Death does not exist

Father, there's something I don't understand: when I die, my body goes to earth, my soul goes to heaven, and what about me? Where will I go?

Death shouldn't concern us because we will never coincide; as long as we exist, it won't exist; when it exists, we won't exist.   Karl Marx

As Lavoisier’s law says, in nature nothing is lost, everything is transformed. In continuous transformation, nothing stays the same. Death and life are part of the same process, there is no life without death or death without life. Death is not a state in which a living being can be found, but the passage from one form of life to another. Death is a means by which life diversifies and progresses in the evolution of the species.

The green grass in the fields grows until the day the gazelle eats it; the grass has not died, it has progressed and changed form, it has become a gazelle. The gazelle leaps and jumps through the ravines, drinks water from the streams, and wanders through the woods until the day it is eaten by the lion; it has not died, it has been absorbed and assumed by the lion’s body.

As the lion has no predators, it dies of old age or in a fight for male supremacy, its mortal remains are eaten by hyenas and vultures, and what is left is eaten by ants and worms which, in turn, when they die, fertilize the earth where the grass grows again.

On the surface, life is as good as death because neither remains, one follows the other unceasingly.  However, if we take a closer look, we realize that this is not the case.  Although they are two parts or stages of the same process, life and death are not on equal footing; on the contrary, life is on a higher plane because it does not exist for the sake of death, but death does exist for the sake of life.

Therefore, it is not true what the philosopher Heidegger says: "We are a being made for death". The grass lived for months before it died; similarly, the gazelle and the lion lived for years before they died; death was a moment, while life was for years; death was a passage while life is a constant; we are therefore a being made for life.

The same life-death-life process that happens between living beings in the food chain, happens inside every living being. Our body is made up of around 30 trillion cells; each of them behaves as if it were a living being following the rules that govern life on this planet. In other words, they are born, they grow, they reproduce, and they die (interestingly, only cancer cells refuse to die); this is how we explain the growth, transformation and ageing of our body; every 7 years we have biologically a new body.

Psychological maturity, which according to Freud takes place in the transition from the pleasure principle to the reality principle, also implies and presupposes death. The same can be said for spiritual maturity: "For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it" (Luke 9:24)

Just as the lion, which has no predators, is at the top of its food chain and is king of the jungle, Man is king of creation.  Easter means passage; our death or our Easter is like that of Christ. The passage from temporal-spatial form of life to a life in God’s eternity, in which we will not only be a soul but, like Christ, we will possess a spiritual body, a glorious body.

For this reason, we do not lose heart, because "we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens" (2 Corinthians 5:1).

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC