Death as a passage - Easter
From the point of view of our faith, we should not use the word death as if it were a final destiny. The deceased are the dead; deceased means gone, finished, the end. This however is not true in the context of our faith.
In this context, death is not the last thing that happens to us, but the second to the last. Death is more a stage of growth, the passage from a spatiotemporal life to an eternal life beyond space and time. We believe there is life beyond space and time because God our creator of space and time and lord of life is himself spaceless and timeless.
Even in nature death is never a definitive state, but a passage from one form of life to another. According to Lavoisier, in nature nothing is created, nothing is destroyed, everything is transformed. The death of one living being always gives rise to the life of another. Life is a perpetual circle of living and dying, because life feeds on life, every living being is the food for another living being.
The grass that rises from the soil dies between the teeth of the gazelle that feeds on it. The grass does not die, it is transformed into the gazelle, which then become a lion, and when this dies, it is eaten by vultures and hyenas, which then give life to countless worms, which in dying, fertilize the soil that gives rise to new grass and so the cycle repeats itself.
Death is not a state, but a passage. Those who have near-death experiences speak often of a tunnel and a light at the end of this tunnel. The same happens when we are born: there is a tunnel and there is a light; in Portuguese to give birth is translated literally as to give light. Our birth can be viewed as our first death, a death to the life we had in our mother's womb. In the same way, our earthly death can be seen as our birth into eternal life, in the bosom of God.
Death is a passage from one form of life to another form of life, from being in the womb attached to our mother by the umbilical cord to coming into the light, breathing for ourselves. Life is a gift from God, it is the air that we inhale through our nostrils that leads us to start living until the day we exhale that air and we return to Him.
The butterfly metaphor
In nature, there are living beings that change form during their lives. The frog is one of them, and the butterfly is another. The change of form also requires a change of environment, both in the case of the frog and in the case of the butterfly. The butterfly is born as a caterpillar that crawls on its belly across the earth, eating leaves until the day it apparently dies.
What seems to be a death is in fact only a change of form which while maintaining some similarities with the previous form, it is also startling different from it. Our life on earth is like that of the caterpillar, and our life in heaven is like that of the butterfly; our physical body is like that of the caterpillar, very attached to the earth, while our spiritual body is like that of the butterfly, freer, flitting from flower to flower.
The caterpillar is a metaphor of our earthly life, of our physical body that is dependent on the earth. Like the caterpillar, we drag our body across the earth, but we are called to a higher life, we are potential butterflies. To become butterflies and realize man's dream of being able to fly, we have to go through a near-death passage. We cannot be a caterpillar and a butterfly simultaneously; to be a butterfly, we have to stop being a caterpillar.
Life as a butterfly is flying on a warm spring day in a sea of different flowers with other butterflies of different colours, through fields, valleys and meadows, in the light of the radiant sun of the early morning hours, this is the life to which we are all called: Heaven.
The water metaphor
Another metaphor that nature gives us that helps to conceptualize Resurrection is the three physical states of water. Water, without ceasing to be what it is, that is, without changing into another compound, exists in nature in three different states that are so distinct from each other that one might even think that they are three different compounds when we compare them to each other.
It comes from the ocean in the form of vapour that cannot be seen. It condenses and falls on the earth, penetrates it and springs up, forming rivulets, streams and rivers. It is buried and springs up again, flowing and forming rivers, giving life along its way, until it returns to the sea.
Instead of rain, it can fall in the form of snow; at zero degrees Celsius, it freezes, becoming hard as a rock; at 100 degrees Celsius, it boils and evaporates and, without ceasing to be what it is,comes into existence in the gaseous state, invisible to our eyes and intangible to our touch. We can see and touch it again if it condenses on a surface colder than the air temperature.
If water, without ceasing to be what it is, can exist in an invisible and intangible form, we could say almost in a spiritual form, how can we who have a body that is made up of 70% of this element not be able to also exist invisibly and intangibly?
The 12 physical bodies of our life
The first living being that inhabited this planet was a single-celled being; there are still living beings that are single-celled, like the amoeba. The ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis, that is, the millions of years of the history of life on this planet recapitulates or repeats itself abbreviated in the individual history of every human being who comes into this world.
We too were once a single-celled being that was formed by a half-cell from our father, the sperm, and a half-cell from our mother, the egg. The two joined and we were formed, a human cell with a unique genetic code in the history of mankind; in a comparatively short time, this cell subdivided into other cells to form an adult human body consisting of 30 trillion cells.
Each one of our cells follows the general law that governs life on this planet: to be born, to grow, to reproduce and to die. This explains the growth and the aging of our body. In fact, with the exception of our brain cells, the neurons, all others follow this general rule – we can say that every 7 years we change, every 7 years we have a biologically different body.
Within an average lifespan of 85 years, we have 12 different bodies. With which of these 12 bodies would we be resurrected? With none of them, because it is not the physical body that resurrects, but rather the spiritual body which is a synthesis of all of them, but none of them in particular.
What is the spiritual body?
For 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. For in this tent we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling – if indeed, when we have taken it off we will not be found naked. 2 Corinthians 5:1-3
Putting it simply and bluntly, our spiritual body in heaven is made up of all the treasures that we accumulate throughout our life here, (Matthew 6:19-34). These treasures, these spiritual goods, which at the end of our lives form a body that is our history, are the good works, or what we have managed to spiritualize with our material resources and our spiritual talents.
People say that those who give to the poor lend to God, that is, the money or any temporal material good, when it is used for a spiritual purpose, becomes an eternal good, that is, it becomes spiritualized or an accumulated treasure in Heaven.
Using a metaphor that we all understand, our life is like a distillery. Distillation is a process by which material goods are evaporated by boiling, thereby removing their essence. To obtain the essence of a perfume, for instance, it is necessary to distill tons of a particular flower, thus acquiring a few drops of its essence. Alcohol resulting from the distillation of grapes or barley is called "spirit", whisky and brandy or cognac are thus called because they result from the distillation process.
This is a story about a woman who was accustomed to all the luxuries and flattery that this world can give because she was rich and famous. She died one day and when she reached heaven, St. Peter took her by the hand to lead her to her heavenly dwelling.
As they passed by many charming Beverly Hills-style mansions, the woman thought that she would be assigned to one of these. But they continued, reaching the suburbs and the high-rise buildings with apartments and she thought, "Well, it'll be at least one of those," but no...
Then they arrived at the slums of Heaven and St. Peter showed her a hut made of cardboard and tin. "This is your home," said St. Peter. "What?" said the woman, "that? I can't live in this dump!” "I'm sorry," St. Peter said, “but this is all we were able to build for you with the materials that you sent to us during your lifetime."
It seems to me that the more mysteries of nature science unravels, the easier it becomes to believe in a God who has made everything, and in a life beyond death. In the context of Newton's mechanistic physics, where matter is matter and energy is energy, it was hard to believe in the Resurrection.
With Einstein’s quantum physics, where matter and energy are one and the same thing, that is, that matter can become energy and energy can become matter, it is much easier to believe that our material physical body can become an energized spiritual body.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
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