We Will All Be Changed

On the Feast of All Souls, I find it helpful to meditate on this verse from the Book of Wisdom: “God did not make death, nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living.”

It is natural to view this proclamation with skepticism. If God did not make death, why do we die?

We have difficulty resolving this dilemma because we do not see as God sees. What we view as death, God views as a passageway to a new form of life. As the Book of Wisdom goes on to say, “He fashioned all things that they might have being.” Note that the form of that being is not specified. It is likely that our being will not always be in human form; as it says in 1 John 3:2, “what we will be has not yet been revealed.” We, of course, prefer to maintain our current state of being because it is what we know, but that signals a lack of trust in God’s imagination and care for us.

St. Paul had some sense of this transition when he said, “Behold I tell you a mystery. …we will all be changed, in an instant, in the blink of an eye, at the last trumpet.” What happens to us when we die is a mystery, but we haven’t arrived at the doorway of death yet. Today, we have time to enjoy our current life as a human being on earth, with its delights, challenges, and memories of those who have gone before us. Ultimately the glory of God is that, whatever our state of being, we are fully alive.