The Monthly Note
April
«HE HAS RISEN» (Lk 24, 34)
by Jacques Sylvestre, o.p.
The news hadn’t spread like a flash. Even those concerned, the Apostles, dared not believe. It was impossible for them to know, understand and materialize the resurrection. « Some women from our group have astounded us… » the remembered, pouting. On the road to Emmaus, two disciples were walking, taking with them their despair: « three days have now gone by since it all happened…» And Thomas, the disbeliever…Not long ago, the gospel of the Transfiguration ended this way: Coming down the mountain, Peter, James and John « were wondering what on earth "rising from the dead" meant. »
In this 21st century, the question remains the same, except in other words. » Is there life after death? ». Some have written about « Life after life», in terms of illumination, rest and peace…Nothing too specific. These supposed witnesses were they really dead and came back to life? Does that mean that Lazarus’s resurrection occurs on a daily basis?
Since the resurrection of Jesus, no one has ever came back to let us know how it will happen, in what environment and situation we would be in. There is Purgatory and Hell portrayed in terms of eternal fire or temporary. But Heaven! Our brother, Thomas Aquinas, 14th Century Dominican, great theologian before God and the Church, depicted celestial happiness in terms of obsession, of fixed idea. Not of a temporal and mental imbalance that sometimes affects us and that we become slaves of, unable to liberate ourselves of. For him, the reality could be compared to a loving experience that would last a moment but without end. A moment without end... One of these happy experiences that we would hope that would last for eternity. Time, suspend your flight! Said a poet. The blessed, those that the Church has declare as such, will be living the full experience of divine friendship, immersed in total happiness. Nothing will come across the happiness, and only love and knowledge will make it come true. No one will see time fly because we will be out of time.
This love, Paul proclaimed its fullness in his letter to the Romans, in this same Sunday of the Transfiguration: « For I am certain of this: neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nothing already in existence and nothing still to come, nor any power, nor the heights nor the depths, nor any created thing whatever, will be able to come between us and the love of God, known to us in Christ Jesus our Lord. » (Rm. 8. 38-39)
No earthly experience can give the least knowledge, even the most indeterminate rapture of human love that nothing can completely revel in. St Augustine wrote that the insatisfactions of human love became a proof of the existence of God and of Resurrection. This thirst of immortality that Man cannot fulfill calls for an achievement, a « Life…after life. »
