Night Office
Second
Reading
07/07/2015
Previously Sept.'97
Previously Sept.'97
A
Heading about Eternity, by Ernesto Cardenal
Death now no longer
exists for us. Death for us was baptism, through which He shared in the death
of Christ we died with Christ. Christ died for and instead of us, and now we
need not die. Physical death is merely the beginning of eternal life, 'the
condition of resurrection', as Athanasius says. He who has been baptised has
passed through death. The other ‘death’ is not death, but meeting Christ.
Christ is 'the
first-born of the dead', as St Paul says. This means Christ was the first (the
first-born) to rise again, the first who passed from the womb of death out to
the new life, and all those who follow Mm are like other children, brothers and
sisters from the same mother’s womb, who follow the first-born down the same
birth canal.
Death no longer exists
for the monk. He has already overcome it. He who lives in union with God
fears nothing, knows that nothing can hurt him now,
Whereas the world’s
chief concern is the shortness of life, the shortness of time and the speed of
days passing is our chief joy. We see time pass like an express train to a
longed for destination, a happy meeting. Time is the train speeding to its
destination, a train taking us to meet God.
It is not true that
life is short. Our life is not short, it is eternal. He do not have death
before us , but eternity. Were not born to die, but to live, to live eternally.
We do not grieve that time passes so quickly, because life does not pass, only time
passes (time which does not exist, the constant passing of the future into the
past, and that which is not yet into that which no longer is) and eternity is
coming, the ever-present present, without future or past, without end, life in
an eternal present, eternal life. We do not fear death because we do not die,
we only pass on to a more prefect life, more real, more living, more alive.
Like the caterpillar
that falls asleep in its chrysalis and is changed into a butterfly.
From "love" by E Cardenal
(Search Press, 1974), pp. 117- 118.
Ernesto Cardenal
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ernesto Cardenal Martínez (born January 20, 1925) is a Nicaraguan Catholic priest, poet and politician. He is a liberation theologian and the founder of the primitivist art community in the Solentiname Islands, where he lived for more than ten years (1965–1977). A member of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, a party he has since left, he was Nicaragua's minister of culture from 1979 to 1987.
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