Quotes about Death

The Lord did not create suffering. Pain and death came into the world with the fall of man. But after man had chosen suffering in preference to the joys of union with God, the Lord turned suffering itself into a way by which man could come to the perfect knowledge of God.

it is of the very essence of Christianity to face suffering and death not because they are good, not because they have meaning, but because the resurrection of Jesus has robbed them of their meaning.

And yet with every wound You robbed me of a crime, And as each blow was paid with Blood, You paid me also each great sin with greater graces. For even as I killed You, You made Yourself a greater thief than any in Your company, Stealing my sins into Your dying life, Robbing me even of my death.

I believe with Diadochos, that if at the hour of death my confidence in God's mercy is perfect, I will pass the frontier without trouble and pass the dreadful array of my sins with compunction and confidence and leave them all behind forever.

Stagnation and inactivity bring spiritual death.

All things are yours and you are Christ's—and Christ is God's. If we live, we live unto God. If we die, we die unto God—whether we live or die, we are God's possession." What more could anyone ask?

But I think St. Peter and the twelve Apostles would have been rather surprised at the concept that Christ had been scourged and beaten by soldiers, cursed and crowned with thorns and subjected to unutterable contempt and finally nailed to the Cross and left to bleed to death in order that we might all become gentlemen.

Solitude means withdrawal from an artificial and fictional level of being which men, divided by original sin, have fabricated in order to keep peace with concupiscence and death. But by that very fact the solitary finds himself on the level of a more perfect spiritual society—the city of those who have become real enough to confess and glorify God (that is, life) in the teeth of death.

All sorrow, hardship, difficulty, struggle, pain, unhappiness, and ultimately death itself can be traced to rebellion against God's love for us.

The root of all sin goes back to the garden of Eden. The result of Adam and Eve's disobedience was exile for them and all their descendants after them. Living in exile means living in a perpetual state of disconnection and separation that ultimately leads to death if not remedied. There are four aspects to exile: spiritual, emotional, relational, and physical.

Maybe the desert wisdom of the Dakotas can teach us to love anyway, to love what is dying, in the face of death, and not pretend that things are other than they are. The irony and wonder of all of this is that it is the desert's grimness, its stillness and isolation, that brings us back to love.

Many people are just waking to the reality that unlimited expansion, what we call progress, is not possible in this world, and maybe looking to monks (who seek to live within limitations) as well as rural Dakotans (whose limitations are forced upon them by isolation and a harsh climate) can teach us how to live more realistically. These unlikely people might also help us overcome the pathological fear of death and the inability to deal with sickness and old age that plague American society.