Death and the Fear of it

[GEddie]

The paradox am I a soul with a body or a body with a soul. My user name is also a paradox, it has physical implications as in a drug and it has spiritual implications meaning Divine nectar.

You are not either/or but both/and.

You are a breathing soul and a thinking body. Without both, you’d be nobody.

OK, I get the SN. “Soma,” in addition to the items you mentioned, is also the Greek (and New Testament) word for body. Hence my confusion.

ICXC NIKA.

 

[Vigilant]

I look with longing for the day Jesus calls me home to be with him.

Life has been a series of tough series of challenges all to get to the point where I can battle to help others only to suffer misunderstanding and persecution.

I am good at helping people but life is wearing me out. If heaven was on the other side I would be happy to call it quits.

But if I stick around it is to serve my wife, my kids, and my clients.

It seams all my life since early childhood I have been targeted by evil, whether human or spiritual. Even though I have a little skill and faith to fight through it, I am real tired.

At this point I feel like I’m done and want to quit. All I would want is a nice little farm in a mountain with a fresh water mountain stream and a spring fed well.

Bk

Pretty much a mirror image of my thoughts and life.

Godspeed.

 

[fhansen]

These last few weeks I have been thinking about death a lot, and whilst I am a Catholic and believe in God and accept Jesus as my Saviour, I am often thinking “what if there is nothing?” and I feel this sort of… I don’t know how to describe it - emptiness? inside of me.

No matter what, I always come back to thinking about death and the possibility of there being nothing, and I am terrified and upset. What if I just stop thinking, feeling, existing? I am not at all scientific but take some solace in the ‘matter cannot be destroyed’ sense, as well as in my faith.

Does anyone have any tips or advice on either how to stop thinking about this or how to overwrite the ‘nothingness’ with my belief in God?

It’s a matter of faith, which can grow. We can pray for it. The more we seek God in whichever way we can, the more of it we receive. He reveals Himself to the extent that we want to know Him.

 

[Vigilant]

From Padre Pio’s Words of faith:

From Padre Pio’s Words of Faith:

Listen carefully. There is a mother who is embroidering. Her son sitting on a low stool sees her work, but upside down. He sees the knots of the embroidery, the tangled threads and says, “Mother, what are you doing? Your work is not at all clear.” Then the mother lowers the embroidery frame and shows the good part of her work. Each color is in its place and the variety of threads form a harmonious design. We are seeing the reverse side of the embroidery; we are sitting on the low stool.

padrepiodevotions.org/padre-pios-words/

 

[Vigilant]

We should also keep in mind that one day we will realize that just one Mass and Communion, if we are properly disposed, is worth more than all the riches on earth.

 

[Vigilant]

WORDS FROM THE BLESSED VIRGIN ON SUFFERING, FROM THE MYSTICAL CITY OF GOD

Human nature is slow, coarse and uneducated; and if it is not cultivated and softened, it gives no fruit in season, and on account of its evil inclinations, it will never of itself become fit for the most loving and sweet intercourse with the highest Good. Therefore it must be shaped and reduced by the hammer of adversities, refined in the crucible of tribulation, in order that it may become fit and capable of the divine gifts and favors and may learn to despise terrestrial and fallacious goods, wherein death is concealed.

Faith illumines and ennobles the understanding of man, since it directs him in the darkness of his natural ignorance, not to stray from the way, and it elevates him above himself so that he sees and understands with infallible certainty what is far above his powers and assures him of it no less than if he saw it clearly before him. He is thus freed from the gross and vile narrow-mindedness of those who will believe only what they can experience by their own limited natural powers, not considering that the soul, as long as it lives in the prison of this corruptible body, is very much circumscribed and limited in its sphere of action by the knowledge drawn from the coarse activity of the senses.

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And then there is this quote from our Lord Jesus to Saint Faustina:

“There is but one price at which souls are bought, and that is suffering united to My suffering on the Cross.”

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A PERSONAL THOUGHT:

Consider offering all your suffering and discomfort, trials and tribulations up to our Lord Jesus, through the Blessed Virgin Mary, to be united with His Passion and suffering on the Cross, and used as our Lord and the Blessed Virgin see fit. The joy that you would realize one day from knowing that you helped to save even one soul from hell would be priceless.

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