The thin veil

It’s not good for man to be alone, God said when SHe saw Adam in that beautiful, brand new garden. There should be a companion, a partner for him to share his life with. And thus happened. Ever since we see people seeking other people to bond with and forming all kinds of relationships. People join convents, communes, communities to meet and connect with kindred spirits. For it is in those relationships that we thrive best. In that connectedness we find friendship, understanding, support, care, love.
That’s why we connect and bond. Relationships make us more US. Relationships make us strong and beautiful, happy and confident. And therein lies it’s greatest weakness. We lose a lot when this relationship comes to an end. We only feel half the person we were before; we feel amputated and lost and more alone than we’ve ever felt before in our lives.
At one point or another, we all suffer such a loss. Some even more than once in their lifetime. Apart from the how and when, our condition at such a moment is pretty much the same. We stare into the abyss of our grief and all we see in this – apparently – bottomless pit is utter darkness. We wonder if and how we will ever get over this heartache. Will there ever be joy again; will I ever see light again? Where has my loved one gone?
Throughout the bible we read stories of such pain and despair and agony, and we hear these questions asked by all kinds of people. And staring in our abyss of grief, numb, paralysed almost, we are not able to see the other stories and hear the answers of other people; the words of comfort and hope and light they speak.
First the prophets and later Jesus himself, tell us time and again that all that is precious to God will never ever perish. It cannot. For that is not how it’s meant to be. That is not how God made things. That is not how God made us. Especially in the gospel of John we hear time after time how God and Jesus are connected and that the essence of this connection is love, and that furthermore we are incorporated in this love, from time began to the end of eternity.
We are all connected in this strong bond of love, whatever our material shape or condition is, wherever we find ourselves in this vast universe. And that is the point we easily miss, when staring in our abyss. We focus too much on the physical aspects of life and death. Which is of course totally understandable because we live in a material world. For the time being we exist in matter, in a physical body.
But the pitfall is that we believe that the moment the physical body is gone, the whole person is gone. Which is not true and cannot even be possible as I stated earlier. What made our loved one so dear and precious to us in life, is exactly the same that makes him or her precious and dear to God, and that does not die with the physical body, because that is simply not how we are made or meant to be. That most beautiful and most precious part of us is divine and eternal by nature. It comes from God and it returns to God to be forever in this limitless realm of light, this all-embracing bond of love.
When it comes to it, death is best compared with a thin veil. Some are on this side, and some are on the other side. And due to an awkward situation of unequal timeliness, some pass to the other side of that veil, while others still have to wait a little longer before it’s their turn. Yes, we are separated, but only for a while, and surely we’re not so far apart as we often fear.