My heart was racing as I made my way down the stairs. I knew I had to call the ambulance. In the muddled haze of thoughts, I made my way into the dining room. I got a piece of paper. It was crumpled around the edges. My heart rate wouldn’t go down. I took out a pencil and I wrote down some things that I would miss about my life. Something had clearly gone wrong with my runaway heartbeat, and it was strange to know that today was the day I would die. I began to write. I remember the pencil marks as a weak, hollow gray, that barely marked the page. Some hopes, some regrets, somehow, I was half-blinded to the hope that maybe, the doctors could do something for me. Maybe my heart would again beat with ease. It was true. I didn’t die that day. But someday, I am going to die. Someday there won’t be another chance. Someday, you will die too.
It is something we all must experience, but something that is often met with a half-angry, half-dismissive “Oh, don’t think about it!” as if this ultimate concern doesn’t matter. And that is maybe the problem. Maybe one reason people don’t like to think about death is not because it doesn’t matter, but because we don’t have good reasons why life matters, if, in the end, we die. But the fact remains, you and I will one day experience death. At the end of the day, maybe we are totally isolated from each other, doomed to separateness. At the end of the day, maybe we are forced to try to impose meaning on the meaningless world into which we have been tossed. When the dusk comes, we have to look back at the terrible responsibility for how we spent that time that slips through our fingers, quicker than water or sand. And then there is death. All the effort, all the close escapes. The long safety, or the long danger of daily life, and then, cornered at the end, bereft of all physical safety. The threat after all, was in our very bones. And, when night of death falls, is there dreamless sleep, or are there dreams. Nightmares? Will we ever awake? And to what kind of morning? Wishful thinking doesn’t make it so.
But from what roots spring the wishes of our hearts? What do we really wish for? What do we really fear? You don’t want to believe in lies. You don’t want to believe in wishful thinking. No one consciously wants to be deceived, but all of us secretly just want the world to be the way we want it to be. Mostly we are all looking for comfort. That is an accusation that we can all admit to. Whether we are scrolling through our phones rather than facing a painful feeling, whether we are trying to distract ourselves in different ways from some pain we’ve caused, we are all running from something. We run from death, we run from guilt, we run from meaninglessness, and we try to run from isolation.
But we can’t get away. Now it has us, until we look away again. But if we realize that we often run away toward some mind-numbing comfort, what do we seek? When things hurt, we often seek anesthesia. We seek oblivion. Some find it in the bottle. Some find it in TV. Some in the frenzy of work. Numb. That’s often what we want. A dark place. A place to hide. Crawl back into the nice warm womb. Seal us up in the stone-cold tomb. When I was a baby, I used to fall asleep after every terrifying visit to the doctor. Sleep. Block it out. Go to nothing. That was my defense. We all know that some people don’t want to take responsibility for their actions. We all know people, who seem to be living lives that are about something that we know is just a passing thing. If we’re honest, we’ll find a bit of that in ourselves. Maybe more than a bit. But what if that desire to go to sleep, that desire for oblivion, that desire for numbness, what if that drives people to secretly wish that death was the end? On some level, for some people, that would actually be preferable to a world of ultimate meaning and ultimate responsibility, in which death wasn’t the end.
The ideas of heaven and of resurrection could fulfill our wishes, and so can the idea of not existing at all. They just do it in different ways. Heaven dulls the sting of death, and resurrection could break its dread entirely. Heaven could be a place where we are forgiven. But if death is really just nothing, like dreamless sleep, we could find a kind of comfort in that instead. That too can, in a sense, forgive. It can blot out everything. It kills the problem of meaninglessness, since even that doesn’t matter. It can free us from accountability, and maybe in a seemingly more efficient way than heaven. Heaven has accountability, because heaven means hell is also possible. And we know we are guilty; we know we are responsible. We know we’ve done things wrong, by our own standards, let alone divine standards. We know people have been hurt by what we’ve done. We’ve even been hurt. Maybe it would be better to sleep without dreams. Maybe it would be better if death wiped it all out. Maybe that dark black ink of death will cover all the scuffs, all the scrapes, and all the filth in one creeping darkness.
