Taming death

THANKS be to God, our country is still so largely infused with Christian piety that together with the Holy Week, the Solemnity of All Saints and the Commemoration of All Souls on the first days of November draw great crowds of the faithful to cemeteries to pay homage to the dead.

Such wonderful phenomenon may be dismissed as a show of a contrived Deus-ex-machina show of faith, reinforced by a mounting evidence of inconsistencies in the life of the believers.

That’s how non-believers see it. The most they can concede to participating in this yearly activity is for sentimental reasons or for social and political correctness. Nothing more or beyond these.

In short, they consider the phenomenon as a superstition, a gratuitous nonsense built up through years of ignorance and blind obedience to Church teaching. It’s supposed to thrive in a chicken-run kind of locality, still removed from the liberating light of reason and science.

But that is not so. Contrary to what non-believers may say, we have within ourselves, whether strongly or faintly felt, an urge to communicate with our dearly departed.

Such urge springs from the belief that we continue to live in another form after our death here on earth. We believe that there is in us something that refuses to die, in spite of our death here on earth. We just continue to live on.

We can’t explain it thoroughly because it’s a belief that exceeds the powers of empirical verification. But it is not completely unreasonable.

If we think and reason, if we will and love, then we must have something spiritual in us, since spiritual activities presume a spiritual subject. “Operare sequitur esse” (operation follows being) goes a philosophical principle that applies here.

Anyway, without being aware of this principle, we somehow hold on to the truth of our spiritual nature and our supernatural calling. We refuse to be held captive by the limits of a rationality that is hooked to the merely empirical.

And thus we believe that even if we die here on earth, there is something in us that does not die. It is our soul, the spirit that animates us, that is above the wear and tear of earthly life and thus enjoys immortality.

If not destroyed by some factors, this natural tendency to believe focuses our attention to the spiritual world, and then to the possibility at least to a supernatural reality. This will require the gift of faith.

That’s the problem with our brothers and friends who reject the faith. They make their own reason the ultimate guide in their life. But it is a reason that refuses to admit its limits, and refuses to be open to anything smelling of faith and mystery. It refuses to accept what it could not understand.

As a consequence, they can not figure out the objective reality of the spiritual world, let alone, the supernatural realm. These are Greek to them. These just don’t make sense. They prefer to stick to what could be touched, seen and comprehended.

The ways of the simple people who honor the dead on these November days may reek of sentimentality and may be accompanied by imperfections and exaggeration, but they objectively leap from an objective truth about us.

I pray that they be left in that belief even as I encourage them also to go deep into the full meaning as well as the consequences and implications of our death. We have to mature in our attitude towards death.

Death should not be a cause of fear. That would be useless, since we can not escape it. It’s part of our continuing life, a crucial event that brings us from time to eternity.

Something in it should attract us to it, since it is the doorway to our definitive life. But to cross it, we need to be fully ready and live our earthly life the way it should be.

What can help us is to study the dispositions the saints, and especially the martyrs, had towards death. They will give us concrete ideas of how we can welcome and embrace death.