After

After death it is LOVE itself that will greet us…

Immaculate Conception (Peter Paul Rubens)

Recently, someone very young and very close to me and people within my family, passed away.

I think that it is one thing to farewell people who are older and who have lived long lives, and quite another to bid farewell to someone who is close in age to you and whose life was cut short.  I is a different sort of confrontation to see a younger person struggle to continue on with the life that they had built for themselves and the plans that they had made in the face of a dreadful diagnosis, like terminal cancer.  It is a very moving experience to consider their suffering and compare it to your relative lack of suffering and to consider that all of the trials and tribulations that had previously concerned me are as nothing in the face of eternity and judgement…

And when I stop and reflect on the death of this dear soul, I consider when he must have seen on the other side…  For after death it is LOVE itself that will greet us…

“How marvellous it will be when we hear Our Father tell us, ‘Well done, my good and faithful servant, because you have been faithful over a few things, I will set you over many; enter into the joy of your Lord!’ (Matthew 25:21). Let us be full of hope! This is the great thing about being a contemplative soul. We live by Faith, Hope and Love, and Hope makes us powerful. Do you remember what St John says? ‘I am writing to you, young men, because you are strong and the word of God abides in you, and you have conquered the evil one.’ (1 John 2:14). God is urging us on, for the sake of the eternal youthfulness of the Church and of all mankind. You have the power to transform everything human into something divine, just as King Midas turned everything he touched into gold!”

And we use this Earthly life for work.  Just as Christ did.  It is used to prepare for Our Blessed Lord in Heaven.  And this is why – for twenty centuries – the Blessed Eucharist has existed so that Christ can wait for us, to share in our work on this Earth in preparation for Heaven.  “God has decided to stay in the tabernacle to nourish us, strengthen us, make us divine and give effectiveness to our work and efforts. Jesus is at one and the same time the sower, the seed and the final result of the sowing: the bread of eternal life...” (Saint Josemaria, “Christ is passing by”, page 151).

And when I think about what comes after – and the GREAT LOVE that awaits us all – I am overcome.  For there is such evidence of that love here on Earth.  God – despite all my sins – waits inside a little piece of bread, inside a dark little box inside an empty little church, for a miserable soul like mine to walk in, genuflect make the sign of the Cross and walk out – as though I am greeting a dishcloth and not the Lord of the Universe.

How much love there is in that…

For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.