The Only Way out of Life Is to Die

Gloomy words, eh?

At Mass yesterday, that was Father’s thesis.  And yet, he said, in the many times he had asked congregations if they were “ready to go today,” no more than a few people ever raised their hands.  (Thankfully, Father did not try the experiment in this homily.)  And he went on to suggest that part of the reason for people’s reluctance to die is their attachment to human goods.

I would be the last person to deny that a desire to enjoy life could be an obstacle to spiritual readiness.  And yet, I think there may be other reasons for failing to raise one’s hand when a preacher asks “Are you ready to go?”  First and foremost, perhaps, is a feeling that most regular churchgoers (at least churchgoing Catholics) have: the feeling that they are not in fact ready, that there is a good deal of purification left to endure.  If “to go” meant simply “to see God,” I doubt many hands would stay down.  But when “to go” means more purgation of the sort that can more easily be acquired on earth … the choice is perhaps less obvious.  So in a sense, it is their attachment to human goods, or at any rate their awareness of it, that makes people (not wrongly) reluctant to die.

Of course, “ready or not,” the answer should still be “Whenever God wants me.”  I am reluctant to imagine that He does anything deleterious to individual salvations; and the soul that has a long purgatory is perhaps saved from a longer one by dying sooner.  Regardless, it is good to realize that there is a tension between what God might want and what one feels advisable, for that leads to realization that there is a good deal of detaching left to do, a good deal of dying before one can die properly.  In a very real sense, the only way into life is to die before you’re dead.