Death & Rebirth (2-23-16)

What is death and rebirth? Aside from a great name for the next Sepultura song it can mean a lot of things to a lot of people.

The concepts of “death and rebirth” mean different things to different people. I don’t claim to understand them as everyone does, nor am I able to explain them for everyone who dwells on them. I can explain them as I see them and shed some light to someone perhaps. Our ancestors believed very differently than we do now and our descendants will probably have even newer understandings of these concepts.

As a lifelong practicing Roman Catholic the concepts of death and rebirth have been pretty consistent to me throughout my life, except that the terms I used changed. As a child, though, I tended to think of it in terms and life and death in this world only. Life was after I was born and death was when I was buried in the ground. As I grew physically, mentally and spiritually, I realized that the life and death on this earth were only a small part of a bigger life and death concept. This realization came about from religious education early in life self-study later in life. My understanding of life and death became my understanding of death and rebirth as I continued studying the writings of past Catholic Church leaders and experiencing my life.

One big thing to note is that Catholics believe in our physical bodies and our spiritual bodies. Our spiritual bodies have no end but our physical bodies die and decay. The human spiritual body is called a “soul” to Catholics and it has no physical form. It resides in our physical body while we are on this earth but can’t be pinpointed as to where it actually is within our body. The soul begins in Heaven and returns there when the body dies. In the span of the soul’s timeline, the time on earth is negligible. A Catholic’s goal is to live a good enough life here on earth so that our soul can return to Heaven when our body dies. Only pure purity can be in Heaven. If we are not good enough for our soul to return to our Heavenly home, then our soul still lives on but it goes somewhere else. Catholics believe that the soul can go to Heaven, Hell or Purgatory. Heaven is when our soul is pure. Purgatory is where our soul goes, for an undefined amount of time, to be purified before it goes to Heaven. Hell is where our souls go when they are too corrupt to be purified. A soul in Hell will never return to Heaven whereas a soul in Purgatory can. So, our physical body dies and decays to dust while our spiritual body continues on for infinity.

When I was younger I thought of death as the end of our physical bodies and I thought of rebirth as meaning reincarnation and therefore dismissed it since Catholics do not believe in reincarnation at all. As I grew and studied early church writings my understanding of death remained the same but I began to open up to the idea that rebirth simply meant that our souls were starting a new chapter in their journey, just as our physical birth is a new chapter in the full spiritual journey of our souls. With that understanding, I now see life, death and rebirth as different stages for our souls in an infinite road they travel.