Meditation for November 8, For All Eternity

Thinking of death, a great artist, who was unfortunately a pagan, the Countesse de Noailles, felt herself broken in advance at the realization that one day there was to be an end.

"To have received all and cease to know.
What then? I was life and I am going to cease to be
For all eternity?"

For her, scarcely believing at all in the immortality of the soul, death was the end of all. Instead of imagining the tomb as an arch of triumph, an open door to the beyond, she saw it as a hole; an abyss; there is no outlet; it is closed in by the earth on both sides. She pitied herself, sorrowing at this eternal destruction of what she had felt so vibrant in life.

"Could it truly be that the universe destroys
Its most ardent creation?"

Ah yes, it is true that one day death will overtake me, and this life below, so warm, so full of desires, of curiosities, of thirsts of all kinds, will find its end. Ah, if one could only stop the march of the hours!

"Alas, if we could only tell fleeting time to wait."

No, no, time rolls on impassable. At each minute I am dying a little, but I am not aware of it. Only the last minutes of my life will be called, wrongly it is true, the time of my death. Every minute contributes to the approach of my last minute, which will definitely cut the thread of my existence. As the sentence, often written upon sun dials, expresses it: "Every hour strikes, the last kills."

I will try to remember well in this season that I am always dying. I will use this thought as an incentive truly to live every moment, that is to say, to give to each of my days its complete fruit for souls and for God.
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Adapted from Meditations for Religious
by Father Raoul Plus, S.J. (© 1939, Frederick Pustet Co.)