The
Power of The Resurrection
“His Love is the foundation of our
eternity. One whom God loves never passes away. It is not just a shadow of
ourselves that lives on in Him, in His thought, and in His Love; rather, it is
in Him, in His creative Love, that we are preserved forever immortal in the
totality and truth of our being. It is His Love that makes us immortal, and
this immortality, this abiding Love, is what we call “Heaven”’.
-
Pope Benedict XVI
In
Jesus life does not end and death does not end it. In our holy communion with
Christ life is changed, not taken away, and death becomes the door, the conduit,
the portal to Eternal Life in God. Death is a gateway through which one leaves
the womb of time and enters a world beyond our own. At death the person in
Jesus is born again, born anew, and enters into the fullness of His Life.
No,
death does not end life. It is simply that all-important point of transition
which initiates and ushers in the fullness of intercourse with God – a oneness
with God which participates in that of Jesus with the Father, and parallels the
oneness of the Father with the Spirit of His Son; a oneness with the Lord that
transforms us, transfigures us, fulfills us, and makes us complete, whole, even
Holy.
Granted
there is at death an end of our earthly life, but only because it is the end of
our engagement with God and the beginning of our marriage to the "Lamb of God". Yes
there is at death an end of earthly life, but only because in Christ it is the
moment where the totality of Life begins, the moment where one enters into the
fullness of Divine Union, where the marriage to the Bridegroom is consummated,
where a sacred communion commences that consecrates us and perfects us, a holy
communion that satisfies the deepest yearnings of human heart for the fullness
of its dignity as a child of God. It is a sacred communion therefore that gives
Joy to the Father, a communion that fills us with His Joy and completes our
own. Truly then, in that place just beyond the point of death, we realize in
the totality of the God’s loving embrace that we have reached the Day of the
Lord, the Day which brought Him to the Cross, the Day for which He has paid the
price and for which He yearns with all the Love of His Sacred Heart, that Day
when “…you will be with Me in Paradise.”
