Fr Lawrence Cunningham writes on the strong links that bind us to others who are part of the vast community of the living and the dead.
“I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you know you have eternal life.” — 1 John 5:13
Toward the end of his famous ‘‘To be or not to be” soliloquy, Prince Hamlet expresses his “dread of something after death/ The undiscovered country, from whose bourn/ No traveller returns.” That sentence has always struck me as odd, precisely because earlier in the play a traveller did return from the country of the dead—the play, after all, begins with the ghost of the elder Hamlet coming back from the dead to tell Hamlet of the unhappy circumstances of his death and demanding that his son right the wrongs done to him. Those opening scenes of Act I are, in fact, studded with talk of ghosts, dead walking abroad, empty tombs, and other phenomena associated with death and life.
Hamlet
In fact, the Christian story is filled with accounts of people who themselves either had near-death experiences or received visitations from loved ones who had died. There is tremendous literature on this intercourse between the dead and the living, as well as much writing on the near-death experience. Carol Zaleski’s excellent Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times (Oxford University Press, 1988) studies the phenomenon historically, with special reference to the Middle Ages, while Raymond Moody’s Life After Life (Bantam, 1988) triggered an avalanche of studies on the near-death experience. Even today such books regularly find themselves on the best-seller list, near other books urging us to communicate with our angels.
These reflections do not intend to either argue for or against the accuracy of descriptions of near-death experiences or to judge whether accounts of people speaking with or receiving visitations from their beloved dead are true or the result of hysteria, hallucination, oxygen deprivation, the release of endorphins, or any of the other explanations raised.
My more modest aim is to look at these phenomena with the eye of a theologian and to ask, What are we to make of these experiences theologically? What truth might they hide, and how are we to assess such a widespread interest in the happenings associated with the near-death experience?
The obvious answer is that such reports might give us some assurance about what death is like, how we experience it, and what comes immediately after death. Since the nature of death and what happens after death has been a perennial puzzle, such experiences might furnish some kind of ‘proof’ regarding the mysterious event.
I will take up, in order, the near-death experience and the claims of many that they communicate with their beloved dead.
When Moody did his study of people who had seemingly died and then been revived in Life after Life, his reports were vigorously condemned as a satanic delusion by fundamentalist Christians who thought that his benign description of the dying process (moving toward the light, a feeling of utter serenity, a sense of safeness, and so on) had no apparent place for the salvific work of Christ. This fundamentalist critique took on particular pungency when the descriptions of near-death experiences resulted from an unexpected trauma or major accident that left little time for a deathbed conversion.
In fairness, we need to say that Catholic folklore is filled with stories of people snatched from hell at the last moment, dramatic deathbed conversions, and a healthy fear of the defining moment of death. There is also a long tradition of cautionary tales pointing out how the sinner got his comeuppance at the moment of death. And we have a long tradition, inherited from Saint Paul, of seeing death as fruit of sin, such as in Romans 5:12: “. . . sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin and so death spread to all because all have sinned”.
Mystical union
The fact that the contemporary Catholic funeral liturgy is celebrated in white with an emphasis on the Resurrection, symbolized by the lighted paschal candle, tells us, in a shorthand fashion, that there is another way to think about death. It is as if the church took its eye off Romans 5:12 and went down the page a bit and looked hard at Romans 5:21:
Just as sin exercised dominion in death, so grace might also exercise dominion through justification leading to eternal life through Christ Our Lord.
Saint John of the Cross says that the experience of God beyond the heights of mystical union is only experienced after death. John describes this union as completely assimilated in God, united in love with God, and it shall be like God through participation. The steps preparatory to this union resonate with the vocabulary of “gentleness” and “sweetness” and “ardor” (from John’s Dark Night of the Soul). With this language, John attempts to speak of what we might experience when, purged from our worldliness, we are ready to be with God in the union of love.
Contemporary theologians like the late Jesuit Karl Rahner have emphasized that passing through death is part of what it means to be a human. It may be, as he and some others have argued, part of the purgation by which we let go of our failures to be ready for the graced bonds of living with love in God. The fundamental point is that death is, for the believer, not the definitive end but the passage to the New Life promised by Christ (indeed, some of the early Christian writers called death the transitus gloriae, the passage to glory).
Still, we should not romanticize death by a too steady focus on the reports of those who have had near-death experiences. Many people in this world die as a result of terrorism, malnutrition, human violence, or cataclysms of nature. Many more die of terrible diseases. Death, in short, is still that awe-inspiring mystery that relativizes all of our human strivings. That is why there is great wisdom in the notion that those acts of “dying to the self’’ by acts of going out of ourselves in love and solidarity are rehearsals for that moment when, to quote the Bard again, we “shuffle off this mortal coil.”
In faith, however, we still declare that we shall live, yet in the hope of the Resurrection, when we will be new creations of God in Christ. Nineteenth-century theologian Cardinal John Henry Newman’s famous prayer sums up this Christian hope in great beauty and with firm faith:
O Lord, support us all the day long, until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over and the work is done. Then, Lord, in Thy mercy, grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest and peace at last; Through Jesus Christ Our Lord. Amen.
