Retreat meditation on the Christian meaning of death

The life of man fluctuates between two poles. The adoration of God or the adoration of “ego”; the service of God or the struggle against God. To appreciate the true values in play in this struggle, there is nothing more useful than to meditate on death, this is not suggesting a terror-filled contemplation, but very much the contrary, a vision of encouragement and hope.
There are two ways of looking at death: one purely human and the other Christian.

1. The human concept considers death as a great destruction, the end of everything. It is a concept pervaded with sadness (the stoic philosophers took their own lives in order to be as totally in control of their passing away as they wished to be during their lives). From earliest times man has felt fear and dread in the face of death. No one knows death from personal experience and of those who have already passed on, none has returned to tell us what it is like. They have entered into an eternal silence.

Death is ordinarily preceded by a painful sickness, accompanied by a growing incapacity that finally becomes total. Those who surround the dying person contemplate in complete passivity how this beloved person is being drawn toward the inevitable void. When we wish to follow him with our gaze, we feel as though he were being consumed by nothingness.

In the midst of living we do not seem so alone before God. There are other beings, who though fragile, offer us refuge where we can hide, but at the moment of death there is no remaining place where we can hide: the soul is pulled out and thrown on the eternal plains where nothing remains except itself and its God.

2. The Christian concept of death is enormously richer and deeply consoling: death for the Christian is the moment of finding God, a God for whom he has searched all his life. Death for a Christian is the meeting between son and Father; it is intelligence finding the supreme truth, and taking possession of the highest good. Death is not death.

We will see Him face to face, see our God who today is hidden. We will see his Mother, our sweet Mother the Virgin Mary. We will see the saints, His friends who will now be our friends; we will find our parents and relatives, all those who have preceded us. During our earthly life we were unable to penetrate the intimate depths of their hearts but in Glory we will see without darkness or misunderstandings. Many ask if we will know our loved ones in the next life. Knowing how God acts, wouldn’t it be a strange mockery of his whole way of dealing with us if he were to put such ardent devotion in our hearts for loved ones who mean more to us than our very selves, only to find that love disappear with death? Everything that is ours will accompany us in the next life. God does not break the ties that he has created. But above all, the great gift of heaven is to be present before God. What more can I need!

What surprise and joy awaits the Christian at the end of his earthly life, on seeing that his trial is over? The sufferings have passed and what he has struggled and sacrificed for has arrived.
What a cheap price for eternal Glory! A few difficult years, but how short they were! What a contemptible thing human life is seen in itself! How great when you consider the eternal effects! It is like a small, contemptible seed that germinates and matures for eternity! This life is precious to the extent that it reveals in its shadows and figures, the existence and the attributes of the all-powerful God. It is precious because it allows us to relate with immortal souls who, like us, are subject to their own trial, it is precious because it allows us to help them to know Christ and to remove those obstacles that the world places in the path of grace.

Sufferings? In this life we will have sufferings but they are not to be seen as punishment alone, any more than death should be. It is beautiful to suffer for Christ. He first suffered for us. He came down from heaven to earth to seek for what could not be found in heaven: suffering, and he took it upon himself without measure for love of mankind. He took it upon his soul, in his imagination, in his heart, in his body and in his spirit because “he loved me, and delivered himself to death for me” (cf. Gal 2,20). After him, Mary, his Mother and mine, is Queen of Heaven because she loved and suffered.

Life has been given to men to cooperate with God, to achieve His plan; death is the complement to this partnership because it is the surrender of all our powers into the hands of the Creator. May each day be a preparation for my death, surrendering myself, minute by minute to the work of collaboration that God asks of me, fulfilling my mission, what God expects of me, what He cannot do without me.

Death is the great counselor of man. It shows us what is essential in life, as a tree in winter once despoiled of its leaves shows its trunk. We die each day as the waters draw closer, moment-by-moment, to the waiting arms of the sea. May our daily dying be what illuminates our most important decisions: in its light the resolutions we have to take, the sacrifices we must make and the perfection we must embrace appear radiantly clear.

The great stimulus in life and in its struggle is death: a powerful motive to give myself to God for God. And while the pagan will begin nothing out of the fear of death, the Christian is in a hurry to work because his time is brief, because the time is running out before he must present himself before the One who has given him everything, to the One who loves him more than he loves himself. Hurry my soul! Do something great and beautiful! If we understand death in this way we will understand perfectly why, for a Christian, his meditation does not inspire fear, to the contrary, it brings joy, the only authentic joy.

My brothers, I believe that the meditation on death has not been for us a meditation filled with fear but one of consolation. Why fear it? Why be fearful of abandoning this deceitful world, we who have been baptized for the world to come? Why be anxious for a long life of riches, honors, and comforts, those of us who know that heaven will be all that we desire of the best, and not only in appearance but in reality and for always? Why put our confidence in this world when it is no more than an image, a symbol of that other real world? Why content ourselves with the surface instead of appropriating the treasure it hides beneath?

For those with faith everything they see speaks to them of another world, the beauty of nature, the sun, the moon, everything is but a figure that offers testimony of the invisible beauty of God. Everything we see is destined to flower one day, destined to be immortal Glory.

Today heaven is beyond our sight, but we will see it, and, like snow, that melts and shows us what it hides; in the same way, visible creation will vanish before the great majesties that dominate it. On that day the clouds will disappear; the sun will pale before the light for which it has been nothing more than an image, the Sun of Justice, who will come in visible form, “like a bridegroom coming forth from his tent” (Ps 19,6). These thoughts should make us pray ardently: “Come Lord Jesus” (Rev 22,20).