AN OPEN DOOR
We’re too trapped by the «here and now» to be concerned about the «way beyond». We submit to a rhythm of life that disturbs and enslaves us, we’re bored by a barrage of information from news and daily happenings, we’re fascinated by a thousand attractions that technologic development puts in our hands – it doesn’t seem as if we need a wider horizon than «this life» in which we move.
Why think about «the other life»? Isn’t it better to spend all our energies in organizing our existence in this world the best way we can? Shouldn’t we expend ourselves totally to live this life of today and be quiet in regards to everything else? Isn’t it better to accept life with its obscurity and enigmas, and leave «the beyond» to a mystery of which we know nothing?
However modern man, just like people of all epochs, knows that in the depth of his being there always remains the question that’s more serious and more difficult to answer: what’s going to happen to us all and to each one of us? Whatever our ideology or our faith, the true problem we’re all confronted with is our future. What end awaits us?
Peter Berger has reminded us with profound realism that «all human society is, in its last resort, a collection of people facing death». That’s why it’s precisely in the face of death that «the truth» of modern civilization appears most clearly – a civilization that curiously doesn’t know what to do with death except hide it and escape its tragic challenge to the max.
More honest is the posture of people like Eduardo Chillida who on one occasion expressed himself in these terms: «Concerning death, reason tells me that it’s definitive. Concerning reason, reason tells me that it is limited».
It’s here that we need to situate the posture of the believer, who know how to confront realistically and modestly the inescapable fact of death, but to do it from a radical trust in the Resurrected Christ. A trust that can be understood with difficulty “from beyond” and which can only be lived out by one who has listened, somewhere along the line, in the depth of our being, to Jesus’ words: «I am the resurrection and the life». Do your believe this?
Jose Antonio Pagola
Translator: Fr. Jay VonHandorf
