September Community Monthly Memorial of the Dead

Night Office Readings:
2nd September 2015, Monthly Memorial, 
Night Office

Second Reading

A Reading about the Resurrection of the Dead

(From a Sermon by St. Augustine.)

If you take away faith in the resurrection of the dead, all Christian teaching falls to the ground. But even should our faith be founded on the resurrection of the dead, the Christian soul is not then secure, unless we distinguish between the life that is to come and that which passes away.

But you are sorrowful because of your dear one who is buried; because you do not now hear his voice. He lived; he died. He ate, he does not now eat. He felt and saw; now he feels nothing. The joys and pleasures of the living are now nothing to him.

But, do you mourn for the seed when you plough the earth? Let us suppose there was someone so ignorant of things, that when he bore the seed to the fie1d and cast it upon the earth and buried it in the broken soil; suppose there was someone so ignorant of the way of nature, even of things close at hand, that, thinking of the departed summer, he mourns for the wheat, saying to himself: 'This wheat, now buried in the earth, with what toil was it harvested, and carried from the field, threshed upon the harvest floor, winnowed, stored in the barn! We saw its beauty, and rejoiced and gave thanks. Now it is taken from our eyes. I see the ploughed 1 and; but the wheat I see neither here nor in the barn!” Sorrowfully he would mourn the wheat as dead and buried; he would weep freely, his thoughts on the field, on the earth, but seeing no more the harvest.

And what would they say to him, those who were not ignorant of these matters? Supposing had wept in this way they would say to him: 'Do not grieve. What we buried in the earth is indeed no longer in the barn, no longer in our hands. But soon we shall go again to the field, and you will be happy in the beauty of the growing corn, where now you weep over the nakedness of ploughed earth. And he who now 1 earns what s ha 11 come from the sown wheat, he too will rejoice in the p1oughing and the sowing. He who had been unbelieving, or rather, who had been foolish and without experience, may perhaps have mourned before, but believing those who have experienced, he will go away comforted, and wait in hope for the harvest to come.

Community Monthly Memorial of the Dead

7th July 2015, Monthly Memorial, 
Night Office

Second Reading

07/07/2015
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 at La Chascona (Santiago).

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.

Ernesto Cardenal at San Diego State University, 2001