EVEN GHOSTS DONT SHAKE HANDS

MY TWO sisters and I were looking at my very sick Dad when he breathed his last in bed in February last year. "There is no more movement," I said, as my niece- a physician- was preparing another bottle of IV fluid for Dad. My niece rushed to search Dad's pulse, found none, and asked whether we, siblings, wanted revival efforts. We opted to let go of my father; he had suffered enough from ravaging cancer. He was 92.

Any death in the family cuts painfully deep, but in the case of my father, I found much comfort in my unwavering faith in the afterlife. I took my phone and googled for prayers for death in the family, prayed aloud, once in a while looking at the ceiling where Dad could be hovering and still confused on who was the motionless person, who looked exactly like him, lying in his bed.

From dire prophecies for our times, this shift to afterlife tone is motivated by a desire to convince people to take spirituality more seriously. Covid-19 has, to some extent, driven many to withdraw from too much material concerns, and this we see from the messages exchanged on Facebook. While mystics tell us that mitigation is still possible, prophesied chastisements for our transgressions have become inevitable. Catholic author Daniel O'Connor put it aptly, as have many modern mystics: the chastisements have to come as the last means of conversion for tenacious sinners and also to spare the elect from being swallowed by the evil times.

From the Blessed Mother herself is the appeal to choose now between God and Satan, or it will be too late for some. Flee from the grey cocoon.

One of the misfortunes of our days is that some have convinced themselves that doing a little good and praying every now and then would suffice, giving the rest of their hours in pursuit of pleasure, material delights. Keep in mind that Judas was an apostle, had prayed with no less than God in the person of Jesus Christ and thus could but be nobler than us, yet he is widely believed to be in hell, as revealed from the identities of spirits cast out by exorcists in diabolical possessions.

AND SO TO GO ON with how it is in the life beyond.

There is conflict, but only apparent, in how some mystics have described the state of the departed in the afterlife. For example, Medjugorje's Mirjana said that when she was given a vision of Heaven, people there were more or less of the same age, or about 30. Maria Simma, however, said that the ghosts she had encountered appeared of the age when they had died.

How reconcile the conflict? Notice that Mirjana saw departed people already in Heaven, while Simma encountered people from Purgatory. Could it be that old folk in Purgatory are transformed to youth upon reaching Heaven? It is also said, in the accounts of those who have encountered deep mysticism, that those who die as children, even fetuses, land in Heaven as children of a certain age, and those with physical deformity reach heaven without any disability.

But there's one very interesting observation that Mirjana said when asked whether the souls she was given to see in Heaven had bodies. Her reply: Yes, they had bodies. Now, before hell is raised by professed intellectuals, this does not mean physical bodies, but some kind of body that only God has the power to bestow.

Here's Mirjana's description of the people she saw in Heaven: "They were different from what we are like now. Perhaps they were all around 30 years of age...They were walking in a beautiful park. They have everything. They need or want nothing. They are totally full...They were dressed in the types of clothing that Jesus wore."

Then here's Simma's short reply to author Nicky Eltz's query on the age of the souls who had been appearing to her in her cottage in Sonntag, Austria: "They always look the same age as when they died."

Now more on Eltz's interview with Simma:

Q: Maria, when you meet someone, how do you determine whether it's a Poor Soul or a living person who is here on earth at the moment?

Simma: When a Poor Soul comes at night I recognize it immediately as one because of its light. They're as bright as a person is during the day. They do not radiate any light so everything around them remains dark, but they themselves are light and, of course, I recognize that immediately as a Poor Soul.

Q: Do they also come to you during the day?

Simma: They do, but when they come during the day it takes until the moment they disappear for me really to know that it was a Poor Soul. Until that happens, I cannot be certain. In either case, if I was to reach for them there would be nothing there.

Q: Has a Poor Soul come to you during the day here in your house and, in that case, how would you be able to tell?

Simma: Well, they do not knock at the door as you did and, of course, they do not shake hands. Those would be two signals for me that it was a Poor Sou