O Death, When Will You Come?

If there is one sure thing in this life, it is that we are all going to die. Last Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, was a very fitting day to begin reflecting on death. The priest kept repeating to the long line of people coming to receive ashes: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Although very few people like to talk about death, it is the only sure thing we have in life. That is the “sad” reality (for some who perhaps have no faith) or the “joyful” reality (for those of us who do). Because for those of us who have faith, death is the beginning of eternal life.

In our beloved Venezuela, sadly, death can come to our homes unexpectedly, and not necessarily to us but, worse still, to a child or another loved one. All because of the serious crime situation in our country, which does not respect what should be the natural order of life: that children bury their parents. That is why, in Venezuela, talking about death has become an everyday subject, and many of us live trying to “prepare” for that moment. We talk about death often with our children, relatives and friends, and we repeat the phrase: “May God find us having made our confession.” Many of us use this situation to talk about the sacrament of confession, and every day you see more people lining up at the confessionals in churches. During Lent the lines always get longer.

Sometimes it is striking how some people talk quite naturally about their confessions in public places. A few days ago I got talking with a woman at a newsstand, and she told me, without any hesitation, that she had gone to confession because she was feeling hatred. The priest gave her Saint Teresa of Ávila’s prayer: “Let nothing disturb you, let nothing frighten you, all things pass, God alone suffices…” She told me it calmed her greatly and that she felt great relief after confession, because “hatred eats you up inside.”

How good it would be if everyone who feels hatred, resentment, envy and so on went to confession (with a sincere resolution to try not to commit those sins again) and knelt to ask God’s forgiveness! That is something worth getting down on your knees for! It is wonderful what you feel every time you kneel (and bow your head) before God to ask forgiveness. And to know that the priest in the confessional forgives us not as a man but as Christ’s representative on earth, because Jesus Christ himself gave the apostles that power: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained” (Jn 20:23).

I believe that if more Venezuelans (starting with the authorities, political leaders and so on) knelt before God alone and went to confession more, there would be great Peace and calm in this Venezuela. Perhaps then the energy spent on insults, fights, divisions and so on could be spent on solving the serious problems of crime and the prisons, which have plunged this country into a great tragedy of violence and dehumanization. Then we Venezuelan fathers and mothers (who suffer and live a Way of the Cross every day because of the thousands of problems weighing on us) could live a little more peacefully, without fearing that at the least expected moment one of our children or a loved one will be killed.

So let us use Lent to reflect on life and death. To reflect that if God is giving us life, it is to live it well, to act well before God and before the society in which we live. To know that we must make the best possible use of the talents, power and/or money God has given us, in order to do good. To reflect that if we are Christians, and call ourselves such, we must be sowers of peace, joy, respect and reconciliation, never of hatred, division or lies, because those are the devil’s weapons. And it is also a fitting time to experience how great it is to kneel before God alone, to ask him for wisdom and strength to carry out the mission He has entrusted to each of us on this earth.

Because sooner rather than later we will all stand face to face before our Beloved Jesus Christ and have to give an account of all the bad and all the good we did on this earth. Because in the end our bodies will turn to dust, and what will remain in our biography, and for history, will be the good or the evil we were able to do. So, since we know neither the day nor the hour when death will come, it is better to be prepared from now on for that moment, so hard and so wonderful, when we leave this “valley of tears” to live forever in our eternal Homeland.