It’s quite fitting that there is a cemetery on the grounds of Oscott College in which thousands of people, bishops, priests and laypeople, are buried. Death and dying are part of the daily life of priestly ministry and there is no harm for seminarians in being reminded of the reality of their future priestly lives, as well as their life to come after death.
One issue that perhaps comes with the clergy facing and with dealing with so much death is that it’s possible for them to get used to it, to take it for granted, to start to lose a sense of the awesomeness of it.
Death is truly awesome, for Christians and for non-Christians.
We all know people who have died and even hope in the resurrection doesn’t remove the natural blow that death delivers to those who are left behind. However, that doesn’t make hope in the resurrection any less real.
Sadly, the resurrection of the dead is one of those areas of the faith which many Catholics find quite confusing. Do we really still believe in that? If our souls go to Heaven immediately when we die, why do our bodies need to be resurrected? And yet, the constant tradition and teaching of the Church is clear and we proclaim it every week at Mass in the creed: we believe in ‘the resurrection of the body.’ The Lord will come again for a final judgment during which all of the dead will be resurrected.
For the majority of the Church’s history, the Christian practice has been to bury the dead as a sign of this teaching. Even today, now that cremation is permitted and commonly practised, the Church still asks that the faithful departed’s ashes be buried and not scattered as though they were entering oblivion.
In the same way, the veneration of the relics of martyrs and saints since the first days of Christianity gives witness to the truth that death is not the end of the story for our mortal bodies. The bodies of the dead are not only holy for what they once were, namely, temples of the Holy Spirit, but also for what they shall be in the future.
When the Lord rose from the dead, he rose with a real yet glorified body.
His tomb was empty, Thomas put his fingers in his wounds and he even ate and drank. When he ascended into heaven he took that glorified body with him. In a similar way, the Blessed Virgin Mary, just as she had been united to the Lord so perfectly in his life, suffering and death, was uniquely blessed to share in his glorious resurrection and ascension immediately at the end of her earthly life.
Let’s have no hesitation in saying that where Jesus has made a way and where Mary has followed, there we too are called to follow. We might not know how it’s possible, but we do know that, “nothing is impossible to God” (Luke 1:37). We might not know all the details of how it will look, “but we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is” (1 John 3: 2).
Death might be awesome but what comes after is so much more!