Everything is from, belongs to, and is for Him

The closer one comes to the end of life, the stronger is his love for the dead. Is this not a premonition of meeting them? You joyfully sense not only them, but also the setting and things associated with them - objects, an old Gospel, a chair, a forest path, the smell of hay, the sound of bells. Apparently, nothing ever dies of what a person somehow needed on earth, of what somehow brought him toward God. Everything is from, belongs to, and is for Him. If, as Dionysios the Areopagite said, 'all things pre-exist in God', it is impossible for anything good - whether now, in the past, or in the future - to not exist in God. We will encounter everything - all the warmth of the earth, everything cleansed and holy; it will seize and embrace us, and we will never more be separated from it. We are not going to a Hindu Nirvana, but to the House of God, where we will use our eyes to search for, and will find everyone whom we had come to love on earth.

 

-  Sergei Fudel, At The Walls Of The Church