Resurrection for us is a daily event. … We know that we walk by Easter’s first light, and it makes us long for its fullness. (Constitutions of Holy Cross, #119)

By Michael Griffin ’93, ’04MDiv, ‘14PhD

Students forge their education at Notre Dame with discussion that happens both inside and outside of the classroom. I remember one of those formative conversations happening to me in the fall of 1989, when I was a freshman sitting in the room of our rector, a Holy Cross priest.

On this night in Morrissey Hall, the talk was of death—and the fear of death. “I have always leaned on John Dunne’s insistence that there are really only two ways to live: living with death in front of you or living with death behind you,” my rector explained. “Christians—we live with death behind us.” 

Let me be clear that this sounded like strange wisdom to this 19-year-old. This theology of baptism—in which we die with Christ to begin a new life—didn’t help me wrap my head around the idea that I have passed through the portal of death and that now only life awaits.

A few years later, probably at the suggestion of this same rector, or one of my professors, I was reading Martin Luther King, Jr., when I came upon another version of this wisdom. He wrote, “Death is not a period that ends the great sentence of life, but a comma that punctuates it to more lofty significance.” I found this perspective a little more approachable, and even found in it a beautiful grammar to describe our journey to God. 

A few thoughts come to mind as I ponder these two Notre Dame moments in which I encountered a deeply Christian vision that challenged my basic fears about dying and facing “the end.”

First, Dunne and King helped me to understand that the hope of resurrection is not only in the future. If death is behind us, then resurrection has begun. This is what the Holy Cross Constitutions mean when they say that resurrection is “a daily event.” Of course, it also requires work, which leads to my second thought.

I am constantly trying to become aware of those moments in life that simply are not subject to death. A joyful embrace with my wife, a loving smile from one of our boys, a moving insight from a student in class—these are experiences that do not decay, are not subject to death. They are carried in our bodies, yes, but carried in that element of our bodies that is not so ephemeral—they attest to a hope in the resurrection of the body and that the life of the world to come has already begun.

Michael Griffin is Assistant Professor of Theology and Director of Service Learning at Holy Cross College