One short sleep past, we wake eternally,

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

    -John Donne, “Death, Be Not Proud”

      Recently Winnipeg’s Archbishop Richard Gagnon was installed as chancellor of St. Paul’s College, the Catholic college in the University of Manitoba. Preaching at the mass prior to his installation, Archbishop Gagnon made an observation which has stuck in my head and my heart. The gospel of the day was the story of the raising of Lazarus. In what was almost a throwaway comment, he observed that, while we might say that Lazarus was returned to the land of the living, it is truer to say that he was returned to the land of the dying.

     What a perspective changer!

     Spring is finally making its presence felt here in Winnipeg after the coldest winter in living memory. The joy is palpable. Even as the Winnipeg Jets limp to the finish of a horrible season, people are walking around with idiot grins on their faces. But because of my archbishop, I have to recognize that this renewal is, in a sense, illusory.

    What a downer!

    What I think the archbishop might have been getting at is this:  death is the unmentionable of our post-post-modern world. Death is hidden away because we are all too scared to talk about it and particularly to face our own. English uses euphemism for unpleasant subjects and the latest euphemism is for “dying” is  “passing.” Frankly, when I hear that someone has “passed,” I cannot help but think of wind!

     Even though my students dismember zombies by the millions in the latest apocalypse  or shoot up Russians in Battlefield 4, people cannot talk of a real human’s death.  Death is the wet blanket of the consumer party of our Western way of life, a way of life that Uruguayan philosopher Alberto Methol Ferre called “libertine atheism.”

    We Christians look at death in two ways. Death is the consequence of sin and so it is bad but just. On the other hand,  death is also our gateway to eternal life in Christ. But I think that Archbishop Gagnon was pointing to something more than this.

    Our earthly life is filled with marvellous, joyful things, like a Winnipeg spring. To take on the world-weariness of a Marcus Aurelius would be an affront to God’s gifts. Ignatius Loyola got it right here (again): the joys and delights of the world make us feel good but the feelings don’t last. Yes, there’s spring but then there’s winter. However, the joys and delights of the our eternal spirits, the things of God, make us feel good and the feelings last.

   Christians, then, must squeeze the joy out of life even as we recognize that we are dying, perhaps especially as we recognize this. After all, since the Incarnation, the whole world , atom by atom, is slowly being transformed into the Body of Christ. More than this, though, we live in the full consciousness of our own impending death (not passing); we make friends with this awareness; we live in the land of the dying and we rejoice.