this,” he said. 

I am not called upon to ‘get’ this, I am not called upon to improve, I am not called upon to get better. And in the toils of the medical establishment you are always told that you will get better, you must get better, you can get better and so on. And I don’t have to. I know I’m not going to get better permanently; nobody is. I’m going to end up dead permanently. Because life after death is a blind alley, in terms of an existence somewhere else than here. My life is in Christ, and therefore in life and in death I am in him. It’s all him. That’s all we know.

“That’s all we know,” and after a year that he characterized as being marked by a “black depression,” he had to decide “if I believed any of this stuff.” He most surely did. “We are not saved from our sins,” he told me. “We’re saved in our sins. We’re not saved from our deaths, we’re saved in our deaths. My death is my salvation. Physically, it is the moment of my salvation, if you want to pinpoint a moment. That’s why we’re supposed to die daily to sin. Sin is always there, and we’re supposed to die daily to it. That doesn’t mean that you have to improve. That’s the mistake of religion.”

That’s the mistake of religion; to replace the radical proclamation of death/resurrection with a set of practices by which to try to improve, progress, or otherwise convince the Divine Fox that we’re worth the bother. Robert Farrar Capon spent the better part of the last forty years trying proclaiming death/resurrection, and many of us are the better for it.