Benedict J. Groeschel - After This Life: What Catholics Believe about What Happens Next

After
This Life

After
This Life

What Catholics Believe About What Happens Next

Fr. Benedict J. Groeschel, C.F.R.

Our Sunday Visitor Publishing Division
Our Sunday Visitor, Inc.
Huntington, Indiana 46750

Nihil Obstat
Reverend Michael Heintz, Ph.D.
Censor Librorum

Imprimatur
John M. DArcy
Bishop of Fort Wayne-South Bend
August 17, 2009

The Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur are official declarations that a book is free from doctrinal or moral error. It is not implied that those who have granted the Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur agree with the contents, opinions, or statements expressed.

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Copyright 2009 by Benedict J. Groeschel, C.F.R. Published 2009.

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ISBN: 978-1-59276-442-6 (Inventory No. T679)
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Cover design: Lindsey Luken
Cover art: The Crosiers
Interior design by Sherri L. Hoffman

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

To all beloved friends who have passed beyond this life.

Contents

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to John Collins, my faithful editor. Over the past couple of years I have been struggling with physical problems and especially the effects of a stroke that I experienced about three months before I finished this book. It is only because of the help and encouragement of John that I have been able to bring this book to its conclusion. It concerns a topic that I believe is extremely important to many people, including me, people who are growing old or struggling with infirmities. It is for these people especially that I have written After This Life.

I also thank Father Patrick Fitzsimons for his comments on early versions of this book, and I especially thank Father Joseph OHara, whose generous help was instrumental in preparing the final manuscript for publication.

As always, I am very grateful to Bert Ghezzi of Our Sunday Visitor for his continued encouragement on this book and over the years.

I hope many will find this book a personal help. I write my books as a form of spiritual direction, and I only ask the Holy Spirit that my books may be a blessing and a help to those who read them.

Father Benedict
The Solemnity of the Assumption
August 15, 2009

Introduction

In my end is my beginning.

T. S. Eliot (from Four Quartets)

The end of this life and the afterlife that follows have always been among the most important concerns of human beings. We see evidence of this interest in the oldest ruins of human civilization, the dolmans or tombs of County Clare in Ireland. These are incredible uncut stone structures that required the lifting of ledges weighing one hundred thousand pounds, fifteen thousand years ago. We see such evidence as well in the oldest intact human structures, the Egyptian pyramids, which are profound testimonies to the importance of the concern about life after death to people who lived thousands of years ago. This concern was so great among the Egyptians that it actually overshadowed the importance of the present life. Virtually every ancient culture we know of paid great attention to the death of its members, surrounding their passing with ritual and ceremony, with prayers and magical rites. The universality of such burial rites and tombs, therefore, raises the question: Why was it so important to build a house for the dead unless one thought that in some mysterious way they would need it in some kind of continued existence?

In many ways we are far removed from our ancient ancestors, yet the funerals of those we love and of our public figures are no less important or ritualistic to us. We lay our dead as lovingly in their graves or in their mausoleums as did our ancestors. We visit our cemeteries, and at the graves of our loved ones we feel less alone. At these moments, no matter what our religious convictions, we are left with the inescapable feeling that death is not the end it seems to be, that somehow there is something more. Even beyond this is the experience of many who are aware that they are approaching the end of life from illness or advanced age. Death is drawing near, but the feeling remains that death may not really be final. We are reminded of the haunting and perceptive words of the great Christian poet T. S. Elliot, In my end is my beginning, and we hope.

What actually happens at the moment of bodily death and after becomes of overwhelming importance to us all when a dear relative or friend dies. The question that haunts our minds, that cannot be put aside, is: Will I ever see my loved one again? Even the agnostics and atheists among us have trouble freeing themselves of this question.

Having looked death in the eye more than once and having for all intents and purposes been dead with no vital signs for half an hour, I feel obligated to write this book, not only to help others deal with death, but to explain, as well, what the Christian faith and the teaching of the Church tell us about the afterlife; that is, about what comes next.

Almost forty years of working as a psychologist have taught me that the most common personal problem of sane people is anxiety and fear. Someone has perceptively written: We are afraid to live and afraid to die. And this is the truth often we lead partial lives, afraid to take risks, afraid to live fully. We are too timid, too unsure, to fully commit ourselves in faith and trust to God and in love to other people as we spend our brief day on earth. Simultaneously, we do all we can to avoid the plain fact that we are mortal that death is our lot, our inevitable future. In denial we try to go on, living day after day, oblivious of the fact that we and those we care for will one day die. We live as if the world were static, yet it changes constantly; every microsecond brings enormous change. We pretend that it is not the nature of all life to be born, to grow, to decline, and eventually to perish. Thus, when life-threatening events occur, many of us are very illprepared to face them, and when we look in desperation to friends for help, we are shocked to discover that these people are unable to deal with the possibility of death either unable to help us when we need them most.

We Live in a Culture That Denies Death

The denial of death is one of the primary characteristics of our contemporary culture. The writer Susan Sontag, a keen observer of our modern world, saw this clearly. Although not religious herself, and certainly no friend of the Church, she was perceptive enough to write: For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.

Wherever we look we find evidence of this: Our drugstore and supermarket shelves are crowded with products designed to make us look younger. People spend incredible amounts of money on cosmetics, hair dyes, hair replacements, and a thousand other things, all in an effort to pretend that they are not aging, to deny the fact that their physical bodies are coming closer to death with every passing second. Large numbers of people willingly even enthusiastically submit to unneeded and potentially dangerous plastic surgeries, not to improve their health or to cure some disease, but simply to pretend to be younger, to deny that they must someday experience physical death. Sometimes even our doctors encourage this way of thinking, telling us that every ailment has a cure that death can be postponed forever.