His Eminence Aloysius Cardinal Ambrozic
Archbishop Emeritus of Toronto
Biography :: Letters, Homilies, Statements :: Articles

Petrovka
December 1992

No, I am not writing of Stravinsky's ballet or of the puppet with a human heart. Petrovka is a clearing in the wood not far from my first home, part grass part cultivated, surrounded by trees and shrubs. We picked blueberries along its edges and hunted for mushrooms. For me, Petrovka was an enchanted spot; in it, sun shone more brightly and rain fell gently, its trees were majestic and its grass unlike the grass which we cut and dried to feed the cows. It may have been mere childish sentimentality, yet I visited it as if making a pilgrimage. It offered an escape from the ordinariness and incessant back-and-forth of games and chores, of the adults' busyness and school; it gave me spellbound peace.

My visits were infrequent; maybe I was afraid of robbing it of its magic. But the emotion it created stays with me. It returns with the silence of self-confident mountains, so free of restless need to draw attention to themselves. It returns with lapping seawaves whose calm rhythms suggest timelessness and freedom from the urge to prove or push myself -- I can relax into the passivity of a floating cloud. Sensing a similar dream, I can never forget the aura of eternity emanating from the waterfowl painted on the walls of Egyptian tombs.

The deep desire to arrest the moment, to free time of its fleetingness, to clutch at the passing day, the burning longing to save them from nothingness and oblivion. But this yearning is illusion; it is the wish for a frozen time, time cheated of its true being. The insect caught in jade is immortal only because it is dead. Rippling seawaves would, after a time, deprive me of willpower and turn me into a non-person. For all their impressiveness, mountains and nature are, as depicted by N. Poussin, self-sufficient and incurious, heedless of human fear and pain. Old Man River keeps on rolling, having nothing to say. The only permanence they can impart is their own, deaf, devoid of mind and heart, impersonal.

This is the stuff of which myths are made, both ancient and modern. The story of a passing event, a pattern caught in history is, in myth, raised above time. What is transitory is endowed with permanence; what remains mortal pretends to be deathless. Death continues to cling to myths and ideologies which imagine themselves to be offering permanently valid explanations of life and history.

Is the longing itself for immortality pure illusion then? Is our anxiety about death to be handled as one of the many irrational fears assailing us now and then throughout our life? Are we to be "reasonable" in the face of perpetual change, accepting it as an inescapable fact of life?

Jesus does not think so. Our revolt against nothingness is breathed into us along with our very being which refuses to come to terms with death as the last word.

Eternal life must, however, be sought where it can be found. It is to be found in the One who is completely alive and over whom death holds no sway. "Truly, truly, I say to you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself" (Jn 5:25-26). Advent speaks of the future coming of the Son of God who, having died and risen, is totally free of death's grasping fingers. He will call and gather us "from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven" (Mk 13:27).