" Thus the whole death is not the biological phenomenon of death but the spiritual reality whose "sting... is sin" (1 Cor. 15:56) - the rejection by man of the only true life given to him by God. "Sin entered the world and death by sin " (Rom. 5:12): there is no other life but God's life; the one who rejects it dies because life without God is death. This is the spiritual death, the one that fill the entire life with "dying" and, being separation from God, makes man's life solitude and suffering, fear and illusion, enslavement to sin and enmity, meaninglessness, lust and emptiness. It is this spiritual death that makes man's physical death truly death... "

― Alexander Schmemann , Of Water and the Spirit: A Liturgical Study of Baptism