Musing On the Dying of the Light and Sister Death

Friday, Mar. 24, 2017

Last night I went for a walk on the Jordan River Parkway. With signs of spring all around me – blackbirds trilling in the rushes, the Russian olive trees beginning to bud, cyclists in shorts speeding past – I thought of death.

This is not as contradictory as it seems. We are in the midst of Lent, a season in which we Catholics die to self through fasting, almsgiving and prayer so that at Easter we might start a new life through our risen Lord. It also happens that I just finished, for the theology class I’m taking, a segment on the Sacrament of Anointing.

It comforts me that the Church continues Christ’s healing ministry. The hope behind the sacrament, of course, is that the person who receives it is completely healed, but the United States Catholic Catechism for Adults points out that even if this hope isn’t realized, “the primary effect of the Sacrament is a spiritual healing by which the sick person receives the Holy Spirit’s gift of peace and courage to deal with the difficulties that accompany serious illness or the frailty of old age.”

We in today’s world have a problem dealing with those difficulties. Our culture is fixated on the young, healthy and beautiful. The old, the frail, the homely are ignored, dismissed, thrown away; we no longer decry premature death but rather tout it through the euphemistically named “End of Life Options.”

I understand the toll dying takes. I watched my maternal grandfather, a strong man whose nature might best be understood by the fact that he achieved the rare feat of a field promotion from enlisted to officer during World War II, dwindle and fade in a nursing home. He accepted this twilight of his life with dignity rather than despair, giving me a model of how to put the catechism into practice. 

While I can hope to emulate my grandfather, I suspect I’ll never be in the league of Saint Paul, who wrote that he gladly gloried in his infirmities so that the power of Christ would dwell in him. During the six months that I suffered from plantar fasciitis, there were days when I would have willingly ended the pain by whatever means necessary, and gave no thought to how Christ would use me through it, but from today’s vantage point I see that that experience gave me much more compassion for those who suffer illness, a poor example of what St. Thomas Aquinas might say was a case of God depriving me of lesser good so that I could grow in authentic human goodness.

The Church teaches that the Sacrament of Anointing allows the recipient to prepare for death. I wondered, as I walked along the river at the end of yesterday, if God gives us the pain and humiliation of our dying days to wean us from our earthly attachments so that when we finally do shuffle off this mortal coil we are ready to leave behind everything that laid claim to us. We who are human typically “rage, rage against the dying of the light,” to quote Dylan Thomas. Even Christ himself, divine in nature and yet incarnate in a human body, shed a mortal’s tears as he pleaded that the cup pass from him. In the end, however, he accepted death, as we all must. From his death by crucifixion – the most brutal, agonizing and humiliating process the Roman Empire could offer – came a glorious life that still reverberates through the world. We as Christians are promised to partake of that life, but only if we follow Christ through death into it. Our deprivations during this Lenten season help prepare us for that which we must endure when we are stripped of our mortality; the Sacrament of Anointing offers us the strength to bear the suffering of the end of our mortal life. 

Another source of comfort in the face of death is prayer, and today as I was writing this column these lines from St. Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Creatures popped onto my Facebook page. I no longer believe such things are coincidence, so I will close with them:

“All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Death,

From whose embrace no mortal can escape.

Woe to those who die in mortal sin!

Happy those she finds doing your will!

The second death can do them no harm.

Praise and bless my Lord, and give him thanks.

And serve him with great humility.”

Marie Mischel is editor of the Intermountain Catholic.