Momento Espírita
Curitiba, 29 de Março de 2024
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ícone The unwanted people

Have we ever wondered, what we would do if, suddenly, a cruel disease embraced us and then our death sentence was decreed?

Or, if in full activity, death would arrive and snatch us?

The proximity of death has already led several privileged minds to reflect on life. Some have turned that reflection into words.

The neurologist and English writer Oliver Sacks, with a liver cancer, at the age of eighty-one, wrote, in February 2015, in The New York Times:

I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope, in the time remaining, to deepen my friendships, to say goodbye to the ones I love, to write more, to travel. If I have strength, to reach new levels of comprehension and understanding.

Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry, scholar of subjects such as perception and consciousness, wrote: Above all, I was a conscious being, in this beautiful planet, and this alone was an enormous privilege and an adventure.

In his farewell letter he confessed: I cannot pretend that I am not afraid, but my predominant feeling is gratitude.

I loved and was loved, received much and gave something in return, I read, I traveled, I thought and I wrote.

Just over six months later, in August of that year, he disincarnated.

In turn, the writer, educator, theologian and psychoanalyst Rubem Alves, who died in the year 2014, left a letter to be read, in his funeral ceremony.

It was written nine years earlier, in addition to reflections on the terminality of life, there were instructions for when his hour arrived, such as the recitation of poems by authors who sang death.

He wrote: I am not afraid of death, though I am afraid of dying.

Dying can be painful and humiliating, but to death I have one question: Will I go back to where I have always been, before I was born, before the Big Bang?

During these billions of years, I did not suffer and I was not anxious for time to pass.

I will return there until I am born again.

*   *   *

Serenity before death. Gratitude for life.

The teaching offered and lived by our Master Jesus was not another.

At the so-called Last Supper, in Jerusalem, before His imprisonment, arbitrary judgment, and crucifixion, He gives guidance to the apostles.

He dwells on details, foretells sufferings that would come to them, and ends with a heartfelt prayer, in which He translates the greatness of His Spirit, caring for those who would remain:

Father, the time has come. Glorify Thy son, so that Thy Son may also glorify You.

I glorified You on Earth. I have consumed the work You gave me to do.

I have manifested Thy name to men. I pray for them.

I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world. I go to You.

Father, keep in Thy name those whom Thou hast given me.

I do not pray for these alone. But also for those who by Your word will believe in me.

Father, now I come to You. And I do not ask that You take them out of the world, but free them from evil.

After that, He went out with the Apostles to the Garden of Olives, where He stayed in prayer, communing with the Father, until they came to arrest Him.

Jesus, the example.

So many others, on Earth, have imitated Him. Let us imitate Him, as well.

Spiritist Moment Team, based on the article Adeus à vida sob o
sentimento de gratidão, from Iatrico Magazine, August 2017,
publ. of Conselho Regional de Medicina do Estado do Paraná,
and with transcription from the Gospel of John, chapter 17,
verse 1ss.
November 8.2018.

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