Pineridge Blog

Dying before we Die (Part 2)

Part of the hope of Easter is that we can “die before we die,” (Part 2)

Ilia Delio writes in her book Making All Things New: “God is radically involved with the world, empowering the world toward fullness in love, but God is unable to bring about this fullness with-out the cooperation of humans. Human and divine cannot co-create unto the fullness of life without death as an integral part of life. Isolated, independent existence must be given up in order to enter into broader and potentially deeper levels of existence. Bonaventure [1217–1274] speaks of life in God as a “mystical death,” a dying into love: “Let us, then, die and enter into the darkness; let us impose silence upon our cares, our desires and our imaginings. With Christ Crucified let us pass out of this world to the Father.”

“Only by dying into God can we become one with God, let-ting go of everything that hinders us from God. Clare of Assi-si [1194–1253] spoke of “the mirror of the cross” in which she saw in the tragic death of Jesus our own human capacity for violence and, yet, our great capacity for love. Empty in itself, the mirror simply absorbs an image and returns it to the one who gives it. Discovering ourselves in the mirror of the cross can empower us to love beyond the needs of the ego or the need for self-gratification. We love despite our fragile flaws when we see ourselves loved by One greater than ourselves. In the mirror of the cross we see what it means to share in divine power. To find oneself in the mirror of the cross is to see the world not from the foot of the cross but from the cross itself. How we see is how we love, and what we love is what we become.”

Richard Rohr reflects: “True life comes only through many, many journeys of loss and regeneration wherein we gradual-ly learn who God is for us in a very experiential way. Letting go is the nature of all true spirituality and transformation, summed up in the phrase: “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.”