Vigils Reading – Office for the Dead

THE GOD

OF THE LIVING

By Maurice Zundel

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The dead have disappeared from our sight. They have not disappeared

from the sight of God. He knows where they are, He knows their lot, He “who

loved them to the end.” But, can we meet them, can we communicate with them?

Some of them occupied such a large place in our life; they were the light of our

eyes, the source of our happiness, the soul of our soul. Is all this now finished

forever?

How can it be finished, if we are more spirit than flesh, and if we have

truly been in communion with what was most intimate and spiritual in them?

But how shall we find them again? By what means shall we reach them? By

entering into what is most intimate in ourselves.

If in truth they sleep in Christ, as we may always hope, they are certainly

freed from the divisions of space and time, from all material constraints, from

all the changes of the outer world. There is, therefore, no means of meeting

them, more certainly efficacious, than to establish ourselves on that internal

plane which they have reached, and strive to live their life. Since their life is

plunged deep in the interior of God, since He is their home, their food and, as

our prayers so touchingly express it, their sleep, if we identify ourselves more

closely with Him, and enter more deeply into His Life, we shall enter into their

life, and the converse broken off on the visible plane will be resumed in a more

living fashion in the silent commerce of souls.

It is indeed within that we must seek, if we would not go astray in a world

beyond, constructed with shadows of the visible world, imagining relations with

our dear ones which would tend to hold them back on the external plane… If

they are withdrawn from the vicissitudes of the sensible world, have been born

to the Life of the Spirit, are in God, we cannot conceive a bond between

ourselves and them more sublime than the communion, always closer, of an

inner life of which God is the source, the center and the gift.

In this way our love not only safeguards its profound reality, it is also most

efficacious. For by the strength of our love for God we can in a sense give Him to

our departed, if they are still detained in the stages of purification which

constitute the mysterious state of Purgatory; or increase in some way their joy in

possessing Him, if they have already reached the beatific vision. To live so as to

be always worthy of God, this surely is the most certain way to be always with

our dead.

They are in God, the very heart of Love. But we also may approach this

Divine Love, for it is in God “that we live, and move and have our being”. We

also are in God, though not yet so completely as they. And God is in us. Christ

exceeded our most daring hopes by making the [unity] of the Divine Persons the

bond of our mutual intimacy…

There can be no surer comfort than this active and sanctifying

communion with our dear ones in an intimacy continually increasing as our

union with God becomes closer. God has not taken them from us: He has hidden

them in His heart that they may be closer to ours. “God is not a God of the dead

but of the living.”