Yesterday, I officiated a funeral for a beloved woman from our church. I felt, as I stood to share the eulogy, that the problem with summing up a person’s life in a funeral service or an obituary is that so little of it as of yet has taken place. It’s like writing the biography of a newborn, or even an unborn, baby.

We, from our perspective, saw our friend’s life as having come to an end. We buried her body and began to tell her story in the past tense. But that does not reflect the way things really are.

Imagine three quadruplets who remain in their mother’s womb after the doctor has delivered their sister. If the fetal mind could think like us, and if they could communicate with each other, what might they be saying? “This is terrible! It is so unfair! Our sister’s life has come to an end. We’ll never see her again.”

How wrong they would be! Their sister’s life had only just begun. So, with us. When seventy or eighty years of life here are up – or even eighty-five, as was the case with our friend – we have only reached full-term, and the life that is life indeed is ready to begin.

What we must understand is that human beings have a two-stage gestation period. The first stage is in their mother’s womb. They have about nine months there in which to receive the kind of life that can continue outside the womb on earth, the life of heartbeats and brainwaves. The Greeks had a word for that: bios. (Biology is the study of that kind of life.)

Then begins the second stage, which lasts something like 70 or 80 years. That is when we receive the kind of life that can continue outside the earth in heaven, the life of the spirit. The Greeks had a word for that too: zoé. We receive bios from our mother and zoé from God’s Spirit. In the first stage of gestation, we have not developed enough to have a choice, but in the second, we are ready (and required) to choose. Biological life comes through an umbilical cord; spiritual life comes through faith. If we don’t receive the life of the spirit before the end of the second stage of our gestation, we will be spiritually stillborn.

We say that our friend has died and, from our perspective, we are right. But that kind of language belongs on this side of death, not the other. The other side, I suspect, sounds more like a maternity ward: “She’s here!” or “She has arrived!” And while on this side there is mourning (and rightly so), on that side there is rejoicing.

If we are standing on the dock as a great ship carries our son or daughter out to sea, we can rightly speak of their departure. But someone standing on a dock at that ship’s port of call would speak differently. Perspective is everything. And our perspective is severely limited.

But God’s is not. He is with us when we enter this world and he is with us when we leave it. He sends us from our point of departure only to receive us at our port of call. The universe (or multiverse, or whatever this marvelous place is where we dwell) is a ball in the hands of a skillful juggler. Its journey began with him and it will end with him. The same is true of us, though God is not playing games with us. As St. Paul so beautifully put it: “For from him and through him and to him are all things.” (Romans 11:36)

There is one more thing to be said—well, there are probably a hundred more things to say, but since I am not wise enough to say them, I will limit myself to one. The fetus is already in this world since that is where his mother’s womb is. Likewise, we are already in heaven even while we are on earth. So, St. Paul could write that “God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms…”