Legacy MattersAn atheist until two years ago, Jennifer visits a funeral home for the first time since her conversion to Catholicism
Yesterday I found myself alone in a room with the body of a deceased person.
What surprised me about that was that it didn't feel all that different from the last time I went to a viewing before a funeral, back when I was a teenager. Not that I expected a chorus of angels or to hear the voice of God or anything, but I guess I thought it would feel noticeably different to see death face-to-face now that I'm aware of God's existence. But it didn't. It didn't feel different because seeing death so close up, then as now, stripped away any high-minded theories or explanations I might try to invoke and left me only with a certain unmistakable feeling, a feeling that came from some primordial part of my mind.
Yesterday, I was able to put my finger on just what that feeling was. I realized in that moment, standing next to a body in an open coffin in a silent room, that I was aware of something at the very deepest level of my consciousness. It was something simultaneously obvious yet easy to ignore, like the fact that there was a ceiling above my head and a floor beneath my feet. It was something I'd felt before, when I looked at my grandmother in her coffin as an atheist teenager so many years ago:
This is only a body. The soul lives on