By Herbert Vego
WITH due respect to a traditional Christian belief, the Bible does not say anything about the dead waiting to be visited in their graves on November 1, All Saints Day.
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, it was on May 13, 609 during the reign of Pope Boniface IV that the Roman Catholic Church first celebrated All Saints Day as a traditional day of praying for the dead. It stems from the doctrine that the souls of the faithful dead need to be prayed for to attain full sanctification and moral perfection before entering heaven.
In fairness, there are Christian sects that disagree on what happens to human beings after death.
In the Bible, King David propounds that men who reach past age 70 are in their “bonus” years: “Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away (Psalm 90:10, New International Version).
By the time we reach 70, we will have yielded to distinct physical deformities like wrinkled skin and graying or balding hair.
Let us be reminded of this Bible quotation: “To everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under the heavens: A time to be born and a time to die…” (Ecclesiastes 3:1-2).
We have no quarrel with that. What people debate about is what happens to us after death. Do we, like other forms of animals, return to dust forever or move on to a higher life plane?
The late poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who believed in the afterlife, wrote, “Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal. Dust thou art to dust returneth was not spoken of the soul.”
There are as many views on post-death existence as there are religious organizations.
Christianity offers no crystal-clear description of the post-earth future. There are cases when what is not written is more acceptable to certain believers than what is written. For instance, while most Christian theologians say that Jesus will come again to resurrect the dead, their followers embrace the contrary belief that the soul immediately leaves the body at death and ascends to either heaven or hell.
The Bible, however, denies consciousness at the time of death: “For the living know that they shall die but the dead know nothing” (Ecclesiastes 9:5).
“His breath goeth forth, he returneth to earth; in that very day his thoughts perish” (Psalms 146:4).
I remember how my late father coped with lung cancer at age 72 in 1992. Though we, his children, had not told him he had terminal disease, he blurted one morning, “I think I will soon die.”
He waited and, a few days later, died.
Tatay had been a member of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, which stresses that Jesus is coming again to resurrect the dead who had done good into eternity.
Soon after his burial, we opened his briefcase which contained his documents, including a clipping of this anonymous quotation: “Come view the ground where I do lie. As you are now, so once was I. As I am now so you will be. Prepare for death and follow me.”
Why not resist fear of death?
Take it from the famous American humorist Mark Twain:
“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
