ON FACING DEATH

Every day we pray in the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.” Perhaps there is nothing harder about God’s will to accept than the hour of our death. Yet every day we invoke the Blessed Virgin Mary and ask that she “pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.” We say it so often that one would think that we were looking forward to it! And yet, when we think of that hour we naturally recoil. In a sermon “On Man’s Mortality” the Church Father and Martyr, Saint Cyprian, notes, “How unreasonable it is to pray that God’s will be done, and then not promptly obey it when he calls us from this world! Instead we struggle and resist…not freely consenting to our departure, but constrained by necessity. And yet we expect to be rewarded with heavenly honors by him to whom we come against our will!”

Some look forward to death when the pains and sorrows of life become burdensome. Others look forward to it because it is a passageway to God, like Saint Paul, who wrote “I long to depart this life and be with Christ, for that is far better” (Philippians 1:23). But most people dread the approaching hour, including people of faith, who sometimes feel guilty about their anxiety. However, it is a natural fear, since death is “a radically hostile presence contrary to our natural vocation to life and happiness,” as Pope Benedict XVI said in a short talk in November, 2006. In it the Pope affirmed that the death and Resurrection of Christ has “revolutionized the meaning of death… The love of God, acting in Jesus, has given new meaning to the whole of man's existence and in this way, has also transformed death. If in Christ human life is a departure ‘from this world to the Father’ (John 13:1), the hour of death is the moment in which this departure takes places in a concrete and definite way.”

Saint Teresa of Avila wrote, “I want to see God, and in order to see him, I must die.” Saint Thérèse of Lisieux said on her deathbed, “I am not dying; I am entering into life.” The fact is that Christians have already died with Christ sacramentally in holy baptism. Their bodily death is the completion of this spiritual reality. St. Paul writes to the Romans, “Are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life. If, then, we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him” (Rom 6:3-4). This is why the coffin of the deceased is sprinkled with holy water when it is brought into the church, and the priest says, “In the waters of baptism (N.) died with Christ and rose with him to new life. May he/she now share with him eternal glory.” Like the white albs which ministers at the altar wear during Mass, the pall which covers the coffin is a baptismal garment.

Pope Benedict XVI assures us in his talk that those who are committed to living in imitation of Christ are free from having to fear death. He quotes Saint Francis’ famous Canticle of the Sun, which affectionately refers to death as “our sister bodily Death.” But the saint also includes a warning: “Woe on those who will die in mortal sin!” Pope Benedict reminds us that “The authentic death, which one must fear, is that of the soul, called by the Book of Revelation ‘second death’ (cf. 20:14-15; 21:8). In fact, he who dies in mortal sin, without repentance, locked in prideful rejection of God's love, excludes himself from the Kingdom of life.” As Jesus said, “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather, be afraid of the one who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna” (Matthew 10:28). While we should not be afraid if we are living in Christ, we should not be surprised to experience some trepidation as the hour approaches. Jesus himself felt it in the Garden of Gethsemane. This is why the Last Rites are a great help and comfort. But the greatest consolation we have is knowing that when we pass over to the other side Jesus will be there, whom we loved and served in this life, and with whom we will live forever in the next. 

FATHER SCOTT