Thoughts on Death from St. Francis de Sales and Karl Rahner, SJ
In his homily for
Fr. Dan Gambet, OSFS' [2nd President of Allentown College of St.
Francis de Sales/de Sales University] Funeral, Father Lewis Fiorelli, OSFS shared a powerful insight on death from Karl Rahner, “I love what the late Jesuit
theologian, Karl Rahner, writes about those who go before us in death. His words speak beautifully of what our faith
tells us about believers when they pass through the door of death to what St.
Jane de Chantal describes as “a blessed eternity.”
Rahner writes: "The
great mistake of many people, even pious persons, is to imagine that those whom
death has taken leave us. They do not leave us. They remain! Where are they? In
the darkness? Oh, no! It is WE who are in darkness. We do not see them, but
they see us. Their eyes, radiant with glory, are fixed upon our eyes filled
with tears. Oh, infinite consolation! Though invisible to us, our dead are not
absent.
I have often
reflected upon the surest comfort for those who mourn. It is this: a firm faith
in the real and continual presence of our loved ones; it is the clear and
penetrating conviction that death has not destroyed them, nor carried them
away.
They are not even
absent, but living near to us, transfigured: having lost, in their glorious
change, no delicacy of their souls, no tenderness of their affection. On the contrary,
they have, in depth and in fervor of devotion, grown larger a hundredfold. Death is, for the good, a translation into
light, into power, into love. Those who on earth were only ordinary Christians
become perfect. Those who were good become sublime.”
St. Francis de Sales offers us these words about death, “The distance from Heaven to Earth cannot
separate hearts that God has united.”
And "Let God gather to Himself what He has planted in His
garden. He takes nothing out of
season."
Death leads us to
the “land of the living” [St. Augustine’s phrase], where every tear is wiped
away, every cross removed, every burden ended, and every joy unending.
May God Be Praised!
