By DONALD DeMARCO
Ambrose Bierce, noted for his cynical aphorisms, once asked why he should do anything for posterity since posterity never did anything for him. As Molly of old time radio would say to her usually misguided husband, “It ain’t funny, McGee.” There was a time when posterity preceded the likes of Ambrose Bierce. He is the beneficiary of an earlier time when people made their contribution to posterity. The past is prologue to the future. None of us can be isolated from the sweep of time.
Two Boston College feminist authors have advised that a good mate would be a man who has vasectomy scars and a deceased mother. Whether or not this duo was trying to be whimsical, they nonetheless succeeded in providing us with a perfect image of dislocation in time. It is precisely this temporal dislocation that appeals to so many people today. Unencumbered by future progeny and nagging mothers-in-law, a woman can be free to control of her own destiny.
There is no greater illusion. To be deprived of hope for those yet to be born and piety for those who preceded us is, indeed, a terrible deprivation. We owe our ancestors a great debt of gratitude and the most appropriate way of repaying that debt is to provide for our descendants.
A passage from William Wordsworth’s Excursion exemplifies the continuity of generations and how the living and the dead are mysteriously and inexorably linked together: “And when the stream which overflowed the soul was passed away, a consciousness remained that it had left deposited upon the silent shore of memory images and precious thought that shall not die, and cannot be destroyed.”
We are temporal beings and our work is to build from the legacy of the past to ensure a better future.
Pope St. John Paul II, who was both a philosopher and a poet, had this to say on the same subject: “The seed was sown; it has known the rigors of winter, but the seed has sprouted, and became a tree. It is a matter of the organic growth of a tree becoming every stronger the deeper it sinks its roots into the soul of tradition.”
Our culture believes wholeheartedly in progress, though it has little respect for tradition. Yet, we may ask, how does anything grow if it has no roots? For John Paul II, tradition is a life-giving factor that feeds and nourishes the future. And, as G.K. Chesterton has affirmed in his Orthodoxy, “Tradition is the democracy of the dead. It means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes: our ancestors.”
I know of no more simple and beautiful way of stating our place in the stream of time than a conversation that takes place in Alex Haley’s celebrated book, Roots. Omoro, one of the principal characters in the story, is trying to explain life and death to young Kunta Kinte. He begins by saying that there are three groups of people who live in every village. He refers to those whom we see walking around, eating, sleeping, and working. The second group consists of those who have passed away whom Grandma Yaisa has now joined. “And the third people — who are they?” asked Kunta. The third group, Omoro avers, “are those waiting to be born.”
On a far more esoteric level, Einstein had something important to say about the integration of space and time. Omoro’s explanation is something that even a child can understand. We revere the past, honor the present, and hope for the future. The extended family prays for the departed, labors for the living, and builds for posterity. It is natural for our love to reach out to the deceased, to embrace those who surround us, and to provide for the next generation.
The doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ attests that all Christians are united into a spiritual body with Jesus Christ as their head. In addition, the unity — and the cooperation — of all the members of the Church on Earth, in Purgatory, and in Heaven is called the Communion of Saints.
It is easy for the Christian to understand how the three groups of people described in Haley’s book can interact. It is a beautiful and salutary thing for a pregnant mother to pray to a saint for the health of her unborn child.
Fulton J. Sheen, in 1935 when he was a Monseigneur, wrote a 404-page book entitled The Mystical Body of Christ. It is a work that is both thorough and reader-friendly.
“The Mystical Body,” he writes, “in its entirety includes not only its members on Earth who are still working out their salvation, but those who have died in God’s favour but without payment of the last farthing of the debt of sin, and finally those who already have been received into eternal bliss and glory.”
In other words, there are three groups of people that compose the Mystical Body of Christ: The Church Militant on Earth; The Church Suffering in Purgatory; and The Church Triumphant in Heaven.
The reciprocal relationships that transpire between the inhabitants of these three groups constitute what Catholic Tradition has called the Communion of Saints.
It is most gratifying and reassuring to know that we are not cut off in time from others who came before us and that we have a spiritual relationship with those who will follow us. To be evicted from the Communion of Saints or even in the sense that Omoro describes to Kunta Kinte is a deprivation so sinister and severe that it conjures up the notion of Hell. Dislocation in time is not freedom but a dissociation from the entire human race, consisting of both the living and the dead.
(Dr. Donald DeMarco is a professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University, and an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College and Seminary. He is a regular columnist for the St. Austin Review. His latest books, How to Navigate Through Life and Apostles of the Culture of Life, are posted on amazon.com.)
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