Our God-given gift of faith builds our true staircase to Heaven. We take the first step by making the choice to believe in God, eternity, and the reality of our resurrection through Christ even though we know the whole staircase will not be visible to us until we too die and ascend it. Yes, faith that our loved ones do survive death and enjoy eternal happiness and that we will join them one day is the greatest healing and comfort that we can have here in this place of tears.
The faith in God which our loved ones shared with us while they were still on earth also helps build our stairway to Heaven for us. The person in Pope Francis' family who most influenced his faith and believed in his priestly vocation was his grandmother Rosa. She taught him to say the rosary and accompanied him to Mass. She read to him from the lives of the saints. When traditional Catholics believed that all Protestants were going to hell, she pointed out women from the Salvation Army to him, and told him "They are Protestants, but they are good." This was the wisdom of true religion.
Rosa gave Pope Francis a letter that she had written in a mixture of Spanish and Piedmontese (an Italian dialect) in case she died before his day of ordination. Francis keeps it to this day. She wrote that she was giving him the "modest gift" of the words of her letter:
"On this beautiful day in which you can hold in your consecrated hand Christ our Savior and on which a broad path for a deeper apostolate is opening up before you, I leave you this modest gift, which has very little material value but very great spiritual value....
"May my grandchildren, to whom I gave the best of my heart, have a long and happy life. But if one day pain, illness, or the loss of someone they love should afflict them, let them remember that one sigh before the Tabernacle, where the greatest and most venerable of the martyrs is kept, and one glance at Mary at the foot of the Cross, will cause a drop of balm to fall on the deepest and most painful wounds."
How blessed for Rosa that her beloved grandson was with her when she died, his prayers helping to usher her up that sacred staircase to eternal life!
Mark K. Shriver, son of Sergeant Shriver and Eunice (Kennedy) Shriver, writes of his family's profound influence on his faith during a time of his disillusionment with the Church. A sense of his father's real presence to him even after his death helped Mark in his grieving and in his struggles to believe:
"Lately, I had been needing my Church and my faith (the two, no matter how hard I tried, are as inseparable for me as they are for many Catholics) more than usual. My dad, Sergeant Shriver, with whom I had a very close relationship, had died two years prior, on January 18, 2011. My mother, Eunice (Kennedy) Shriver, with whom I was also very close, had died seventeen months before that, on August 11, 2009. Richard Ragsdale, nicknamed Rags, who had worked for my mom and dad for my entire life and who was like a second father to me, had died just two weeks before my mom. And my one remaining uncle, Ted Kennedy, died two weeks after my mom. These losses were a series of mighty blows.
"I kept up my Catholic routine simply because my father and mother's faith had had such a strong influence on me. Dad's faith and Catholicism had been on my mind even more since he had died. Whenever I went to mass, his spirit would end up sitting right next to me, squeezing in between my son and my daughters and wife to prod me into emulating him. His faith was his animating principle, the fuel for his discipline, for his generosity, for his politics, and the source of his constant joy." (in Shriver's book " Pilgrimage: My Search for the Real Pope Francis.")
As Pope Francis and Mark K. Shriver discovered, it is only after a loved one has ascended the stairway to Heaven, that faith allows us to ponder their lives. Even during our grieving, faith gives us the inner gift of knowing who that person really is and how profoundly she/he has affected our lives, our whole understanding of what is important in this life. This new depth of understanding is part of how our loved one truly descends the staircase to be with us. Fr. Ronald Rolheiser tells us
"We only really grasp the essence of another after he or he has gone away. When someone leaves us physically, we are given the chance to receive his or her presence a deeper way. And the pain and heartache we feel in the farewell are birth pangs, the stretching that comes with giving new birth. When someone we love has to leave us (to go on a trip, to begin a new life, or to depart from us through death), initially that will feel painful, sometimes excruciatingly so. But...even if it is death itself that takes away our loved one, eventually he or she will come back to us in a deeper way, in a presence that is warm, nurturing, and immune to the fragility of normal relationships. For me, this happened at the death of my parents. My mother and father died three months apart, when I was twenty-three years old. They were young, too young to die in my view, but death took them anyway, against my will and against theirs. Initially their deaths were experienced as very painful, as bitter. My siblings and I wanted their presence in the same way as we had always had it, physical, tangible, bodily, real. Eventually, the pain of their leaving left us, and we sensed that our parents were still with us, that all that was best in them, our mom and dad still, except that now their presence was deeper and less fragile than it had been when they were physically with us. They were with us now, real and nurturing, in a way that nothing and nobody can take away."
Faith helps us to embrace the truth that the stairway to Heaven exists, and that, while the destination, Heaven, is hidden to us here and now, Heaven is real! Faith helps us understand that while we cannot ascend that staircase, our loved ones truly do descend it to be with us in a new, deeper way, a way beyond our understanding, but real and permanent. Their spirit is with us as the Spirit of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, is with us, the Spirit which could not come to us until Jesus left us to ascend his stairway to his heavenly Father.
What spirit of ourselves will come to those we love when we die? It is worth pondering when we pray, especially when we pray in front of Jesus' Real Presence in the Eucharist. How blessed we are that his Real Presence is with us in tangible bread and wine, life-saving Food and Drink for our journey! Will our lives and deaths bring spiritual food and drink to our loved ones? Will our deaths, given to God, release a flood of life-saving spiritual blood and water to revivify and reignite with faith the ones we leave here, leave behind? Is our faith strong enough to support theirs through the times of our life and death? Will our lives and deaths be remembered as being full of love and joy and activity and acceptance, or remembered for pain, alienation, and bitterness? It is our choice.
We, with God's grace, build the stairway that links us from earth to Heaven, the stairway we will also be able to travel down to our loved ones if our faith, hope, and love are sufficient. Will our lives and our words speak to them of faith, of Jesus' Passion and Resurrection? Will our loved ones sense us sitting in the church pews with them, praying for them and with them? Will we be able to support them as they go through times of pain and disillusionment?
The choice is yours. Go, and build your stairway to Heaven in faith, hope, and love.