Restoring The Sacred… At The Hour Of Our Death

By JAMES MONTI

The onset of autumn has deeper lessons to offer than merely the return of students to their classrooms for another semester of studies. Our Lord Himself told us to derive spiritual instruction from even the change of seasons when He compared the budding of leaves on the fig tree that presage summer to the signs that will precede His return in glory at the end of the world (Matt. 24:32-33).
So too, the dying foliage and waning sunlight of the fall image the approach of death that we will all someday face. In an October 1589 letter of spiritual admonition addressed to his elderly father, the English Jesuit martyr St. Robert Southwell (1561-1595) writes, “Remember I pray you that your spring is spent and your summer overpast; you are now arrived to the fall of leaf; yea, and winter colours have already stained your hoary head” (text in J.W. Trotman, ed., The Triumphs over Death, Herder/Manresa Press, 1914, p. 45).
It is at this time of year, as autumn begins, that in the two-year cycle of weekday readings for the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite we hear at Mass (this year on September 24) what is one of the most remarkable passages in the Old Testament concerning death, a reading from the Book of Ecclesiastes (11:9-12:8) marked by haunting imagery:
“Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come . . . before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened . . . before the silver cord is snapped, or the golden bowl is broken, or the pitcher is broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern, and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it” (Eccles. 12:1-2, 6-7; RSVCE/Ignatius Bible version given here).
I recall how two years ago this reading deeply affected me, hearing it just four days before my beloved mother passed away on the feast of St. Therese of Lisieux.
In St. Thomas More’s “Godly Mediation,” a prayer of his own composition that he wrote out verse by verse in the margins of his Book of Hours while a prisoner in the Tower of London (1534-1535), we find the petition, “To make death no stranger to me” (text in The Workes of Sir Thomas More Knyght, London, 1557, p. 1417).
More had spent most of his life making death “no stranger” to him. In his work The Four Last Things, he observes that “every hour of our age as it passes by, cuts his own length out of our life, and makes it shorter by so much, and our death so much the nearer” (Workes, p. 81).
The hour of our death has already been “written in stone” by God — we will only learn it when at last it comes. Reflecting on this reality, Thomas More notes, “For when death comes, the dreadful mighty messenger of God, there can no king command him, there can none authority strain him, there can no riches hire him, to tarry past his appointed time one moment of an hour” (Treatise upon the Passion, chapter 1, lecture 2, in Workes, p. 1298). Keeping the inevitability of our own death in mind puts everything in its proper context.
This remembrance of death gives us as believing Catholics a firm sense of mission, of purpose and direction in our lives. God has given us each a task to complete, a vocation, for His greater glory and the salvation of souls, and a specific span of time, determined only by Him, within which to complete it.
Venerable Edel Quinn (1907-1944) expressed this particularly well: “We have only this life, and perhaps only a short one, in which to prove our love” (quoted in L.-J. Suenens, Edel Quinn: Envoy of the Legion of Mary to Africa, C.J. Fallon, 1955, p. 182).
Similarly, St. Thomas More advises, “. . . let us consider well in time, what words we be bound to speak, and what deeds we be bound to do, and say them, and do them apace, and leave unsaid and undone, all superfluous things, and much more all damnable things, witting well that we have no bold time allowed us thereunto” (Treatise upon the Passion, chapter 1, lecture 2, in Workes, p. 1298).
The remembrance of death is likewise vital to developing a sense of the sacred, for it makes us realize more than anything else our utter dependence as frail, mortal creatures upon our omnipotent God, who alone holds “the keys of Death” (Rev. 1:18). And it is only by understanding truly who God is and who we are in relation to Him that we can enter into a proper understanding of the sacred liturgy.
Have you ever stopped to think just how often in our daily prayers we make reference to “the hour of our death”? For each day we recite innumerable times, particularly in the holy rosary, the words, “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.” The phrase “now and at the hour of our death” was added to the Hail Mary in the 14th century, an addition officially codified by Pope St. Pius V in the Breviarium Romanum of 1568.
We can be sure that our Lady takes this petition very seriously. When the last hour of life comes she will not have forgotten the many times we have asked her in this manner for the grace of final perseverance.
Similarly the prayer Anima Christi (“Soul of Christ”), which dates back to the first half of the 1300s, draws to its climax with the supplication to our Lord, “In the hour of my death call me, and bid me come unto thee, that with thy saints I may praise thee forever and ever. Amen.”
An early text of the Anima Christi from a Book of Hours in the British Museum (the Percy Hours, early 15th century, ms. Harley 1260) has virtually the same wording: “In the hour of death call me, and place me beside thee, that with thy angels I may praise thee forever and ever. Amen” (text in G.M. Dreves, “Wer hat das Anima Christi verfasst?,” Stimmen aus Maria-Laach, vol. 54, 1898, p. 503).
The thought of our own future “hour of death” as well as the remembrance of the times when we have been present for someone else’s hour of death can lead us to a deeper perception of our Lord’s final hour on Calvary. And it is by placing ourselves frequently, even daily, in mind and heart at the death-scene on Golgotha that we will find the courage and strength to face death when it comes for us or someone we love.
For centuries, the Church has provided in her liturgical books special prayers for a priest to say whenever he finds himself at the bedside of a person close to death, “in extremis.” Among the oldest and most eloquent of these prayers is Proficiscere, anima Christiana, first found in an eighth-century liturgical book known as the Gellone Sacramentary (here we take the text from a 1617 edition of the Rituale Romanum):
“Go forth, Christian soul, from this world, in the name of God the almighty Father, who created thee; in the name of Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, who suffered for thee; in the name of the Holy Spirit, who has been poured forth upon thee; in the name of the angels and archangels; in the name of the thrones and dominations; in the name of the principalities and powers; in the name of the cherubim and seraphim; in the name of the patriarchs and prophets; in the name of the holy Apostles and Evangelists; in the name of the holy martyrs and confessors; in the name of the holy monks and hermits; in the name of the holy virgins and all the holy men and women saints of God; today may thy place be in peace, and thy habitation in holy Zion. Through the same Christ our Lord. Amen” (Rituale Romanum, Antwerp, 1617, p. 120).

A Clear Sunset

Visiting our loved ones’ graves regularly not only benefits their departed souls but also serves to help us “number our days” aright (Psalm 90:12). In many cases their final resting place will someday be ours as well.
None of us knows for certain just how many days or years stand between us and the grave that awaits us. We need to measure what we do each day, what our priorities are, by considering well what will really matter when we finally leave this world.
At the close of Fr. Southwell’s letter to his aged father that we cited earlier, he draws a lesson from the passing hours of the day that we call all learn from:
“Howsoever therefore the soft gales of your morning pleasures lulled you in slumbery fits; howsoever the violent heats of noon might awake affections; yet now, in the cool and calm of the evening, retire to a Christian rest and close up the day of your life with a clear sunset; that leaving all darkness behind you and carrying in your conscience the light of grace, you may escape the horror of eternal night, and pass from a mortal day to an everlasting morrow” (text in Trotman, pp. 63-64).