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By HERBERT VEGO
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See you at the cemetery
ALL roads lead to the cemetery on Tuesday, Nov. 1 – the traditional All Saints’ Day. It’s when we pay homage to the departed. While its origin cannot be traced with certainty, history says it is a take-off from the Lemuria pagan festival, which the Catholic Church first celebrated as a Christian holiday on May 13, 609 during the reign of Pope Boniface IV.
Christendom observes Nov. 1 as the traditional day of praying for the dead, although it’s actually November 2 that is known as All Souls Day in the Catholic liturgy.
The Roman Catholic celebration is associated with the doctrine that the souls of the faithful dead need to be prayed for to attain full sanctification and moral perfection before entering Heaven. Other Christian sects don’t share that view.
Ironically, it’s we the living who actually rub elbows with each other at the cemetery on All Saints Day. There we meet long-time-no-see friends and relatives; and reminisce the good old days with the departed. We ask questions: What caused their death? Have we exhausted all efforts to keep them alive?
We all agree that death comes like a thief in the night – unexpected. No man is too young to die – or too old to survive.
In the Bible, King David – who lived from 907 BC to 837 BC – propounds that men who stay alive after age 70 are in their “bonus” years: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten, and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow, for it is soon cut off and we fly away” (Psalm 90:10).
According to the Jewish book David the King, David himself died at age 70.
As it was in the days of David, by the time we reach 70 today, most of us would have complained of deteriorating health.
We are reminded, “To everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under the heaven: A time to be born and a time to die…” (Ecclesiastes 3:1-2)
We have no quarrel with that. What we argue over is what happens after death. Do we, like other forms of animals, return to dust forever or move on to a higher plane of life?
Most of us believe in the afterlife. In one of his poems, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote, “Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal. Dust thou art to dust returneth was not spoken of the soul.”
Unfortunately, we disagree as regards the “afterlife.” There are as many views on post-death existence as there are religions and sects.
Bible-based Christianity offers no crystal-clear description of post-earth future. There are cases when what is not written seems more acceptable than what is written. For instance, while most Christian theologians preach that Jesus will come again to resurrect the dead, their followers on the contrary believe that the soul immediately leaves the body at death and ascends to either heaven or hell. Roman Catholics visualize an appointment with Saint Peter, who holds the key to our assigned rooms in heaven or hell.
On the contrary, the Old Testament denies consciousness in death: “For the living know that they shall die but the dead know nothing” (Ecclesiastes 9:5).
“His breath goeth forth, he returneth to earth; in that very day his thoughts perish” (Psalms 146:4).
Nobody who has gone up there has come down to tell us what paradise is like. We merely assume that the good go there because that’s what our priests and pastors tell us.
The question posed by 1 Corinthians 15:55 remains unanswered: “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?”/PN
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