Dear Friends,
What happens when we die?
Celebration of Día de los Muertos / The Day of the Dead and the All Saints Sunday are intrinsically tied together. I thought I’ll take this opportunity explore the question, “What happens when we die?” What I attempt to write is my take on what I believe up to now from all my learning and reflecting on this subject.
In the Gospel of John 14:1-3, Jesus says to his disciples, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God and trust in me. 2 In my Father’s mansion there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? 3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again to take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.”
I think when we die, first of all, we’ll be surprised by the love that’s waiting for us. The unqualified acceptance of our being, the depth of love that’s waiting for us, and the intelligence that we are being returned to. Basically, I see death is a time of homecoming, a time of expansion, a time of remembering things that we forgot. It will be a time of remembering the deeper identity of who we are, our original identity, our soul identity created in the “image of God.”
I like to think that when we die, we are escorted into this soul territory of God’s kingdom. It’s a process in which people are at different stages of their own spiritual and evolutionary development. Some people need more remedial work than others. People who have given themselves over to violence and anger, injuring of other people and violating the fundamental oneness of life, often have to be carefully and gradually go through a process of repairing their injured souls.
And then there are people whose lives have been given over to compassion, generosity, and service, who lived in alignment with God, move through this transitional period more smoothly and rapidly.
This is the process of digesting your life, digesting everything that happened to you, everything that you have done and not done. This is what near-death experiences of people live tell as “life review” they saw at the cusp of death. Eventually that entire digesting of your most recent life ends and you return to your deeper identity. Your egoic identity gives way to your soul, which is a much, much larger, expansive identity.
On the All Saints Sunday, we talk about “the communion of saints.” This is a community of beings when we die is not a community of simply dead human beings. They are, rather, community of souls. And souls are a hundred thousand-year-old beings, not a hundred-year-old beings. And the community of beings in the afterlife is basically this community of souls, community of beings with deeper knowledge of the truth. Here, older souls assist younger souls, more evolved souls help less evolved souls. We dwell together.
How do I know all that? I don’t. It’s the best I have come up with for now.
“Long before he laid down earth’s foundations, he had us in mind, had settled on us as the focus of his love, to be made whole and holy by his love.” “It’s in Christ that we find out who we are and what we are living for. Long before we first heard of Christ, He had his eye on us, had designs on us for glorious living, part of the overall purpose he is working out in everything and everyone.” (Ephesians 1:4, 11-12)
Yours in Christ,
John
