Vigils Reading – Office for the Dead

A reading from

CARDINAL JEAN DANIELOU

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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”. 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. And the education that proceeds till the hour of death – for all

life is only an adolescence – consists, as Jean Guitton says, “in that discipline by

which we prepare the child for temporal life, the adult for eternal life, so that

whatever we see, we feel we have seen it already.” 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.