DEATH BECKONS

Death Beckons

            “My bags are packed. I can go at any time”, good Pope John XXIII used to say. The late Cardinal Koenig’s attitude was the same. He testified to feeling a great serenity. But from the vantage point of his 94 years, he had something to say to our generation. “When you reach my age, and know each day could be the last, you go back to the source of your existence. You distinguish between what passes and what endures, you feel respect and awe for the God of heaven and earth that is what so many modern Western people have lost: they do not look beyond yesterday and tomorrow. I see the broad lines of the Gospel, but much remains a mystery. I have had the opportunity to study in a special way the religions of the word. That brought me back to the person of Jesus Christ. The most important question in the history of the world is, ‘Who is Jesus Christ?’”

            Cardinal Joseph Bernadin in his “Last Testament” that he penned on the very eve of his death, said: “In the final analysis, our participation in the paschal mystery – in the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus - brings a certain freedom. The more we cling to ourselves and others, the more we try to control our destiny – the more we lose the true sense of our lives, the more we are impacted by the futility of it all. It is precisely in letting go, in entering into complete union with the Lord, in letting him take over, that we discover our true selves. It’s in the act of abandonment that we experience redemption.”

            Ready for death? We’re none of us ready for death; we thrust it out of our consciousness. One of the most tragic things about so many funerals is not just the sense of shock at the terrible intruder, reminding everyone of their own mortality, but also the sense of time lost, of missed opportunities. We live as if we were immortal, but time is not on our side. By the time the funeral comes, it’s too late to say, “If only...” But the real problem of death concerns not sadness or a sense of loss, not even our own mortality; it is to do with the question that mortality asks us – what, after all, is the rigmarole all about? Are we born to die, and does that inevitable death make all our achievements, our dreams, hopes, loves and longings of as much worth as an empty cigarette packet? At the end of the game, says the Spanish proverb, king and pawn go back into the same box.

            Since the Middle Ages, much of Western (and westernised) culture has attempted to flee mortality and has demonstrated a real fear of death. We have lost the ability to accept “life and death on one tether, running harmoniously together”, as something to be welcomed. This takes courage, and it also helps us to understand other people, since grief can be shared and not privatised. Since it is difficult to find words in our bereavement, it is best to surrender ourselves to the Church’s expansive liturgy that assures that our life’s achievements and failures are not exposed to futility, but assumed into the narrative of salvation that Christ’s paschal mystery guarantees. The luminous liturgy of the Catholic Church says it all.

According to the poet, John Donne, when a man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book but translated into a better language. God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand will bind up all scattered leaves together for that library where every book shall be open to every other. That is to say, there will be mutual transparency in the absolute transparency of the Trinity.

We all know that death is waiting; but few of us feel that death is beckoning. “The Master is here and is calling you” (John 11, 28).