I received an email recently, asking me could I give any idea of wha awaits us in the next life. This was my effort at an answer:
You do ask difficult question!! And I am afraid nobody has a definite answer to that one. No one has come back to tell us what the next life is like.
Many people have told me over the years that when someone very close to them dies, and after a period of grief and loneliness, they gradually get a sense that the person is close to them. Not that they can talk, and get an answer in words. But they feel a very comforting presence which sustains them.
I hope that you too will experience that presence and closeness.
Some modern writers talk of God as being the energy that sustains all of creation, and whose outstanding characteristics are relationship and love. They go so far as to say that God is in each one of us. And they suggest that when we die the deepest part of us, our spirit or soul, becomes subsumed into the eternal presence of God, where we too live in relationship and love for eternity. Will we still have our own individuality, and will we know the people we loved in this life? I hope we will, but we cannot be sure of the answer to that.
What is important, I believe, is to rid ourselves of all fear, and to face death and whatever follows with eagerness and openness to the mystery of it all. I believe that eternity, and life with God, will be greater and more wonderful than anything we can imagine.
I hope those few thoughts are of some help to you.
