"Father, what will it be like when we die?" This is a question that priests are used to being asked by both children and adults. A priest is probably just as good a person as anyone to ask. In addition to their theological training on the "Last Things" – Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell – most priests probably have a certain amount of face-to-face experience of death, from tending to members of their flocks in their last moments on earth. One of our great worries at the beginning of the Great Lockdown last spring was that it would be difficult to see those who were gravely ill in hospitals. As it turned out, nursing staff have been excellent about alerting us to the presence in their wards of Catholics in need of sacraments, and in kitting us out with contagion-proof clothing. As Catholics, we should each of us pray every day for the grace of a "good death", with our sins shriven, fortified by the Sacraments and, ideally, with someone to pray with and for us as our souls prepare to meet Our Lord at the moment of Particular Judgment, when our eternal destinies are sealed.
To that increasingly weird and wonderful creature whom German theologians like to call ‘Modern Man’, death is the ultimate affront. For those scientists and social engineers who have convinced themselves that they can save humanity without regard for the laws which Almighty God has written into nature, death can only be an awkward reminder that we cannot compete with the Creator. No scientist or medic has ever yet conquered death, or ever will. In some of the whackier parts of America there are institutions that, for vast sums, will freeze and store human bodies in the conviction that they will soon find a technique to bring them back to life. For a lesser fee one can pay to have just the head frozen, presumably in the expectation that it may one day be attached to the body of a donkey or a goat. To make such quackery sound more scientific, they have given it the name "Cryonics". The truth, however, is that man does not have the gift of life in his possession. He may take life, but he can never revive what he has killed. Christian burial is a testimony to our acknowledgment that our mortal flesh returns to the soil from which God created Adam in Genesis. The Latin word for ‘earth’, or ‘ground’, is ‘humus’. Death is humbling. It reminds us that we are not really in charge.
We might smile at the thought of Silicon Valley oligarchs looking forward to eternity among the frozen veg. But as Catholics we cannot afford to be glib about mortality. Bereavement is one of the most acute psychological agonies a person can suffer, and grief is quite capable of producing physical pathologies. Death is the ultimate divider, which separates us from our loved ones and violates the human being at his most fundamental level as an entity, by sundering body and soul. All of this indicates that at the source of death is that great divider himself, Satan. Our Holy Catholic Faith teaches us that death was never part of God's plan for the human race at all. It is the most radical and terrible consequence of that rebellion of our first parents, when they allowed themselves to be tempted by the devil.
As a stark reminder of our mortality, the ashes which we receive on our heads on Ash Wednesday with the words "Remember man that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return", are typical of the Church's realism in the face of death. Unlike the modern world, She does not try to conjure death away and out of sight by means of distraction and euphemisms. She confronts it head-on and unapologetically. But the ashes are not merely a memento mori which serve to put us in our place as sinners destined to decomposition in the dust. The whole Lenten season which is launched with this ashing is a preparation for Easter, when the Church celebrates with utmost solemnity Our Lord's definitive and glorious triumph over death in His Resurrection. In Lent we unite ourselves with His Passion through self-denial, so that on Easter Sunday we may participate most fully in the joy of His Resurrection.
We cannot escape death. But in His Resurrection, Our Lord has overcome the lasting power that death might have had over us. He came precisely to reverse the effects of the fall, so that what has been separated as a consequence of Original Sin – our bodies from our souls, and our loved ones from us and from each other – may all be reunited in eternity at the Throne of Grace. Descending into the waters of Baptism, we have already died with Christ and been buried with Him in the tomb. We emerged from those waters of regeneration full of the supernatural life of His Resurrection. Thanks to the Resurrection, and to our insertion into this Mystery in our Baptism, life has the last word over death.
The only serious threat to this new life is self-centredness, through which our enemy the devil may find an entrée into our hearts, and the old Adam of sin is able to reassert his presence within us. Lent is our opportunity to lay siege to self-centredness, so that the supernatural life of the Resurrection is able to take ever greater possession of our hearts and souls. Through prayer we enthrone God at the centre of our lives, through almsgiving we put the needs of others before our own comfort and satisfaction, and through fasting we die to ourselves so that we might have life in all its fullness in Christ. The answer to that question "What will it be like when we die?" is "It depends." What it depends on is how much we becoming used to dying to ourselves now. This Lent, let us ask for the grace to conform ourselves with the death of Jesus, so that we may participate in the glory of the Resurrection at Easter.
Father Julian Large