‘Be compassionate as your heavenly father is compassionate. Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven.’ (Luke 6:36f) This is no parable. Our Lord is very clear here. ‘Forgive and you will be forgiven.’ We must often have reflected that the only petition in the Our Father with a condition attached is the one relating to forgiveness. It is also the only one on which Christ offers any comment later, when he says: ‘For if you do not forgive others their sins, neither will your heavenly Father forgive you.’ It is quite a sobering thought, since we find forgiving some injuries, even quite small ones, difficult. We hug them to ourselves and the resentment and anger, instead of abating, can grow, fester and turn to bitterness. True, the white heat of our initial rage may subside in to a red hot anger, but then it can morph into an ice-cold hatred, which can masquerade as indifference. That is rather an extreme case. Quite often, we do ‘get over it’, though the issue has not been addressed and the anger doesn’t quite go away.

Perhaps the fear of not being forgiven our own sins is not enough. Luke can help us here. ‘Give, and there will be gifts for you: a full measure, pressed down, shaken together, and overflowing, will be poured into your lap; because the standard you use will be the standard used for you.’ Here the same teaching is presented to us in a more positive form, as the benefits of forgiveness are outlined. We are being told to be generous, and generosity is the very key-word of our religion. Generosity with God and with others and…with ourselves. There are occasions when we need to forgive ourselves. So many of us don’t and continue to beat ourselves up for our ‘past sins and transgressions’ which can ‘cause us to falter’ on our way to God. Instead, we need to keep going, acting without fear, by which I mean, without a craven fear, since we should have a healthy filial Fear of the Lord — which is, after all, one of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit! St Philip would pray : ‘Give me the grace dear Lord, to serve you not out of fear, but from love.’ Otherwise we are merely slaves, doing what is required, ticking boxes, hoping to get the job done without receiving a beating.

God’s mercy is inexhaustible, but it is sometimes the case that we erect barriers which prevent us from being able to receive it. And our being unforgiving is chief among these. If we say we cannot forgive such-and-such a person, God can deal with that. There is here a suggestion of a willingness to forgive, but for the present we are not yet ready to do so. The wound still smarts too much. So we pray about it, asking of the Lord the grace to reach the moment when we can offer forgiveness and genuinely so. On those occasions when the hurt is too great and the offence has been deliberate and its effects devastating, we need longer. We may have to take many steps back in order run forward. We may have to want to want to forgive. Or even to want to want to want to do so. But if we say we will not forgive and wilfully persist in our unforgivingness, do we not exclude ourselves from heaven, which is God’s space? ‘Be merciful, as your Father is merciful.’ Think of the Father in the parable of the Prodigal Son and you have there the image of God which Jesus wants us to know and to love, with whom ‘there is mercy and plentiful redemption.’ Furthermore, he tells us that we are to love this God and our neighbour with all our strength. Forgiving someone who has injured us or those we love may indeed require all the strength of mind, heart and soul we can muster, but try we must, knowing that our eternal salvation may well depend on it.

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November is a month when the Church asks us to pray for the faithful departed, and in doing so to reflect upon death. We may not relish contemplating our mortality, but doing so is an essential element of a well-lived life, a Christian life, realising that our life on earth will decide how we spend eternity. St Benedict in his Rule tells his monks, “Remember to keep death before your eyes daily”. Cardinal Basil Hume, when abbot of Ampleforth, was asked once by a prospective parent what the school could offer his son, and replied that the school did not prepare boys for life, but for death. St Therese of Lisieux expressed the same sentiment in a different way: “The world is a beautiful bridge, but do not build your home on it”.

Catholic tradition and culture has always kept death before our eyes, but the secular world — despite the ghouls and ghosts and skeletons of Halloween — has worked hard to bury death deeply in the vaults of history. Society cannot deal with death, ignoring it, hiding it in hospitals and hospices, seeing it as an enemy that must be fought at almost any cost. And the reason is fear. We fear what we cannot see — what we do not understand. It is the fear of the unknown, of what is hiding under the bed. When we are faced with fear, the natural tendency is to push it away: we pretend that death will not happen or can be cheated.

There is a danger, however, in this cover-up. We forget one of the most profound truths of life: that it is finite. The death of a loved one will always be a terrible experience, and no amount of preparation will make the pain go away more quickly. But if we have lived a life of silence about death, if we have not thought about it, confronted it — even made friends with it — we are ill-equipped to deal with grief, to know what to do, or how to console others. We keenly sense that we are alone inside an experience that the world will not recognise; yet it is going to be experienced by everybody.

We can talk about death because we believe in the Lord who said, “I am the resurrection and the life. If anyone believes in me, even though he dies he will live. Anyone who lives and believes in me, will never die”. The Kingdom of God is not a place of fear, because it has been opened for us by a God who descended into the worst fears of human reality for our sake. He shared human pain and human fear. As we contemplate the fearful unknown of human death, he embraced it for us, that we might live in eternal life with him.

Cardinal Hume was able to face the news of his own terminal illness with the assurance of faith, despite his fears:

As we approach the last bit of the journey there are days when we fear that we face an unknown, unpredictable, uncertain future. That is a common experience. But do not worry; because the time comes when we no longer carry heavy bags and all those possessions. We shall travel through the cold, grey light of a bleak… morning into God’s spring and summer. Death is the only way which leads us to the vision of God.

He had earlier in his ministry as a bishop reflected that

Death is a formidable foe until we learn to make it a friend.
Death is to be feared if we do not learn to welcome it.
Death is the ultimate absurdity if we do not see it as fulfilment.
Death haunts us when viewed as a journey into nothingness
rather than a pilgrimage to a place where true happiness is to be found.

The human mind cannot understand death.
We face it with fear and uncertainty, revulsion even;
or we turn away from the thought for it is too hard to bear.
But faith gives answers when reason fails.
The strong instinct to live points to immortality.
Faith admits us into death’s secrets.

Death is not the end of the road, but a gateway to a better place.
It is in this place that our noblest aspirations will be realised.
It is here that we will understand how our experiences of goodness,
love beauty and joy are realities which exist perfectly in God.
It is in heaven that we shall rest in him and
our hearts will be restless until they rest in God.

It is said that when the Cardinal informed his successor as abbot of Ampleforth that he was dying, the response was: “Congratulations! That’s brilliant news. I wish I was coming with you.”

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