The answer
The person who focuses his eyes on his own inner depths sees his Christ within, and therefore looks forward to the death of the body as a divine gift, seeing it as the bridge to immortality and a true liberation from temporal life with all of its physical and spiritual troubles and illnesses. As St. Basil says, “The death of the righteous has become rest, or rather, it has become life itself.”
St. Anthony says, “Death, when understood by men, is deathlessness; but, when not understood by the foolish, it is death. It is not this death that must be feared, but the loss of the soul, which is ignorance of God. This is indeed disaster for the soul.”1153 He also says, “To escape death is impossible. Knowing this, those who are truly intelligent and practiced in virtue and in spiritual thought accept death uncomplainingly, without fear or grief, recognizing that it is inevitable and delivers them from the evils of this life.”1154
Fr. Tadros Yacoub Malaty
Notes
1153 St. Anthony the Great, “On the Character of Men and on the Virtuous Life” (attributed to St. Anthony) in The Philokalia: The Complete Text, Volume I, trans., G. E. H. Palmer et al., eds., Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, and Makarios of Corinth (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979) 49: p. 336.
1154 St. Anthony the Great, “On the Character of Men and on the Virtuous Life” (attributed to St. Anthony) in The Philokalia: The Complete Text, Volume I, trans., G. E. H. Palmer et al., eds., Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, and Makarios of Corinth (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979) 82: p. 342.