Vigils Reading – Office for the Dead

DEATH AND OUR LIVES AS CHRISTIANS

By Cardinal Jean Daniélou4

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THE CHRISTIAN LIFE is altogether an act of waiting. Christians know

that they are made for greater things. They feel acutely the misery of their

present condition. They aspire to be relieved of the weight of animal life and its

servitude. “I desire to be dissolved and to be with Christ” (Phil 1:23). While the

carnal in us grasps desperately at pleasures and possessions, the Christian lives

already in the order of being, detached, free, making use of time, so long as it is

given, to perform works of charity towards all – an activity invisible to the eyes

of the world. The Christian life is a hidden life. But when the world is folded up

like a tent, the reality that has been hidden until that moment will be clearly

revealed. It is to prepare oneself for this solemn act, which is the entry of every

person into the heavenly Temple, through the veil that still conceals it, that

one’s whole life must be devoted.

That life consists for the Christian in being endowed little by little with

divine manners… We must not be without a country on our arrival in heaven.

Our life is an apprenticeship. It is a matter of learning the rudiments of what we

shall have one day to do. So let us already try in prayer to stammer what will

later be the ‘conversation in heaven’ with God and his angels; so we must try to

make less crude this intellect of ours, which is so immersed in the world of time

and space, and to acclimatize it gradually to heavenly things through the action

of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Thus charity itself is the clumsy beginning of that

complete communion which will embrace all the saints. So doing, we begin to

do what we have always to do. It is our real life which is being mapped out. Let

us begin it.

4 The Presence of God, Baltimore 1959, pp.55-57.