Probably won't read this...

You don't have to read this either. I'm by no means a faithful blogger or blog reader and frankly I don't want to be. Spending even more time on the internet is not among my interests.

The people who might just actually read this already know I am headed to Rome for one school year. They also know that this great blessing comes with the pain of leaving one of the best places on earth and more importantly my good friends there. This won't turn into your cliche travel blog because I'm going to start off talking about this journey by discussing one we all have to experience: death.

I probably err on a morbid side of thought because I very often associate the act of leaving and saying goodbye with death. I'm not being dramatic nor do I experience this in a dramatic way. I mean quite bluntly that one day, like it or not, we are going to die and dying involves a kind of parting. Goodbyes are difficult even if they are relatively temporary. When I addressed some of these thoughts this past weekend I followed up with the statement that thankfully "death is a very hopeful thing". Hope needs a purpose, an end, something to hope for. Hope is as lonely and dead as anything without an objective. It needs to be tested or else there is no need for it. We ultimately hope for the heavenly reward for ourselves and our friends and those "who have gone before us with the sign of faith, and rest in the sleep of peace".

Death should be accompanied by hope because we cannot even achieve life without going through it. I mean everlasting life. We are urged to "die to ourselves and live in Christ" spiritually. Bodily we grow and mature and eventually die but spiritually we ought to experience a similar progression only the death involved is one to anything contrary to God. I would venture to say we should be reminded of this in the minor "deaths" we may experience from day to day like leaving friends and family. Catholics talk about offering things up and saints write about "suffering little deaths" and it all sounds so morbid and even masochistic, right? Yet while the world is cowering in confused disgust at ossuaries and gasping at the indecency of mentioning the word death, the Church is turned with an eager heart to the hope of resurrection and the paradox of the crucifixion: "by dying He destroyed our death; by rising He restored our life".

Capuchin ossuary in Rome.

St. Francis said it eloquently in the Canticle of the Sun:

Be praised, my Lord, through our sister Bodily Death,
from whose embrace no living person can escape.
Woe to those who die in mortal sin!
Happy those she finds doing Your most holy will.
The second death can do no harm to them.

One can talk about death for a very long time and there are of course a great many saints who say a great many good things about the subject. However, all of this is to say that throughout this life and in the small goodbyes we are, in the words of Jon Foreman, learning how to die.

But death is a hopeful thing! We hope to be reunited in Christ where there can be no true separation. So we shoulder our struggles and do our duties. After all, "Christians never say goodbye!"* (And Rome, c'mon. It's going to be fun.)

*C.S. Lewis -- A Severe Mercy