At the Hour of Our Death: Receiving the Gift of Eternal Life

By Jean-Miguel Garrigues

In this series of beautiful and accessible meditations, Fr. Jean-Miguel Garrigues examines death and eternal life in the light of Christian revelation. His work is the fruit of years of sustained theological reflection, as well as his own experience accompanying terminally ill cancer patients as a hospital chaplain.

At the Hour of Our Death nourishes the vitally important theological virtue of hope. It encourages us to accompany the dying with compassion, love, and prayer, to live in communion with the saints of heaven and the holy souls of purgatory, and to wisely and serenely prepare ourselves for the day when we, too, will be called to accomplish, in the company of Jesus, the great Passover from this life to the house of our heavenly Father.

The worldwide pandemic has brought end-of-life issues closer to many people than ever before. Fr. Jean Miguel's insights, lucidly rendered into English by Fr. Gregory Casprini, will serve as a help and consolation to many, strengthening their faith and encouraging them to pray for and accompany others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Oct 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781666717976

Book preview

1

Faith in the Face of Our Condition as Mortals

Dare We Speak of Death from the Vantage Point of the Faith?

Death concerns us all: we are all mortal, we are all confronted with the mystery of our own death and the death of others, and we can never really separate these two aspects. Paradoxically, no one, or hardly any one, speaks about death any more from an authentically Christian viewpoint. Even in funeral sermons, priests tend to eulogize the past life of the deceased person in an almost pagan manner while avoiding placing the assembly in front of the mystery of death.

One of the great shortcomings of present-day catechesis, understood in the broadest sense as the preaching of the church, is the failure to confront the mystery of death head on. This evasion is a relatively recent phenomenon. The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, which for centuries helped to form the spiritual life of a great many Catholics, begins by asking the believers to meditate on death and by inviting them to contemplate the mystery of their own death. This sometimes led to certain excesses. It is said that in one house where the spiritual exercises were given, the retreat began in front of a catafalque draped in black! This evokes a vision of death bequeathed to us by the nineteenth century, with black catafalques, horses draped in black, hearses, black shrouds adorned with tears, and silver bones: a vision full of pathos but having very little to do with Christianity.

It is difficult to find the right words when talking about death, and although our faith provides us with much enlightenment, we continue to stand before the mystery of death as if we were confronting an enigma. I have been surprised sometimes when talking with those who have recently lost someone dear to them, to find that even very genuine believers can react to death almost like pagans. All of a sudden one encounters a kind of skepticism, as if faith had nothing to teach us concerning death, and therefore about the afterlife—since for believers, death is the passage into the afterlife. I have been appalled to see how, around a person who is dying, fervent believers sometimes react with panic in a totally pagan manner, as if suddenly, in the face of death, their faith has been put on hold.

Christians today do not speak of death anymore; at best they speak of the resurrection as a very distant reality. Otherwise they talk about sickness, decrepitude, or the fact that someone is coming to the end of his days. But one hardly ever hears people speaking anymore about the act of death itself, of death as a transition, as a passage, an access.

It is with the eyes of faith that I will try to consider here the mystery of death, seeing it as an access to eternal life but also as our way of receiving eternal life. We often think of death as an enigmatic passage, beyond which, we are willing to hope, eternal life is found. I, on the contrary, would like to maintain that death itself, considered in various ways, is the reception of eternal life.

There is not death and then eternal life. Death itself is an anticipation, a beginning, and therefore a welcoming of eternal life. I am fond of these words of Saint Teresa of Ávila: We do not die of death, we die of life; that is to say, we die because eternal life bursts in upon us, and at the same time puts an end to our mortal existence. This may seem like a scandalous paradox to many, because what we see first in a being who is dying is the end of his earthly existence. We are witnessing the end or conclusion of a certain regime or mode of life. But in this conclusion, the eyes of faith can already discern the presence of eternal life—not on the other side, but on this side of death. In fact, our life itself leads us to death because our mortal life is made to welcome eternal life. Our life in this world is already drawn towards eternal life, and this intimate inclination finally increases to the breaking point when our temporal life falls into eternal life.

Listening to Saint Thérèse, the Little Flower

In this meditation we will seek the help of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, the little flower, who can perhaps be considered the great patron saint of death for our time. She died young, after a very long agony. For months she could see death coming. She left us a notebook containing her last words, now published under the title Entering into Life.

Two short sayings will guide this meditation. When Thérèse was asked, What will you die from? She answered: I will die of death. At first glance this seems to be a tautology, a truism. But it really takes a great deal of faith to speak in this way. True, we are led to death’s door by many things—illnesses, accidents—and we are driven to death by various factors, but in the final analysis, we die only from death. Death is an inexplicable mystery that cannot be reduced to mere physical degradation, and that cannot be identified with the various elements that precede and prepare it.

Another saying of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux illuminates this first affirmation: I am not dying, I am entering life. This phrase apparently contradicts the previous statement. But Thérèse maintains that our death itself is already an entrance into eternal life and that such is, in fact, the mystery of death. This mystery implies that we are invaded by eternal life. Such is the life that Thérèse has in mind when she says, I am entering into life.

Death always implies a mystery of freedom: God’s freedom in coming to us, but also our freedom in welcoming God. Death is an encounter between two persons who are free. As soon as we grasp this fact, we are liberated from a fatalistic, pagan fear of death. It is quite normal for us to be fearful of the sufferings, the illnesses, or the accidents that prepare death. But when we understand that the hour of our death is an encounter—I would even go so far as to say an encounter of love between God and us—we open our hearts to the true mystery of death. Our death is a free decision on the part of God, even if the Lord makes use of secondary causes so that, from a human point of view, it is a combination of circumstances that brings us, through an illness or an accident, to the end of our bodily life. In reality, God governs these secondary causes without falsifying them. He knows them in the eternal present of his transcendence and they are in his hands. The design of love that he has for us, the word of love that he has for us, passes through these secondary causes in such a way that even through our illness, even through our agony, the moment of death remains the mystery of a free divine decision and a free human