Facing God’s Judgment

In my work as a psychotherapist in nursing homes, I frequently speak with clients about end-of-life matters. All person’s fear dying, yet the most common fear I encounter is that of God’s judgment: many people dread dying due to fear of rejection by God. It is not often that a client sees herself as a terrible sinner but rather tends to view God as a punishing critic. In particular, persons who have been criticized and judged and rejected by others tend to imagine that God might show anger without mercy, oftentimes based on terribly difficult past relationships.

I recently spoke with a 93-year-old lady who I see for psychotherapy. She is nearing the end of her life and has been sharing her fears and doubts about death and what may come after. She told me of a vivid dream she’d had the night before. She usually does not recall her dreams, but this one had struck her, and she recalled it in detail.

She never had a driver’s license, or drove a car, yet in the dream she was driving a car. She didn’t know where she was going or how to get there, and the car was running out of gas. Suddenly, a man dressed all in white appeared in the passenger’s seat.

“He didn’t look like a real person. He looked like a cloud,” she said. “I asked who he was, and he said, ‘I’m your angel.’”

As a result of our conversation, she continued to feel afraid of dying yet she had a vague sense of someone sent to help her find her way, someone who might know more than her about the way. But she still felt unworthy, and that prevented her from embracing the comforting message of the dream.

She had been physically and emotionally abused by her former husband, and the lingering wounds of that abuse – an incorrect sense of being unworthy, unlovable, and deserving of punishment, continued to interfere with her finding a consoling sense of faith as she prepares for death.

In God and His Image: An Outline of Biblical Theology (Ignatius Press, pg. 34), Dominique Barthelemy suggests that subsequent to the Fall in Eden, “Man has passed straight away from a Father-God in whose arms he had played like a child, to a Judge-God from whose face he flees.”

The questions and challenges of death can be abstract until that electric jolt moment when it becomes imminent, and all our prior considerations are dwarfed by an awesome and incomprehensible reality; and then the psychological dynamics of our past human relationships, and the quality of our faith assume a vast significance. While some clients have a firm and clear faith, others might sway between a vague belief in God and afterlife, or an atheistic impression.

“It might just be lights out. I’ll know at the time,” one client suggested. But if there is no soul and no continuation of life beyond death, then it would be impossible to know. There would be no knower to know.

No one argues that Being simply ends after death because they wish or hope that it is true. Being is all that we know or have ever known about ourselves, the lives of others, and the surrounding universe. No one actually knows anything about non-Being, because it would be impossible to know.

As Catholics, we believe in a particular judgment when we will face God at the moment of death, and He will judge our life. Of course, we experience apprehensions about that inevitable moment.

But I also feel a need and a longing for that moment.

I anticipate utter gentleness and unfathomable broadness of understanding in His loving eyes, and that the light that is the Lord will let me see all I have done and failed to do for others. Shame over my faults and sins will be punishing and cleansing and corrective.

He will show me the whole story, and it will certainly include all the good and bad things that are presently more than I know or comprehend. None of us knows how to judge ourselves and we surely do it wrong, or do it based on wrong ideas of who God is and what He asks of us. The only way I will ever truly know my whole self, and be healed of all my wounds, will be through my face-to-face encounter with God when I die.

In season 1, episode 8 of the television series “The Chosen,” Jesus encounters the Samaritan woman at the well. That beautiful scene seems to me to be an example of what we might experience at our particular judgment – we will fear more rejection, yet He will surround all our woundedness with loving mercy.