When I was asked last year to write a few lines on this argument, my thinking stopped in its tracks! Well, I said to myself, terrible and hard question, in fact, it’s everyone’s cross to bear! It is simple and sometimes easy to write and talk about life, about a collective or personal experience, about time, history and space, even about mathematics and quantum physics, but about death?! How can one, especially as a Christian (and the Christian is, in essence, a human being in love with life, love, harmony, peace, and the eternity that Christ has brought back to us, is, or at least in theory should be, a fulfilled and happy being!), how can you talk about death, about the shadow of this immense, infinite happiness?! And especially I, as a priest, as a servant of Life, of the altar, of our Lord Jesus Christ, dead and risen on the third day, what can I say about death without beating around the bush?! It scares us all! It leaves us all speechless: “As for man, his days are like the grass; he blossoms like a flower in the field.” says the psalmist, “a wind sweeps over it and it is gone; its place knows it no more” – sad, isn’t it?
For as long as I have known myself, I have been to hundreds and hundreds of funerals, mourning and weeping, desolation and despair everywhere: “He’s has gone, gone and left me alone with three children!” And more recently, since I have been a priest: “Father, why did s/he die? (and here, it is usually followed by horror-filled swearing and blasphemy of any kind). Father, why?! Why?! Why me?! Why me?! Is there really no God?! Why did he do something like this to me?!” To which I, of course, remain silent! Dumbed like a secular rock! What can you say to a person who mourns his being? That there is life after life?! That there is resurrection?! That Christ redeemed us with his blood from the abysses of ancestral sin?! That there is hope?! That one day we will see each other again?! These are stories! Nonsense! They have no impact in those moments! Whoever mourns, mourns his own being! His own departure from the Creator! And in that place, there are no words… Because it is about the other, whether male or female! It is about the ones we loved in life!
But still, dare I say, what if this was about you, or me personally? Without the others! You, in front of your own death! Because YOU HAVE to die, that is clear! Death and taxes are two things you can’t get rid of in life! Sounds paradoxical, right?! And yet, one day you will die! (I don’t like to say it, but that’s life!). How do you stand in front of her?!
I will tell you something that I keep saying to myself all the time, to encourage me, to be well at least psychologically: “Dear Father (because I am dear, I love myself, so commanded the Lord! ), I say to myself: there’s no way around it, you did not invent LIFE, God created it, and the natural order of this soul (of yours) is to grow! Not just physically, but spiritually! In the Lord! A job that lasts a lifetime! A titanic job! You fall, you get up, you fall again and you go on again… You grow! The drama of Job in the Old Testament is not his suffering in all its aspects, but his presumption, his pride, the fact that from the creature level, he thought himself, in his wisdom, that he is Creator… Lack of humility, that’s what it is! But the Lord protected him, still listened to him, then gave him grace upon grace and long and prosperous days… Because Job, who represents us all, understood and remained silent before God who asked him at one point: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of this Universe ?! ” Well, where is death in this case?! The blessings of the Lord are eternal. Eternal! God is faithful to His own Word! And Job is our contemporary, Job is all of us! But we, we are eternal! And death is part of Life and is a simple passage from one existential level to another! It is a door we must open with our moral and existential conscience… In other words, if we are good in this life, we live in aeternum, if not, then I do not know what to say … only God with His infinite mercy!!!
And here I will conclude: it is not death that scares me personally, as it should not scare anyone, but possibly its lack of it! To die is a divine grace, a blessing! Ask the old and full of days: everyone wants to return Home, all sincere and pure-hearted people have this faith, of a Home! Ask yourself if you are ready to face this journey or not! I know what it is – it is Home!!! And I really don’t care about psychologists without faith, poor fellows! Christ, our Lord, He gives, that He has all the answers… He rose from the dead, He destroyed this fixation and this fear that is “death” for us. He returned from eternity to re-die every time with us together! He won! Because he was sent by the One without death, by the Eternal One, by the One who built us and loved us… by Him! By God! He himself being God! Homer is an outdated story, just as Zamolxis is an old and outdated story… What is death?! Ok! Here is my answer to you: nothing strange; it is to simply return Home, to the house of the heavenly Father who still sees us from afar and awaits for us with open arms, with the ring ready, with the most beautiful cloak at hand, and with the fat calf prepared for the banquet in our honor!