Dr. Shantanu Dutta 

Recently on Facebook, a suggestion popped up recommending a particular person as a friend. The name seemed strangely familiar, yet there was no one I could recognize by that name. On a bit of probing, I discovered something though. The name tossed up by Facebook was the son of a former principal of a school where I used to study. The principal was no ordinary man.  He had rescued me from the fringes of juvenile delinquency and given me a second chance after I had been expelled from school and no other school was willing to take me. But over the past many decades since I finished school, I had scarcely remembered him.

There often is a temptation for young people to dismiss the elderly. To say that they are out of touch, have nothing to say, are stuck in the past. We do it with past generations too. They with their outmoded thinking are dead and gone.  Such is the temptation of every generation to think that it "has figured things out.” A new day has arrived and the old is washed away ... the good days have arrived ... only to become another generations nostalgic remembrances of "the good old days."

Of course old generations will die, and new generations replace them. And we, as the living saints, ought to take time to give thanks to God for them, and to remember. But we remember in a way that the world does not know, for we know that one day the trumpet will sound, and the dead shall be raised imperishable. Through the power of the cross of Jesus, heaven shall arrive, and the graves shall be opened ... and all those who have washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb will enter the Holy City, where a great body of saints will gather to give praise and glory to God forever. The dead shall rise again. Until we see them in the flesh again, they are with us in Spirit.

Followers of the cross, listen to the dead for they shall show you how to live. Give your life away for the Crucified One, for he shall give you new life. Trust and worship and struggle to be the Church, for, the Christ, the One who died and rose again, is indeed coming soon.