The Priest at Prayer, May 10

The Priest and the Eternal Truths

* DEATH *

First Meditation - Its Certainties

I. A day will arrive - who will dare to doubt it? - when I myself shall be the one who is seriously ill, the one past recovery, the one dying, with people around me beginning to worry about preparations for my burial: the laying out, the coffin, the funeral, obituary cards. . . .

Do you think these details are somewhat ludicrous, unworthy of the seriousness of a meditation? Apply them to yourself, and perhaps they will have the effect of plunging you into deep thought.

If the thought of death does not impress me or deter me from evil, as the Scriptures promise it will, it is because I think of someone else's death, not my own.

My God, frankly, I have never really given a thought to my own death, I have hardly believed in it, despite the fact that I see the face of death so near in my daily ministrations and almost feel its icy breath.

II. When my time comes everything and everywhere around me will echo that "responsum mortis" of which St. Paul speaks. God forbid that I should be the only one deaf to its challenge!

Let us picture the scene. The priest comes to hear your last confession; the tinkling bell heralds your Via­ticum; then follow the Last Anointings [Anointing of the Sick], the prayers for the recommendation of the soul, and the low mumblings, drawn faces, and silent tears of relatives and friends standing round your bed - if indeed there is anyone at all to weep your departure! Your whole body is in a cold sweat, there is a gradual stiffening of your features, a twitching of your rigid fingers as if trying to clutch at something, the cold impression of the crucifix on your livid half-open lips; and the shadows of death crowd upon you thicker and thicker, and your eyes acquire that fixed look as if pursuing sights that vanish from you. . . .

My Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, who for love of me didst submit to the anguish of dying, do not fail me Thou when everything and everyone else forsakes me!

III. At long last your soul will quit the body, leaving it a
repulsive heap of lifeless matter.

The bells you so often heard toll or had tolled for others will now toll for you. The funeral service that you so often chanted for others is now to be chanted for you. And there will be a burial, your very own; and the officiating priest, while your body sinks into the earth, will seal your disappearance from this world with a last supplication wherein you will lose even your name:

Anima ejus et animae omnium fidelium defunc­torum,
per misericordiam Dei requiescant in pace.
Amen.

And then, what will this world have to offer you?

What will become of those material goods that you seemed to have fused with your inmost soul, so deeply had you buried them within your heart's affections? Your name will be struck off all the lists of the living; your benefice, office, money, titles, every one of them will be handed over to another; and people will be quite indifferent and oblivious; they are used to these irrevoc­able resignations!

If you think the consideration of these incidents is of some avail to you for the prudent steering of your life and spirit, turn them over in your mind frequently; if you consider them useless, throw them overboard, bury them fathoms deep: century after century has stood witness to men whose one code is:

Let us eat and drink and be merry for tomorrow we shall die. (Is. xxii, 13)

Resolution
I shall often take as subject of my daily meditation my own death, a future but inescapable fact; and I shall run through, one by one, all the probable circumstances that are apt to impress me the most.

Now I see why the remembrance of the Last Things, of death in particular, has been of such little value to me, in spite of the well-known text:

Remember thy last end and thou shalt never sin.

It is because I have thought of death in the abstract or as applied to someone else. So from now I shall come to grips with the thought of my own death, and I shall take this bitter thought as a leash to my unbridled passions.
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Adapted from The Priest at Prayer
by Fr. Eugenio Escribano, C.M. (© 1954)
Translated by B.T. Buckley, C.M.

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Please pray for our priests and pray for vocations to the priesthood!