The Meaning Of Death

“...It is to [the fear of death] that the ‘good news’ of Christianity speaks. I found it especially among the simple people, the good people, for whom the desire or the expectation of an afterlife was not a fantasy or an illusion, as they so often heard it described by Communist propagandists. It was more than a belief; it was something real, something that all the assertions of the learned materialists, the proofs of science, and classroom demonstrations could not shake. Death to them was not an end, but a beginning, a passage into eternal life. They took joy in the fact that they would one day be together with their loved ones again, and sometimes longed to be free of the sorrows of this life and to be at peace at last with God forever.

Salvation, these simple people would say . . . depends ultimately on our belief in God and our abandonment in him. In failure or in success, in health or sickness, in sorrow or joy, man must turn to God, must trust in God, believing in him more each day, loving him more each day, in preparation for a future life with him. There was something beautiful in their simplicity, something that all the theologians and books of theology could not match in their approach to death. That I should find it in the Soviet Union startled me at first. It taught me much. And coupled with my own experience, it made me think, and think deeply, about the meaning of death for a Christian.”

~Walter Ciszek