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EDUCATIONAL OR SAPIENTIAL APPROACH TO DEATH

What do we learn from the educational or sapiential approach to the phenomenon of death?

Death is not only the end of all attempts to be at home in this world. It is also the end of all knowledge or erudition.

We need to learn the “wisdom of the heart” to become wise, to know, to prepare, to accept our death.

The Old Testament books that present to us the “wisdom” of death are Job, Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Sirach, Wisdom.

Let us look at samples of their “wise” teachings on death and dying.

Psalm 90:12 – “teach us to count our days and we shall gain wisdom of heart”

Ecclesiastes 3 opens the section on death with the words: “a time to give birth and a time to die” (v. 3). It ends with: “both were made from the dust and to the dust they both return” (v. 20).

In Ecclesiastes 12 it says: “Vanity of vanities… all things are vanity!” (v. 8).

Why are we born? Why do we die? Where do we go after death? All these questions of the Old Testament remain without a response other than: God wills it; he has judgment over every thing.

Sirach 41 says: “O death! how bitter is the thought of you.”

It seeks to console us about death, saying that it is the common destiny, that it is decreed by the Lord, that whether we live 10 or 100 years, it does not really make a difference, from beginning to the end, we need to die.

Wisdom refers us to the already unsettling opinions from those who were sceptics at that time: “brief and troublesome is our lifetime, there is no remedy for our dying, nor is anyone known to have come back from Hades. For by mere chance we were born, and hereafter we shall be as though we had not been” (2:1ff)

Only here in this book of Wisdom, death is linked with other-worldly retribution or punishment. The souls of the just are in the hands of God, although it is not known what this precisely means (3:1).

Thanks to Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, Sorella Morte

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