Life as a dress rehearsal
Published Nov 6, 2022 12:05 am
THROUGH UNTRUE
Fr. Rolando V. dela Rosa, O.P.
The recent natural calamities and man-made disasters that claimed many lives reminded us of something we all fear: death.
But how easily do we get over such fear! We have become experts at looking at death as the death of someone else, and never our own. Pictures of bloated and dead bodies hardly linger in our memory. After all, those bodies are not ours. I remember when a strong earthquake ravaged a city in the south, people avoided giant malls fearing these might collapse. But after two weeks, they rushed back to the same malls to shop and watch their favorite movies.
Our contemporary culture offers us many ways to forget the tragic character of death. Funeral parlors and their expert morticians can now prettify corpses so they would look “alive.” Well-maintained memorial parks, elegant crematoria, and columbaria have abolished the smell of decaying bodies, creating the illusion that our dear departed are not really dead; they are merely out of sight. Giant pharmaceuticals also blur our awareness of death by flooding the market with products that delay or hide the ravages of aging or drugs that purportedly cure lethal diseases.
The internet has somehow joined in. Many websites offer entertaining trivia that makes us forget our fear of death. One website gives viewers the exact date of their death. In less than two seconds after you type some data about yourself, it tells you the time, day, month, and year you will die.
Out of curiosity, I keyed in the date of birth of a friend whom I had not seen for a long time. According to the website, my friend was supposed to have died on July 14, 2017! Shocked, I immediately dialed his number to verify, and there he was, talking to me. I closed the website immediately. I did not want to think of my friend as a zombie.
Our tendency to trivialize death has a profound impact on the way we live. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross writes: “It is the denial of death that is partially responsible for people living empty, purposeless lives; for when you live as if you’ll live forever on earth, it becomes easy to postpone the things you must do.”
The gospel reading today features a Jewish religious sect called the Sadducees who believed that there is no other world that awaits us after death. Wanting to disprove the reality of the resurrection, they posed to Jesus this question: If a woman married seven brothers, whose wife would she be at the resurrection? Jesus did not answer their question directly. Instead, he tried to make them realize their flawed way of thinking.
The Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection because they could not envision the future in terms different from what they had been accustomed to. They saw the future from the perspective of sameness — no surprises, no radical change. Their fear of death locked them in a closed world because they had an aversion for the unknown and the unfamiliar. But, as St. Paul wrote, the resurrection is a beautiful possibility: “No eye has seen, nor ear heard what God has prepared for those who love Him” (ICorinthians 2:9).
In the Preface for the Mass for the Dead, we read: “Lord, for your faithful people, life is changed, not ended.” This is echoed by one wise man who said: “We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.”
So, instead of fearing death, and despite the daily dose of pain we experience, we must use every moment to live fully, love intensely, and joyfully embrace the surprises we encounter daily. This way, our life on earth becomes a dress rehearsal for the resurrection.
Fr. Rolando V. dela Rosa, O.P.
The recent natural calamities and man-made disasters that claimed many lives reminded us of something we all fear: death.
But how easily do we get over such fear! We have become experts at looking at death as the death of someone else, and never our own. Pictures of bloated and dead bodies hardly linger in our memory. After all, those bodies are not ours. I remember when a strong earthquake ravaged a city in the south, people avoided giant malls fearing these might collapse. But after two weeks, they rushed back to the same malls to shop and watch their favorite movies.
Our contemporary culture offers us many ways to forget the tragic character of death. Funeral parlors and their expert morticians can now prettify corpses so they would look “alive.” Well-maintained memorial parks, elegant crematoria, and columbaria have abolished the smell of decaying bodies, creating the illusion that our dear departed are not really dead; they are merely out of sight. Giant pharmaceuticals also blur our awareness of death by flooding the market with products that delay or hide the ravages of aging or drugs that purportedly cure lethal diseases.
The internet has somehow joined in. Many websites offer entertaining trivia that makes us forget our fear of death. One website gives viewers the exact date of their death. In less than two seconds after you type some data about yourself, it tells you the time, day, month, and year you will die.
Out of curiosity, I keyed in the date of birth of a friend whom I had not seen for a long time. According to the website, my friend was supposed to have died on July 14, 2017! Shocked, I immediately dialed his number to verify, and there he was, talking to me. I closed the website immediately. I did not want to think of my friend as a zombie.
Our tendency to trivialize death has a profound impact on the way we live. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross writes: “It is the denial of death that is partially responsible for people living empty, purposeless lives; for when you live as if you’ll live forever on earth, it becomes easy to postpone the things you must do.”
The gospel reading today features a Jewish religious sect called the Sadducees who believed that there is no other world that awaits us after death. Wanting to disprove the reality of the resurrection, they posed to Jesus this question: If a woman married seven brothers, whose wife would she be at the resurrection? Jesus did not answer their question directly. Instead, he tried to make them realize their flawed way of thinking.
The Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection because they could not envision the future in terms different from what they had been accustomed to. They saw the future from the perspective of sameness — no surprises, no radical change. Their fear of death locked them in a closed world because they had an aversion for the unknown and the unfamiliar. But, as St. Paul wrote, the resurrection is a beautiful possibility: “No eye has seen, nor ear heard what God has prepared for those who love Him” (ICorinthians 2:9).
In the Preface for the Mass for the Dead, we read: “Lord, for your faithful people, life is changed, not ended.” This is echoed by one wise man who said: “We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.”
So, instead of fearing death, and despite the daily dose of pain we experience, we must use every moment to live fully, love intensely, and joyfully embrace the surprises we encounter daily. This way, our life on earth becomes a dress rehearsal for the resurrection.