November 2, 2008 - Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed - Fr. John Yonkovig
My parents died just about a year apart - it was nearly 30 years ago when they died. It is strange some of the things you remember that happened or were said at the time of death. I recall one woman assuring me my mother was up in heaven making her famous potato salad for a back yard party - and another person assuring me my father was fishing on Lake Ontario - his favorite pastime. We have all heard these wonderful images that are offered to us as a source of comfort at the grave side. But what I have hung on to all these years is the powerful line from the ancient Book of Wisdom - "The souls of the just are in the hand of God." Those merciful hands of God who created my parents, sustained them with a trusting faith through hard times and final illnesses and now is showering mercy and love on them - "The souls of the just are in the hand of God."

For many it is a struggle to both believe in God and to believe in life after death. We are dependent on our senses to understand. That is our nature. We draw life through our physical senses, from what we can see, feel, touch, taste, and smell. When we try to imagine anything, the pictures we draw are based upon what we have experienced through our senses. And so it is hard for us to imagine and believe in a reality that is totally beyond our present one. Our imaginations simply run dry.

We can imagine death because it is physical. We have seen it, felt its bitterness, but we can't imagine what life looks like beyond death. And yet that is what we are asked to do, imagine life after death, imagine the unimaginable, picture what cannot be pictured, and put your faith in something that goes beyond what our minds can think. How do we do that?

The thought of a baby in the womb can be helpful: Imagine you could talk to a baby in the womb. Having never seen the light of this world, knowing only the confines and securities of the womb, the baby would, I suspect, be rather skeptical of your story of the existence of a world beyond the womb. You would be hard pressed to convince it to believe both that outside of its mother's womb there exists a world infinitely larger than what it is presently experiencing and that it is to its advantage to be born into that immense world.

On the basis of everything it has experienced, the baby simply lacks the tools to imagine the world of which you are speaking. Unable to picture that world, it would have difficulty in believing in it and would struggle to let go of the world it knows, the womb. If a baby in the womb possessed self-awareness, it would have to make a real act of faith to believe in life after birth. It would surely fear birth as much as we fear death. In our fear of death we are not unlike babies in the womb fearing birth. This world, for all of its immensity and for all it offers, is just another womb, bigger than our mother's womb, but ultimately still small and constricting in terms of its potential to offer full and eternal life.

And like babies in the womb, it is virtually impossible for us to imagine life beyond our present experience. And so we clutch on to what we know, to what gives us life, our umbilical cord, our present life and its routines, and we fear everything that might loosen our grip on that. We fear life after death in the same way as a baby fears life after birth. That is because our situations are basically the same. We are still in a womb, still being gestated, except now we call it aging. A new pelvic thrust, death, will awaken, in the deep dark recesses of our minds and bodies, the memory of just such a push many years earlier. And, as years earlier, a dim passage will promise a new world and, just as the first time, we won't have much say in the matter. We will have to trust that being born is what is best for us.

To my mind, there are few things as helpful in understanding death as is the analogy of birth, except that it is not an analogy. Seen through the eyes of faith, death is not LIKE a birth, it is a birth. We are initially born from our mothers' wombs, into a seemingly large world, which for a time leaves us literally speechless. However, this seemingly immense world is, itself, limited and basically just another womb within which we are again being gestated and readied for birth into an even larger world which, I suspect will, in its magnitude and beauty, leave us speechless again. And, just as initially we had to first be born before we could see our own mothers, so too we must first die, be born again, before we can see our true mother, God. After this second birth, just as after the first, we will lie open mouthed and awe-struck before a beauty, magnitude and love that we had never imagined. Birth and death require the same act of faith, a trust that a fuller life and a more meaningful contact with the mother awaits us beyond the womb.