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by Carol Luebering

Gil died when the car he was riding in side-swiped a telephone pole. Within a few days the pole that the car had struck was covered with remembrances of his life—photos, notes, his football jersey number—as his stunned friends and classmates tried to "reach out and touch" him across a new, incomprehensible distance.

Gil's death raised a lot of questions. Where is he now? Will we ever see him again? What happens when you die?

We have, of course, no firsthand reports, but we do have some educated guesswork. A branch of theology with a jaw­breaking name (eschatology, derived from the Greek word meaning "last") searches Scripture, tradition and our understanding of the world around us for clues to the "last things": death, judgment, heaven and hell. This Youth Update will help you to explore Catholic belief about these issues.

The Mystery of Death

Death makes a hole in our world. It separates us from people we love, and that hurts. But what does it mean to die?

Gil's body stopped working. He stopped breathing; his heart didn't beat, the electrical activity in his brain ceased. But what happened to the person—to his sense of humor, his feelings for his girlfriend, his fondness for country music, his gift for making friends?

For centuries Christians have spoken of a soul that leaves the body at death. Jewish thought in Jesus' time didn't divide a human being into parts. It was the Greeks who thought of us as something spiritual trapped in a body. When Christianity spread beyond Jerusalem to the Greek world, that idea crept in.

Modern science, which measures brain activity and unravels the marvelous strands of DNA that make us unique, has brought us closer to Jewish understanding. We are indeed body-persons; our identity is closely linked to our physical selves. It's hard for us to think of being without a body, but soul is still the best word we have for our inner reality.

Our ideas about life after death have changed, too. What we believe today about heaven and hell and judgment has developed slowly over many centuries. It depends not only on our understanding of physical reality, but also on how we see God—as an angry judge or as a merciful and loving parent. This is the God who so loved the world that he sent Jesus to save us.

Resurrection: A Promise

Gil's funeral Mass, like every Catholic funeral, spotlighted two things: Jesus' resurrection and Gil's baptism. When his casket came into church, it was covered with a white cloth as a reminder of his Baptism. Throughout the Mass, the lighted Easter candle, the sign of the risen Christ's presence, stood in front of Gil's coffin.

These words and symbols are not just to make funerals more elaborate. They insist that Jesus rose from the dead. They promise that, just as death was not the last word for Jesus, it is not the last word for anyone who has become part of his Body by baptism.

No one saw Jesus leave the tomb. The Gospels offer just two facts: Jesus' tomb was empty, and people saw him alive after his burial. Yet that scrappy testimony tells something important about Jesus' resurrection and ours: It is, as we profess in the Creed, a resurrection of the body. Like the Lord, we will rise not as spirits, but as whole persons.

We will rise—but when and how? Scripture gives a few clues to how. The disciples saw the risen Lord. He ate with the apostles and with a couple from Emmaus, near Jerusalem. He invited Thomas to touch his wounds. Yet his friend Mary Magdalene and the disciples who walked with him to Emmaus were slow to recognize him. He moved through locked doors. His body was the same and yet different.

St. Paul answered the question of how we will rise by comparing a buried body to a seed. What comes up in the spring is not more seeds, but a beautiful green plant (see 1 Corinthians 15:42b-44a). Our risen bodies will not just be put back together. (Every cell in your bodies has already been replaced many times, anyway!) They will, like Jesus', be different and yet the same.

When is another question. The first Christians thought that the dead simply slept, awaiting Jesus' return. Of course, they expected him to show up any day. As the centuries rolled by, believers began to wonder more about their dead. By the 14th century they agreed that people faced an individual judgment and entered heaven, hell or purgatory immediately after death. Our habit of praying to the saints and praying for the dead stems from that belief.

The folks who first shaped our ideas of life after death thought of places above the clouds or beneath the earth. They thought in concrete terms of actual physical locations. Astronauts have returned from space with the news that the world is larger than we imagine while scientists have measured matter far smaller than molecules. We know now that the sky is not a lid over our planet, but a far-flung universe full of whirling galaxies and black holes. Light switches set electrons moving; your chair is a mass of spinning atomic particles.

It's much more helpful in our age to think of the "places" as states of being. You already know two such ways. One is the way of human life such as you are now experiencing. You don't remember the other, but before you were born, you lived in underwater darkness, aware of little but your mother's heartbeat. You didn't need to eat or breathe; Mom took care of all that. You had the same body you have now, but it worked differently; your life was very different.

In Christian belief, death is very like birth: the beginning of a new way of being, and being able to recognize at last the Person who has been supporting and blessing us in this human journey.

Purgatory: Between Heaven and Hell

Gil's oldest friend is a next-door neighbor. Gil's funeral was not the first for Hank; his grandma and his little sister both died within the last few years and were buried from his family's Protestant church. But it was his first Catholic funeral, and he was surprised that people prayed for Gil.

Catholics pray for the dead, because Catholics believe in purgatory, a "place" between heaven and hell. Some folks think of purgatory as a place where the dead have to suffer punishment for a while before getting into heaven. But the word means "purification," not punishment.

There's something called a near-death experience—the remarkably similar stories told by people who have been revived after their hearts and breathing have stopped. They speak of being enveloped in the warmth and love of a "being of light." This being replays for them their whole life.

If we're talking about states of being, about a reality that exists beyond space and time, perhaps purgatory is like that: a time of transition between life and death, the first time we see God face-to-face.

Imagine meeting an expert in something you love to do. You're on the basketball team—and Michael Jordan appears in your driveway to toss a few baskets with you. You like to sing—and Mariah Carey suggests a duet. Do you jump right in? Hardly! You stand there speechless, feeling a little awed and a lot humbled.