Communion of Saints
There is no doubt that Christian practice has been quite ready to condemn, as diabolical, the practice of necromancy—conjuring of spirits—and various forms of seances and other spiritualist exercises. The literary tradition of the Faust legend is a kind of cautionary tale about the dangers of calling up the dead from life, as are the more suspicious and fearful tales connected with everything from Ouija boards (vigorously condemned by the priests of our parish when they enjoyed a vogue in my youth) to the cinema versions of the walking dead associated in folklore with zombies and the like.
Despite the resistance of the Christian tradition to these esoteric practices, it is worthwhile to remember that from its beginnings the church has insisted, through its teachings and in its actual practices of liturgy and piety, that the relationship with those of us on earth and those who have died has not been definitively and absolutely severed. Indeed, it teaches quite the opposite through its emphasis on what we call, in a shorthand phrase, the “communion of the saints.”
What does communion of saints intend? Rather than hazard a definition here, we might first of all note some actual church practices to get a picture of what we mean by the phrase.
– At every liturgy we pray in the company of the Blessed Mother, the saints, the angels, and the martyrs. Each time we do that we assert implicitly that the church is larger than the current population of the earth.
– In our devotional life we call upon Mary and the saints to intercede for us, to aid us, and to protect us. We do that with the conviction that they can hear us.
– At every Christian funeral, indeed at every death that touches us, we pray for that person’s peace and rest and acceptance into the presence of God. In that act, we affirm that our dead are not beyond our caring or so separated from us that we cannot speak for them and with them.
In short, as the Second Vatican Council said, the church must be thought of not merely as a visible structure on earth but as a communion in love constituted of those on earth, those who are being purified in and after death, and those who share in the glory of God. That means that all of us are part of what scripture calls the “cloud of witnesses” who surround us (Heb. 12:1).
That is why Vatican II insists that when we are bound together in charity and in praise of the Triune God, we not only fulfill the deepest vocation of the church but experience a foretaste “of the liturgy of consummate glory” (Lumen Gentium, VII.51).
Not an unbridgeable gulf
In the early church the phrase communio sanctorum meant communion in or with “holy things” and not persons. Thus, many of the early writers saw the phrase to have a eucharistic sense or to mean the right to participate fully in the liturgy (in the Byzantine liturgy, just before Communion the priest or deacon cries out “Holy things for the Holy”) or in communion with those who were not heretics, and so on.
It is possible that we recover that sense of the phrase when we reflect on the gifts that our deceased have left us—such as life itself, our education, the guidance we received through example, the material things we now possess, or even those objects that powerfully remind us of those who have gone before us. These are strong links that bind us to others who are part of the vast community of the living and the dead. That is why we should be strengthened by a line from a prayer Father Andrew Greeley once wrote for his departed friends:
Give me the courage and faith to follow them on the road of this life and bravery I need when I cross the boundary and join them on the way home.
That is a plea thick with an understanding of the communion of the saints.
Is the near-death experience or the phenomenon of the deep experience of seeing, speaking, or experiencing the dead proof of immortality? I don’t think so. And one could argue that it’s a projection of our need to believe in a benign life after death (this would be the approach of Freudians) or some dramatic form of chemically or psychologically induced hallucinations.
From a theological point of view, however, it might be argued that such widely reported phenomena (and they are widely reported in different cultures and times) are worthy of reflective consideration even though such experiences ought not become an obsession nor a preoccupation. In that sense, we might say that widely reported incidents of near-death experiences are at least an indicator that what we assert by faith might well correlate with what some have experienced. Beyond that, however, we ought to place the mysterious issue of death squarely where it belongs: under the wide mantle of God’s merciful love.
This article appeared in Reality (November 2001), a magazine of the Irish Redemptorists, reprinted with permission from U.S. Catholic, a publication of the Claretians.
The practical implications of this profound doctrine and Christian practice are that the gulf between those of us who are alive and those who have died is not unbridgeable. We assert in faith that those with God can intercede for us and we can call upon them. Indeed, it is a deeply human thing to do since we know that the church of the saints is infinitely larger than that which is constituted by canonized saints. I know more than one person who considers a deceased sibling or a stillborn baby or a dead parent as a kind of special protector, just as everyone knows a person for whom a loved one is still profoundly present in memory, imagination, or through prayer. Such gestures and feelings are reflections, even if unstated, of a deep faith in the communion of the saints. Do the dead speak to us? Is that frequently cited fact that widows and widowers “speak with” their deceased spouses or sense their presence merely a pious delusion? Is the deeply rooted desire to pray to our beloved dead for comfort and protection merely an evasion to heal our sense of grieving loss? Were the admonitory warnings coming from the dead, testified to in our Christian literature, a giant fiction? The old requiem liturgy put its main focus on death as a punishment, as an example to the living to get their lives in order, and to fear the coming judgment of God. (There is little sweetness and light in the singing of the ‘Dies Irae’.) is filled with forebodings of death and the comings and goings of dead spirits. In that sense, Shakespeare draws on common beliefs that go back to the beginnings of Christianity and even earlier. King Saul in the Old Testament, after all, conjured up the witch of Endor, and Jesus himself tells a story about a rich man who goes to hell and begs for permission to go back to earth to warn his family against the kind of sins that brought him far from the bosom of Abraham.
