Life After Death

+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
4 Nov 2001

This week saw the celebration of Halloween, one of our more recent cultural imports from the United States. It was a festival unknown in Australia when a was growing up. This is no longer the case thanks mainly to marketing, especially that directed at children.

"Halloween" is a contraction of "All Hallow Even" a the evening before the feast of All Hallows or All Saints Day, as we say today. Halloween as we know it now is just a bit of childish fun, all about ghosts, monsters and skulls. All Saints Day on November a - and All Souls Day, which follows on November a - is about something very different: the reality of life after death.

Life after death is not just a Christian belief. Most of the major world religions believe in some form of life after death, and in the West it goes back well before Christianity. Plato saw the body as the soul's prison, so that death meant liberation. The bodily resurrection of Jesus brought a different perspective, helping us to see the person as a unity of body and soul.

There are many arguments that can be made supporting the reality of life after death, although today people tend to think that unless something can be proved either scientifically or from experience it does not exist. But these things are not always the best guides.

Too often, scientific proof is reduced to the claim that unless you can hold something in your hands it does not exist. On this basis, we would be unable to "prove" the existence of consciousness because it cannot be located in the brain. And yet there is no doubt that consciousness is a reality. Likewise, "near-death experiences," although powerfully convincing for the person concerned (Mr Packer assures us from his own near-death experience that there is nothing there) prove little to those who have not experienced them.

For Christians, the most powerful proof is the witness of the apostles to the resurrection of Jesus. Mary Magdalene was the first to see the risen Lord, and many others saw him after her. That they were seeing a person and not a ghost is attested by the witness of Thomas who was invited by Jesus to touch the wounds left in his body by the crucifixion (Jn 20:27).

The English writer C. S. Lewis argued that every innate human desire indicates the reality of the thing desired. Hunger proves the existence of food. Curiosity proves the existence of knowledge. That some of our desires a such as those for justice or meaning a are often not satisfied in this life does not mean they are delusions, but points to the continuation of life after death.

This is especially true of love. As the planes hijacked by the terrorists on September 11 approached their targets, passengers used their mobile phones to call their families and say good-bye. Over and over again the message was the same: three small words a "I love you." This does not seem like much against the hideous violence and destruction that obliterated these people and killed thousands. But clinging to these words in the face of death comes from a deep and very sound human instinct; one which tell us that love is not in vain, and that love and life continue after death.