This seems scientific, to think that death is the end. Science would really admit that it knows nothing about the conscious experience of death. There is a lot of research on near-death experiences, and whatever they are, they happen. However, this doesn’t tell us about death, but near-death. But at least, thinking death is a nothingness takes the mystery out of it. We don’t really like mystery, because that’s really uncertainty. Some people like mystery novels in which we wonder who the killer is, but few people go through life, simply fascinated with what will kill them in the end. We like even less to think about what death is anyway. So, we find at least a working answer to the questions of death.
With regard to the answer to death, we fall into two camps, those who embrace the science fiction that we will cease to be, and those who embrace the fantasy that we will continue. The question is whether science fiction or fantasy corresponds to reality, not whether our accounts are well-written. There are dull and exciting works in both genres. You undoubtedly have your favorites. Whether we are writers or not, there is a limited sense in which we are the authors of our lives, and a limited sense in which we too write the backstory. Our lives happen in a context. Sometimes the context can be elegantly thought out in an epic backstory, or it can just be a set of unquestioned assumptions. But we all live by myths. Evolution and creation, progress and redemption are, in a way, all myths. A myth just means it is a life-guiding fiction. The question is which fiction is true. Some of these fictions are lies. Some fictions are real truths. Some of the things actually happened. And some of them didn’t. But we spend our lives either living a lie or living a truth.
It was cold this year at Easter, the winter still holding on with a bite for a day or two. But there were also flowers. The question is whether Easter is just the passing high of the return of spring and a few candies hidden in plastic eggs. Or if there is something really pregnant in it, something that really gives life. Does the promise of a spring day, the lift of the spirit in the warm air, and at the return of light and warmth and flowers mean anything? St. Francis of Assisi is loved by almost all, religious or not and is associated with the beauty of nature. There is something about him, whether it is the romance of leaving behind worldly goods, whether it is love for the poor or needy, or whether it is a sense of praise for the gift of nature, which seems to capture the hearts of all, regardless of whether they are interested in religion or not. There is something romantic about him that is understandable. What was on his hands might not be.
For it is said that eventually, on his hands, he bore wounds. He bore wounds that matched those of one in whom he believed. He bore wounds that matched those of the Christ he served. And if his ideals are understandable to all, the miracle is less so. The great question is, what genre of story are we living in, and things like miraculous wounds make us wonder if we are hearing legends or if we have found ourselves in a fantasy. But what if we are not hearing a legend, but history. Much of what we know about history comes from a few sources. We don’t trouble ourselves much about it because little of emotional value for our daily lives rides on the list of emperors of ancient Rome, the Pharaohs of Egypt, or any number of other facts that we take entirely as truth. But the Resurrection of Jesus is something that is unbelievable because of how many everyday beliefs and behaviors it would overturn if it were true. It is ironic that even one of the premier atheist scholars still believes in the historical nature of the Resurrection, that at least there was a historical event that the early Christians saw in that way. Another great scholar notes that there are no serious academics who doubt the established historical evidence that there was some sort of Resurrection event, even if they don’t necessarily buy into the idea a Resurrection is what the Church says it is. But we know the tomb was empty. We know how the Christians saw it. And we know they died, not for their beliefs, which is a common occurrence in history, but for their eyewitness testimony.
Sometimes, certain kinds of doubtful thoughts creep into my mind. When they do, they flow like the roaring of waves against great stones on the shoreline. The blast of the foaming waves. And then they recede. Because the rock stands firm in the storm. At the end of the day, the Resurrection is the best explanation for the historical fact of the empty tomb. And this is just the first link in a chain that binds me to belief. If Jesus was raised from the dead, he could send the Holy Spirit down, and if the Holy Spirit could be sent down, the Church could be inspired and guided, if the Church can be guided and the Scriptures inspired, then I can trust them, regardless of my difficulties. We could spend a long time debating each point of this, but when doubts arise, for me they come up against this structure, and the structure holds. But let us look instead of debate.
