Deriving life from death

I JUST said a Holy Mass at the funeral of high school classmate. Events like this are usually overloaded with emotions. That´s understandable. But we also need to put things in the proper perspective, so that we avoid getting completely held captive by blind and unreasonably persistent grief.

Again, death can come to anyone of us anytime. This classmate of mine was the big guy in the batch, he was the corps commander of our military training. He was not only physically well endowed, but intellectually as well. The last time I saw him, two years back, he was oozing with true manly vigor. Who would have suspected his time was ending?

Our Lord can call us to his presence at the time willed by his ever mysterious wisdom, love and mercy. St. Josemaria Escriva used to say that God is no hunter of souls who hunts us down. He rather is more of a gardener who takes care of roses in the garden. When they are already abloom, he cuts them to put them inside the house, making it more beautiful.

We have to look at death from the point of view of faith. This gives us the ultimate measure of reality. Objectivity is not only matter of the senses or the intellect. We cannot simply rely on our feelings, our hunches, our reasoning. We have to use our faith, which our Lord in the first place gives us abundantly.

That faith tells us that we actually do not die, because even if our bodily organism dies and disintegrates, there is something in us, our spiritual soul, that simply cannot die. That´s the very nature of things spiritual. They are beyond the wear and tear of this life.

But it can suffer the so-called spiritual death, or the second death, when it fails to get sustained by its ultimate proper source of life who is God. The life of our soul is not just made up of our ideas, plans and desires. These hardly survive the physical death. Its real life-source is God.

This is a point we need to be clear about. Our soul is not the vegetative or the animal type that animates the living plants and animals. Such life-giving soul dies and disappears together with the death and decay of the plants and animals.

Not so with our human soul. Ours is a spiritual soul that, while distinct from the Spirit of God, nonetheless participates in that Spirit. It is meant to be with the Spirit. And it´s the separation from the Spirit, which we can freely do, that spells its death or at least puts it in jeopardy.

That is why our soul somehow feels a longing for God, as expressed beautifully by St. Augustine once when he said: ¨My Lord, my soul is restless until it rests in you.¨ There is a nostalgia for God and things spiritual and supernatural, which we can also misinterpret and misdirect, ending in some superstition. That´s because our soul has God as its true home.

We need to know the true nature and purpose of our soul. While a lot of theories, ideologies and creeds can offer a variety of ideas about this topic, we need to attend to this issue, because it´s basic, it is what gives over-all meaning and direction to our life.

We just have to wade through the many aspects involved in this process. But it´s all worthwhile. And while we are at this stage, we should not forget that a great source of enlightenment in this regard is our Christian faith.

There we are told that the very substance of our soul´s life is love, the one that defines God himself (Deus caritas est, St. John says in his letter) and fully manifested, made available and freely given to us by Christ. For us who claim to be Christians, we should not ignore the relevant doctrine and praxis taught by Christ and now handed down by the Church.

We have to bridge the gap between the faith we officially profess and the life we actually live. It´s amazing that at this age of supposedly dramatic progress in technology and knowledge, this anomaly between faith and life not only continues but is actually worsening.

We have to take our faith more seriously, and discover the many happy, liberating truths about ourselves that can help us derive good from the evil in this world, and eternal life with God from our death. We have to free ourselves from the confinement of a sense-and-reason-based worldview.