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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

There are Shadows – but Greater Lights – in the Christian’s Death

There are Shadows – but Greater Lights – in the Christian’s Death

Though a desire for death that springs from life-weariness is (if we entertain it deliberately) a moral fault, there is a Christian desire for death which is wholly laudable, since it comes from our hope to be united with God. In page 444 practice, of course, the two attitudes will tend to be intermingled.

An old person who feels alone in the world, and who is suffering many physical and mental pains and limitations, may well desire to die, chiefly to be free of certain burdens, but also with a firm hope that he or she will be joined to old friends who have died already and also to God.

It would be a narrow critic who would blame such a person because some life-weariness is mingled with the legitimate Christian hope, or because the natural desire to be with one’s neighbours already dead is mingled with the higher aspiration towards the Beatific Vision.

I think all people desire death, whether or not they recognise the fact, and this is largely because of the decay of natural hope. The hope of a good meal is nothing to a man who no longer has a good digestion. The hope of sexual love will become at most a small side-issue to a woman who has been coping for many years with a painfully difficult marriage. The hope (I speak now a little nearer home) of getting a new book published means little when the writer has learnt a wise doubt of the ultimate value of his literary efforts.

Yet men and women are born to hope. Without hope we are like houses in which all the lights have been turned out. And as natural hope fades, so supernatural hope becomes pre-eminent, and death, which was once dreadful to our imagination, becomes the door of possible liberation into the life of God which is also our own true and real life.

Yet though men desire death, they also continue to fear it. No man alive truly knows what death is. We may have ministered at a thousand deathbeds, and still the mystery remains – what is this separation of soul and body? How can the personality both come to an end, by something resembling annihilation, yet survive and flourish again, transplanted into the new gardens of God? And – a source of grief and trouble to many sensitive Christians – how can we be sure that we in fact possess the flame of true charity in our souls, so that death will be an ordeal certainly, but the means of liberation, and not the means of a hideous and final defeat.

I think God gives us lights and intuitions to help us to cope with our natural fears of what is in fact His last and best gift to us. Sometimes we raise our eyes and seem to see for a moment those great mountains and ice-fields of Heaven where the lilies grow which are the faces of the dead who have gone before us; for a moment we seem to see them, pure, austere, lovely, human yet transformed, and an incredible longing seizes the heart to be at one with them, to be free of this life which in comparison to that is a death and a prison.

But the moment passes, and we are left with our Safety First signs, our jobs to do, our dislike for all that might remind us of the doctor or the undertaker. We have returned, in fact, to a wholly natural view of death.

And from the natural angle, death is certainly thoroughly unpleasant, even to some minds horrific. I dislike death thoroughly myself. I dislike page 445 physical pain. I dislike being helpless. I dislike very much the after-effects of the death of the body. I have often more than a touch of panic when I consider that death is not only inevitable – it will also be quite unpredictable, a new thing, a falling away of all natural support, a step in dark into the arms of a God whom I know to be absolutely holy (and thus very unlike me) as well as absolutely loving and merciful. My central fear of death springs from a kind of subconscious fear of the void, of what is wholly unknown and in a sense unknowable.

Yet I believe God may permit imaginative people to trouble themselves somewhat about death as a means of their purification. It is better to fear than to be complacent. Often the work of the Holy Spirit in the soul begins with fear and leads towards calm; whereas the work of the Devil begins with the spurious calmness of complacency and leads towards the bitter pain of moral disorder.

We are not just calculating machines designed either to produce prayers and good works or remain idle. We have the human depth that resembles by analogy the abyss of God’s own Nature. And in those depths the Spirit moves, first troubling us, then bringing us His joyful calm. Without ordeals we could not grow into maturity.

But we mere human beings are not left alone face to face with the Trinity. The Bridegroom whom we wait to meet is certainly Divine; but He is also human like ourselves. And when we die, His Mother and our Mother will be there as a midwife for the soul being born into the life of Heaven.

She was present at the death of her husband Joseph. She was present at the cruel death of her Divine Son on the Cross. And when each of us is placed on the smaller cross of our particular death she will be there, with her eyes fixed on our face, giving us the graces that we need.

She too died; since it was not suitable that she should not go through the same door as her Son. Our Lord and Our Lady have gone through that door before us: in a sense they have become for us the door itself, changing the negative sign of pain and grief and corruption to a sign of joy and eternal love.

When I die, I trust I will be able to offer my death into the hands of my Mother, saying perhaps only her name – ‘Mary’. For where she is, Heaven also is; and she does not desert her children, but covers their weakness with the mantle of her prayer, and will bring us where we desire to be. Even now we can be happy, knowing that it will be so.

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