Our Final Gift. Sister Sue Mosteller, CSJ and Fr. Ron Rolheiser, OMI are the mission leaders. Their talks focus on Henri Nouwen’s reflections on death and the promise of life everlasting.
In his last works, just before he died, Henri Nouwen began to speak of how the final task in life is to give one’s death to others. We are meant, Nouwen says, to give our lives for others, but we are also meant, to give our deaths for them. Just as elders are meant to teach the young how to live they are also meant to teach them how to die. That’s the final lesson we are meant to give the young, to die in such a way that our deaths are our final blessing to them.

The promise of life everlasting means that our death does not have to be our final failure, our final defeat in the struggle of life, our unavoidable fate. If our deepest human desire is, indeed, to give ourselves to others, then we can make our death our final gift.