32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time
Life After Life
What happens to us when we die? What do you believe about life after death? How does that influence the way you choose to live your life, the decisions you make and the values that you live?
As Catholics, we believe in the resurrection, or life after the present one we are living. The Gospel for this Sunday poses some questions about what that life will be like, the afterlife or resurrected life. Are the two related? Some people believe that happiness is part of resurrected life while our life on earth is filled with trials, tests, suffering, unhappiness, and misery. Heaven then becomes a reward for our long-suffering.
Others believe that we have choices to make about how we live on earth. Heaven is like the eternal promise or a reward. Hell is punishment. Which are we choosing?
According to John Kavanaugh, SJ, there is a third option. I tend to believe what we says:
What if there is no discontinuity between this life and the afterlife? What if there is just life, some of it eternal, some of it temporal? If that is the case, then the way we live now is the way we will always live. How we live is the promise of our destiny.
In this option, God does not threaten us with hell. We fashion it for ourselves by the choices we make: enclosed, egocentric, untrue, uncaring, unloving. That’s a hellishly mean existence, whether in this life or the next.
Thus, as we live and die, so we become eternally, outside the limits of space and time. There may not be marriage in the afterlife, but there is the fulfillment of what we have been becoming.
All of us, from the moment we begin, are endowed with an openness to God. But those of us who live long enough to exercise our freedom actually take part in determining our fate.
Like the Maccabees, we become what we have most loved, most believed, most hoped.
Thus, Lewis’s fascinating parable of The Great Divorce is a story of people confronted with the deepest choices they make. Those who cling to their fears, who hug for dear life their resentments, who refuse to let go of their prisons, can only be given what they endlessly demand.
Those, however, who give their lives in hope and trust, who cast themselves into the arms of the living God, no matter what their shame or sorrow, find what their hearts desired.
They encounter not only the graces of the earth and the faces of the beloved, but also the one in whom they lived, moved, and had their very being.