Thought for the Week

Mgr Kieran Heskin

Sacred Heart Church, Ilkley

FEW people approach the second half of life with exactly the same outlook with which they lived the first. Our perspectives change as we see the march of time. We realize that death is not something that befalls the occasional misfortunate: we ourselves face an appointment with death. This becomes more and more clear as we attend the funerals of contemporaries and those who were younger than us.

Faced with the limit of our days, we understandably wonder if all the memories of a lifetime, all the knowledge and skills acquired over the years, are to be suddenly blotted out in an instant by death and forever cast into the abyss of nothingness.

In pondering this question, it is striking that for all the denial and skepticism that surrounds belief in life after death, humanity to a large extent has never settled for the belief that beyond death there’s only nothingness.

We all have within our hearts a yearning for immortality as well as the desire that our loving relationships will endure forever. Those of us who believe in God attribute these yearnings to him as Creator and we think that it would have been a strange and unworthy expression of his love and care for us if he planted immortal yearnings within us while prohibiting their ever being fulfilled by refusing us immortality.

We know that this is not so because God himself has assured us in the Gospels that we are destined to live forever more and that genuine love will not come to an end.

Since human life has this eternal dimension, it can only be properly understood against the great backdrop of eternity: any other backdrop shrinks human hope and it makes life too brief and too limited.

On these darkening November days, let us accordingly open our eyes to the amazing fact that God appeared on this planet two thousand years ago and that he opened the doors of eternity to all of us. When our time comes, he has the power and the desire to lead all of us safely through the dark night of death, through which He himself has gone. He is the Good Shepherd. We can put our trust in his guidance because he wants to lead every sheep and lamb of his beloved flock safely home.