If you wonder about Resurrection, think of St. Francis, and the wounds that echoed the nails in Christ’s hands and feet. And if we wonder if it is only legend, let us look at the photographs. Let us look at the hands of St. Padre Pio who bore these wounds as well in more modern times. Let us listen to the stories about him. There are many, many miraculous tales. And he was real. The church was suspicious. One high-ranking church official was not impressed, until he came to stay in the friary where St. Pio lived. After hearing the horrible noises of St. Pio wrestling with evil spirits at night, the official decided not to stay much longer. And let us also realize that until this day, the body of St. Padre Pio has not decayed. It remains today for all to see. Let us look at the incorrupt heart of St. John Vianney, who had similar battles with evil. I have seen that with my own eyes. I have also seen a real wound inflicted by demons. If this is not convincing let us point to the healings that surround Lourdes, and the incorrupt body of St. Bernadette who saw the Blessed Virgin there. Let us look at the grand miracle of Fatima, where newspaper reporters came to laugh at the simple people who thought the Virgin Mary would appear, only to be amazed and maybe even fall to their knees with thousands of others as the sun danced in the sky, and great visions appeared above them. There are photos of this day. One who knew the countryside commented on one picture. The sun, they said, is never naturally in that part of the sky. Don’t ask me whether the sun really danced. We are talking about a miracle. This is something out of the ordinary. But we are talking about something seen by people who were hostile to the Church, which they had to acknowledge. Last, let us look at the shroud of Turin, which I’ve heard cannot even be made today through modern technology, which bears the image of a man wracked with pain. It is said that the image was burnt into the cloth by some wild blast of light, some big bang of radiation. Let us see the evidence of a world renewed. Let us see the evidence of resurrection. Let us forget the science fiction, and face the fact of fantasy. For it is true.
And let us realize that the truth opens us up to hope and not to despair. The world of science fiction is the world in which our only hope is death, but the world of fantasy gives us the hope of eternal life. In Michigan was another who wore the habit of St. Francis, Father Solanus Casey. He counseled people of all walks of life, and miraculous cures followed his prayers. But what has impacted my life the most is his teaching of thanking God ahead of time. We can explain this in this way. Our deepest cry is always to our mothers, and in our cry is the trust that our mother will answer. This trust in a parent is the same kind of trust we are to have in our Father in heaven. Fr. Solanus, who has eventually become Blessed Solanus Casey, as he is on the path to sainthood, had a special way of practicing this kind of trust. He would thank God ahead of time. He would joke that this was a way of almost twisting God’s arm, but in the end, it is something that God deserves. He is trustworthy, so he deserves our gratitude for what we hope he will do for us. In the face of failings and despair, this teaching has let me rise again and again with strength of heart. So, thank God ahead of time for all the blessings, graces, mercy, and pardon that we hope he will give. Let us also thank him for whatever he sends. Let it move you to love for him and to repentance. Let it help make you live the real life of Fantasyland.
But if there is the outer resurrection, there is also the inner resurrection. One is rooted in the other. A good eternal life hinges on whether we now enter into the dance of love through prayer and sacrament. When we sin, our souls sustain wounds, some small, and some mortal. In the face of this deadly combat, we need the wisdom of Sr. Consolata Betrone, who was also in the Franciscan family, among the Poor Clare nuns. Jesus taught Sr. Consolata that she should repeat the words “Jesus, Mary, I love You. Save Souls,” as much as possible so that her life became a ceaseless act of love. This is not magic, but a miracle. If we commit a perfect act of love, we rise back to life in God.
Although fantasy, with all its dragons, its giants, its damsels in distress, is a much more dangerous world than we think, love holds it together. And belief in Heaven and Hell, belief in the Resurrection, is, in the final analysis, a facing of a more awe-inspiring reality than believing that death is the end. Faith is innocent of the charge that it is merely a defense mechanism based in wishful thinking. It is the science-fiction view that death is the end which is the lulling opiate of many today, the antidote to accountability. And the science can support the dark magic of the demons, as we look to their effects in exorcisms, and the science can support the light of the miracles in the bodies of saints that do not decay, in Eucharistic hosts that bleed or turn to the tender muscle of the heart. And science can lead us away from science fiction to the truth that not only is the Resurrection is history, but it is a future for us all.
You and I will never be really dead. We will never again cease to exist. You and I are both mortals in that death will need to be faced, but immortals, in that we rise again. We will get our bodies back. Whether that will be good or ill, a final glory or a final shame, the fullness of salvation or damnation, will be determined by whether or not we live with faith, hope and love in the one who died and rose for us. Death is no silent sci-fi nothingness. Your death will be a death in fantasyland, and you will rise again. Happy Easter. Welcome to Fantasyland.