Meeting the God who is all-good, all-loving—all-everything we think is great—is more than a little awesome. In God's blinding light, all our faults and failings will stand out like zits on prom night. All of us will feel not just humbled, but humiliated—painfully so. We'll have no choice but to own all the gaps in our goodness. Only then will we be ready to celebrate eternally that God has been so good to us.

Catholics believe that their prayers can speed the process of people getting to heaven. Prayer is a powerful way of being with someone, standing with another in God's presence even when that person is far away. Prayer is the original time and space traveler. It can even cross the distance between the living and the dead.

Heaven: Let's Party!

The people who loved Gil hope, of course, that he is in heaven. But what kind of state is heaven?

Have you ever been in a party mood? Biblical authors often talk about a gigantic party with an endless supply of good things to eat and drink (see Isaiah 25:6). This party is not only enjoying God's company, but also a great reunion where Gil and his friends will meet again.

You can't get into the spirit of a party if you ignore all the other guests. Our relationship with God is always tied up with our relationships to other people. Indeed, when Jesus spoke of entry into heaven, he stressed care for others: the hungry and thirsty, the lonely and needy (see Matthew 25:35-40). He didn't rule out the people we love. St. Paul named three things that last, and insisted that the greatest is love (see 1 Corinthians 13:13).

The love we give now will last forever. Popular writer Father Leonard Foley, O.F.M., once added that in heaven we will, like God, be able to love perfectly. No more mixed feelings about your parents; no matter that a friend once let you down—hard!

In this life, the best parties end. There comes a point when you cannot hold your eyes open another moment, when your stomach is full and your feet hurt. In thinking of the life to come, it's hard for us to imagine that we wouldn't tire of anything that goes on forever.

But the address on the invitation to the heavenly banquet reads "beyond time." Sometimes in this life, time "stands still"—when you are with a special person, or so absorbed in something you enjoy that you don't notice the clock. Such moments are a foretaste of heaven.

Cincinnati Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk suggests remembering all the moments you wish could last forever. "All that will be ours in eternity," he says, "affirmed and enhanced beyond our wildest imagination."

You may have heard rumors of one more "place" in the Catholic map of the afterlife: limbo. It's been described as a kind of suburb of heaven; the word means "the border." Limbo was proposed by thoughtful persons struggling to understand what happens to babies (including miscarried infants) who didn't live long enough to be baptized, much less to make moral choices. It is described as a state of happiness too far from the heavenly party for a glimpse of God.

The funeral rite offers this prayer for the parents of an unbaptized child: "May they find comfort in knowing that he (she) is entrusted to your loving care." This prayer reflects our faith. While we believe Baptism is necessary to gain supernatural life, Catholics also believe that God can work the divine will that people be saved in ways that we can't understand or imagine.

Hell: The Demands of Justice

But what about punishment? Who wants to sit beside a mass murderer or a cruel dictator at the heavenly banquet? It's hard to see how even God's mercy could run that deep! What about God's justice? Our concept of justice includes punishment. Human beings like the idea of hell—perhaps better than God does.

Jesus insisted very firmly that God's justice is very different from human justice. He was really hard on the folks who scolded him for keeping company with sinners. Given that Jesus reaches out to sinners, we have to acknowledge that sinners may refuse to reach out in return. We all make choices that turn us toward God and neighbor or away from them. One day our life ends, and with it the ability to make further choices. It may be more accurate to say that we damn ourselves than to say that God condemns us to hell.

A well-worn story from Korea describes heaven as a huge dinner party. All the guests have chopsticks six feet long. They cannot feed themselves; they can only put choice tidbits into one another's mouths. Hell is just the same, but the guests, too caught up in selfishness, refuse to feed one another, and forever wail with hunger.

We can't decide who belongs in hell. That's God's decision. But if we don't take the possibility seriously, we aren't taking ourselves seriously, either. Our decisions matter—eternally.

Judgment: The End of the World

Some parts of the Bible describe the end of the world as a pretty awful event. When David Koresh and his followers settled into a Waco, Texas, compound to await the end of the world, they were prepared for a bloody shootout.

Catholic Scripture scholars warn against taking biblical descriptions of judgment and punishment at face value. Rather, these pictures are meant to stress the urgency of the gospel and the seriousness of our daily decisions. This, after all, is the moment for which we "wait in joyful hope," as the priest prays after the Our Father.

When Jesus' ancestors talked about God's judgment, they pictured a civil case, not a criminal trial, and believed that the judge would settle the suit in their favor. Speaking of his return on the last day, Jesus told his followers to "stand erect and raise your heads because your redemption is at hand" (Luke 21:28).

The same biblical book in which Koresh's Branch Davidians found reason to stock up on machine guns promises that our troubled world will become a new creation—the "new heaven and new earth" of Revelation 21:1. For all of God's creation is too precious to be wasted; the Creator wants to save it all.

We have only a dim idea of what the new world will look like. Like our risen bodies, it will be the same but different. What counts is the promise that it will be a world without pain or suffering, oppression or death.

When St. Paul spoke of judgment, he could have been talking about birth: "At present I know partially; then I shall know fully, as I am fully known" (1 Corinthians 13:12b). Truly, no one knows us so well, yet accepts us so fully and loves us with such passion as God does.

God did not make death, the Scripture says (Wisdom 1:13). God makes life—forever. Gil's friends will keep the memories they nailed to a telephone pole—and celebrate them with him again.

Carol Luebering is a book editor and has written many books herself on issues connecting personal and family life to the public life of the Church. She is the author of many Catholic Updates and two previous Youth Updates.

Danielle Butsch, 15; Nate Depenbrock, 16; Denise Lageman, 15; Angie Marshall, 17; and Ben Wilmhoff, 16; all from St. Timothy Parish in Union, Kentucky, reviewed this edition of Youth Update.