Christ Transforms the End: A Reflection for Advent

"There is a reason why Christ is so insistent in the Gospels that the hour is short: we only have this life to find Him and enter into His Divine life."

From Crisis

By Darrick Taylor, PhD

Advent is a a time of looking towards the first coming of Christ as a baby, which is precisely why the Church spends the season contemplating His second coming at the end of time.

In February 2023, my grandfather died at the age of 97; five months later, in July of that year, my mother passed away unexpectedly at the age of 72. My mother’s death hit me and my family particularly hard, and it took some time before I could come to terms with it. I have been thinking about both of them a great deal as Advent approaches. That may sound odd, as Advent is a time for anticipating the Nativity of our Lord; but as I grow older, I look back more and more upon the loved ones who have shaped my life and passed on. Their deaths still sting, but they also bring to mind the truth of the Christian Faith which make them bearable.

I recently came across a video clip from the television show After Life, about a man who has to go on living after his wife has died. The show stars British comedian Ricky Gervais, an outspoken atheist. In the clip, someone who appears to be a colleague asks the main character that if life ends with death, then what is the point? Gervais’ character replies (in effect) that, on the contrary, life is not meaningless because there is no afterlife—because it is limited, unique, and therefore precious. I would presume most Christians would agree with Gervais’ interlocutor rather than his character, but I think there is actually something to what he says, in spite of his atheism, which is closer to the Christian view of life and death than he might imagine. 

Most Christians have in their minds today, even among Catholics, something like the “good death” as it was imagined in 19th-century America. In it, one died surrounded by family at the bedside, giving a last testament to their faith before being reunited in Heaven with them much as they were in life. The historian Drew Gilpin Faust painted a lovely picture of this idea in her book This Republic of Suffering, which details how the Civil War, with all its horrors, challenged this idea. My point is that though this picture possesses much to recommend it, it is based on the misconception that the next life will be more or less the same as this one.

The idea that we will just “go on” as before, as we have in this world, is belied by how the Gospels depict the resurrected Christ. In those accounts, Christ is very much a transformed figure: He walks through walls in John’s Gospel and tells Mary Magdalene she cannot touch Him; in Luke and Matthew, He vanishes into the heavens with His Ascension. Moreover, he already hints at this when he tells the Sadducees that human beings will not marry after the Resurrection, for “they will be like the angels in heaven.”

This may sound disturbing to some people, as life for us moderns is rather sweet and pleasant compared to that of our ancestors. But it also points to something else: that our experience of this life is unique and unrepeatable, just as it is for Gervais. In a sense, life in this world is a one-off. We will only experience life like this once, for after the Resurrection it will be vastly different. Popular ideas of Heaven obscure this difference, but Christ’s death and Resurrection have transformed our understanding of death and life. 

That is why, during this season of preparation for Christ’s Nativity, I have resolved to contemplate my own end, daunting though it may be. The traditional Christian understanding of death as a painful and dramatic separation of soul from body—when the powers of darkness come for those whose souls cling to their sins, while the angelic hosts come to take the just to be purified or into the eternal rest of the blessed—can make for harrowing reading in the works of the early Church Fathers or in devotional works like that of Fr. Martin von Cochem’s The Four Last Things. And yet, I have found this vision strangely comforting. 

Prior to my conversion to Catholicism, I feared death as a permanent end, the annihilation of my consciousness. But the idea of the endless continuance of this life, as we live it, I find equally disturbing. Both seemed like a terrible “end” to me, for they offered no ultimate completion, no resolution to the mysteries of this present life. This is why I find the traditional idea of death comforting by contrast. Whatever one’s ultimate fate in the Final Judgment, there is a closure to one’s existence. But more than this, it offers hope: hope of a sort of “translation” from one state to another, to one of perfect blessedness.

Often, the things I hope for in this life are not worthy of the attachment I give them—a football game win, a promotion, a romantic relationship. These things are good in themselves but not when measured against our final end. A large part of life here on earth consists of making slow, painful progress detaching from these things, however good they may be, and attaching ourselves to Christ. 

This is a struggle for me. Perhaps it is the unique temptation of people in contemporary life to believe their lives are unique unto themselves, that they have no greater reference point. To think our lives are lived uniquely, once and for all, for someone else, even God made Man, is sometimes hard for me to believe. I suppose that is why I chase after fleeting things so ardently.

This is what I hope to meditate on in the coming weeks. As a convert, I have always cherished Advent, partly because it returned to me the warm feelings of Christmas that both my adulthood and my former unbelief had taken from me. Christmas no longer sparked any feeling in me, separated from the childlike joys of my youth. But now Advent has become for me a prelude that announces the mystery of God’s entrance into human life.

And, like this world, it is limited—a unique span of time to prepare for the coming of the Great King. I have lived most of my life as if I had all the time in the world; but there is a reason why Christ is so insistent in the Gospels that the hour is short: we only have this life to find Him and enter into His Divine life. 
Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, famously wrote, while awaiting her execution, that “in my end is my beginning,” meaning the end of her earthly life spelled the beginning of eternal life. T.S. Eliot wove this into his poetic masterpiece Four Quartets. But this does not imply a circularity. For Christians, it names the ultimate transformation where God raises us up with Him, as we were meant to be, in true and perfect love.

Advent is a fitting time to reflect on this transformation: Christ was, in a sense, born to die—but also to bring death to an end, to bring human destiny to its fulfillment in Him. May all those who love Christ enjoy His blessings in this season and have hope in Him even as their end approaches. For every end is also a beginning. But in Christ’s death and Resurrection, they become one—the final reunion that lasts forever.