Sixth Sunset: Death



My dear friends with this last sunset the night is upon us. The dimming of the sun from the temptations and through the betrayal, the agony, the sentence, and the solitude; we arrive to the plenitude of the night with death. If we want to synthesized all our fears like fear to pain and suffering, fear to weakness and sickness, fear to age and lose, we can see that all of them have their origin in our fear to die.

Fear of death. Where that comes from? Or better, why do we fear death? Perhaps, because it is unknown what happens after it. But a more concrete reason maybe it is because we don’t want to leave everything behind: family and friends, things and business. We don’t want to go alone to the cemetery.

In my childhood imagination, I remember asking: what section of the casket is used to store the food? Or where in the coffin is the bathroom? Questions like those came up frequently after many funerals in Ituango where my grandparents were the proud custodians of the parish cemetery key. It was fascinated. I felt like if death in the town was owned and controlled by my family.

There can be added to my boyhood questionnaire observations like the ones we used to make on the tombs: we judged them by the amount of flowers and decorations they had. A simple tomb without anything meant forgotten dead person while an elaborate mausoleum meant a very fortunate well remembered dead person. However, those observations were not so original. I found out recently visiting the catacombs and underground necropolis in Rome that the Romans also thought the same things. There we can compare the pagan tombs like in a contest for exuberance. It makes sense since the place of the death was the seen as the final resting place for eternity. By contrast, we saw the simple Christians tombs with nothing calling the attention but raw dirt. Their tombs are just temporary waiting places, like forgotten a la Ituango. It seems then that a reason to fear death is that we will be forgotten alone.

Let us move then from an ephemeral reason to fear death to a transcendental one. We learn in Christian doctrine that we may run to one of two destinies: heaven or hell; in other words, salvation or everlasting damnation.  It is a preoccupation that only happens in the level of faith. In fact, St Teresa used to pray: ‘it does not move me Lord to love you neither your promised heaven nor the hell so feared.’ It is another reason to fear death based on the main preoccupation of not knowing what happens to us after death. The difference is that here the fear to die does not come from a materialistic foundation but from a kind of inferiority complex and insecurity about faith.

After being confronted during Lent by the lives and testimonies of the martyrs visiting the stational churches, I can say that they, the martyrs, understood well their faith to the point of placing their love for God above their lives. They did it with such radicalism because it was the only way to give literally their lives for Christ, their rock, savior and Lord.  The martyrs were holy men and women that not only professed a faith but that embodied it with the sacrifices of their own bodies. They found all the encouragement on the cross and death of Jesus for whom they also died. But they died, perhaps with much pain, but definitely fearless because they all knew deep down what their final destiny was: a share in God’s glory.

But where did Jesus find his support? Who did encourage him to descend to the complete darkness of death? It certainly was a very foreign situation for God who is only life. However, he went down there to illuminate it with his presence to claim it for him.

Dear friends, why do we fear to die? There is not room for a Christian to fear death because we now know what happens after we die. We go through a state known to God. We cross the gate’s threshold of the cemetery whose key are in God’s house. The family has control over death and power over it. God himself claims death by assuming it. There is nothing to fear.  This should be a good criterion to evaluate the radicalism of our faith. Perhaps, when I stop fearing death is because I am ready and affirmed by my faith. But, when? I can be from now on!