EDUCATIONAL OR SAPIENTIAL APPROACH TO DEATH
What do we learn from the
educational or sapiential approach to the phenomenon of death?
Death is not only the end of all
attempts to be at home in this world. It is also the end of all knowledge or
erudition.
We need to learn the “wisdom of
the heart” to become wise, to know, to prepare, to accept our death.
The Old Testament books that
present to us the “wisdom” of death are Job, Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Sirach,
Wisdom.
Let us look at samples of their
“wise” teachings on death and dying.
Psalm 90:12 – “teach us to count
our days and we shall gain wisdom of heart”
Ecclesiastes 3 opens the section
on death with the words: “a time to give birth and a time to die” (v. 3). It
ends with: “both were made from the dust and to the dust they both return” (v.
20).
In Ecclesiastes 12 it says: “Vanity
of vanities… all things are vanity!” (v. 8).
Why are we born? Why do we die?
Where do we go after death? All these questions of the Old Testament remain
without a response other than: God wills it; he has judgment over every thing.
Sirach 41 says: “O death! how
bitter is the thought of you.”
It seeks to console us about
death, saying that it is the common destiny, that it is decreed by the Lord,
that whether we live 10 or 100 years, it does not really make a difference,
from beginning to the end, we need to die.
Wisdom refers us to the already
unsettling opinions from those who were sceptics at that time: “brief and
troublesome is our lifetime, there is no remedy for our dying, nor is anyone
known to have come back from Hades. For by mere chance we were born, and
hereafter we shall be as though we had not been” (2:1ff)
Only here in this book of Wisdom,
death is linked with other-worldly retribution or punishment. The souls of the
just are in the hands of God, although it is not known what this precisely
means (3:1).
Thanks to Fr. Raniero
Cantalamessa, Sorella Morte
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