A reading from the Book of the prophet Ezekiel (37:1-14)
The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me all round them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. He said to me, ‘Mortal, can these bones live?’ I answered, ‘O Lord God, you know.’ Then he said to me, ‘Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath*to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath*in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.’
So I prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, ‘Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath:*Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath,*and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.’ I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.
Then he said to me, ‘Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.” Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act, says the Lord.’
From a talk, "That Which is to Come," by Karl Rahner (+1984)
[...] It seems to me that the models and schemes people use to try and explain eternal life in general don't fit the radical rupture that nevertheless comes with death. People think to themselves about an eternal life that is generally described -- and this is already strange -- as "on the other side" and "after" death; these thoughts are dressed up too much with realities that are familiar to us here: continuing to live on; meeting with those who were close to us here; friends; happiness; banquets; joy and all that kind of thing. These things are presented as never ceasing, as carrying on. I'm worried that the radical past-all-graspness of what "eternal life" really refers to is being rendered innocuous, and that what we call the immediate vision of God in this eternal life is being leveled down to one among others of the pleasant occupations that fill this life. The ineffable outrageousness of the absolute Godhead in person falling stark naked into our narrow creaturehood is not being perceived authentically. I confess that it seems to me an agonizing task for today's theologian -- one that hasn't been managed -- to discover a better imaginative model for this eternal life that prevents these devaluings from the outset. But how? But how? When the angels of death have swept all the worthless rubbish that we call our history out of the rooms of our consciousness (though of course the true reality of our actions in freedom will remain); when all the stars of our ideals, with which we ourselves in our own presumption have draped the heaven of our own lived lives, have burned out and are now extinguished; when death has built a monstrous, silent void, and we have silently accepted this in faith and hope as our true identity; when then our life so far, however long it has been, appears only as a single, short explosion of our freedom that previously presented itself to us stretched out in slow motion, an explosion in which question has become answer, possibility reality, time eternity, and freedom offered freedom accomplished; when then we are shown in this monstrous shock of joy beyond saying that this monstrous, silent void, which we experience as death, is in truth filled with the originating mystery that we call God, with God's light and with God's love that receives all things and gives all things; and when then out of this pathless mystery the face of Jesus, the blessed one, appears to us and this specific reality is thedivine surpassingof all that we truly assume regarding the past-all-graspness of the pathless God -- then, then I don't actually want to describe anything like this, but nevertheless, I do want to stammer out some hint of how a person can for the moment expect what is to come: by experiencing the submergence that is death as already the rising of what is coming. Eighty years is a long time. But for all of us, the lifetime assigned to us is the short moment in which what is meant to be comes to be.
Musical Selection(Melissa Dunphy)
Prayer
Lord,
in our grief we turn to you.
Are you not the God of love
who open your ears to all?
Listen to our prayers for your servants,
whom you have called out of this world:
lead them to your kingdom of light and peace
and count them among the saints in glory.
We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,