Elie Wiesel once said: “Life and death are not separate domains; they meet in us, though not in God. It is possible to live with death: all one needs to do is to turn one’s back on living. It is possible to be dead and not know it.” It is possible to be dead and not know it, to be asleep and still think we are awake, bitter as an enslaved person, and still believe we are loving. Physical death, for most of us, comes last. First, there is a long series of other deaths of crucifixions. In this, too, we follow the pattern of what happened in Christ. Christ came as God’s perfect image, the most precious, sensitive, and extraordinary human being ever. It was that uniqueness and goodness which was crucified. It is that which still gets crucified in us. It is precisely in those areas of our lives where we bear God’s image perfectly, where we are most precious, most sensitive, and most special, and that invariably gets crucified. What’s calloused, tough, homogenized, survives, living on, helping us go through Life’s motions: our automatic pilot in death. Our infidelities, our lack of gratitude, our lack of prayer, our propensity to misunderstand and to hurt each other, our need to lie and rationalize, and our excessive self-preoccupations occur primarily because of what’s best in us, the image of God that lies frozen (assets we cannot touch). Our poverty and bitterness come from that. And so, we begin to settle for second best. We live on, far from fully alive, on automatic pilot, the Christ in us lying in the tomb, what’s most precious in us frozen under bitterness. Every spring, a warm sun reappears, and nature and ourselves are given the opportunity to unthaw, to resurrect, to leave behind us a string of empty tombs, to let our crucified hopes and dreams be resurrected so that, like Christ, our lives will radiate that, in the end, everything is good, reality can be trusted, love does triumph over apathy and hatred, togetherness over loneliness, peace over chaos, and forgiveness over bitterness. God is not God of the dead but of the living. Trust in His love and embrace Life. – Fr. Ron Rolheiser