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!
No comments:
Post a Comment