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Vigils Reading – Office for the Dead
June 26
DEATH AND OUR LIVES AS CHRISTIANS
By Cardinal Jean Daniélou4
◊◊◊
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.