The Presence That Conquers Death
Michiel Peeters - Death is an essential element of life, even if we have succeeded fairly well in tabooing it. Where other civilizations practice elaborate, public funeral rites and ancestor worship, and cherish beautiful, well-maintained tombs or cemeteries, full of flowers and visits, here we rarely see funeral processions, quickly sneak in and out of the crematorium when we really must, and our graveyards are dreary and empty. The imposing fact of our human mortality is circumvented carefully.
While our “sister bodily death,” as Saint Francis calls it, can give and teach us so much. Heeding our mortality, helps us to understand life better. Death tells us that life is limited, that it has a beginning and an end; that it is given; that I do not make myself, but depend. The inevitably of death invites me to think about what I want to do with the time given to me. And what does it do to my gaze on someone I care for, when I realize he or she is going to die?
For the more I live—and only in that measure—the more I discover life—while not censoring the fact of death—the more the natural desire awakens in me that death may not be an end, that bodily death be not “death.” Only if we would care about no one, neither ourselves nor any other, this desire would not awaken in us.
It’s a sad desire, sure, because no human being is able to push away or undo death. But the desire is there. Let us recall that sadness is longing for an absent but existing good. That the existence of a desire points to the existence of its object.
What happens when we suppress our sadness? It turns into its logical opposite, which is despair. Graham Greene observes in The Power and the Glory that “living with despair” is what our world knows best. Having learnt to censor our humanity, we have had to learn to live with despair. But once it happens that we give free rein to our humanity, we discover an ineradicable desire for immortality.
What does today’s liturgy say to this desire? The Psalm’s refrain gives a synthesis: “Though I walk in the valley of darkness, I fear no evil, for you are with me.”
The answer to the problem of death is not a theory, but a presence. Like the answer to the helplessness of a child is his mother’s presence. The more he is enabled—through her comforting and affirming presence—to interiorize her gaze, her certainty, the more he will be able to walk in any “darkness” without losing heart.
For us it is the same, with the realization that our mother was a sign. “Though I walk in the valley of darkness, I fear no evil, for You are with me.” Life is a valley of darkness, and this is true in the highest degree of death, but I can walk through it by virtue of my lively awareness of Your presence, of Your companionship.
As we often say, if you want your hope to increase, make sure your faith increases. For hope is certainty in the future based on something real in the now. The greater that presence now, the more I can base my future on it. We are uncertain because Christ is not yet a real presence for us, a presence so present that it enters all the details of our lives. But for that to happen we must go a road, made of all the factors of our lives, our humanity, our hearts, all events.
The Lord invites us to go such a road, here and now. In virtue of an exceptional experience in the present, of the experience of an exceptional Presence here and now, we become certain that, in that Presence, time, death, are not our enemies; that the best is yet to come.
The author has not revised the translation.
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