Jesus taught us that "The Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed ...."
And Pope Francis said, “Death does not have the last word: love is stronger than death.”
Jesus promises us that one day all tears and sadness will be wiped away and sadness will be no more. The late Jesuit theologian, Karl Rahner, wrote beautifully of what our faith tells us about believers when they pass through the door of death: "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.”
May God Be Praised.
The art work above is by Kelly Latimore, you can find her work at https://kellylatimoreicons.com/
