The Last Things
By Fr. Conor Donnelly
(Proofread)
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.
Every November, in the month of November, the Church invites us to look a little more at the last things—death, judgment, heaven, hell, and purgatory—and also to think a little bit more about all the souls that have gone before us.
In some ways it’s a rather beautiful idea, and the Church reminds us of all those souls, people that we may have known who passed, on so that we don’t forget them.
The Church also encourages us to visit cemeteries, to bring our children to visit cemeteries or places where people are buried, because that alone transmits a message. It reminds us of where we will be one day.
That’s a little bit what the Church wants to tell us during this month of November, that we’re all called to the “eternal wedding feast” (Pope John Paul II, Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii gaudium, Point 288, November 24, 2013).
There is a church in the Via Veneto in Rome run by the Capuchins which has a number of bones hanging on the wall.
All the walls are decorated with bones, femurs and tibias and fibulas, and monks dressed in their habits, but only bones. There’s a sign at the start that says, “What we are now you will be. What you are is what we were.” A rather strong reminder.
The Church wants to remind us of the passing nature of this world. The Book of Wisdom in the Old Testament has some rather beautiful things to say in this regard.
It says, “The souls of the upright are in the hands of God, and no torment can touch them. To the unenlightened, they appeared to die, their departure was regarded as disaster; their leaving us like annihilation; but they are at peace” (Wisd. 3:1-3).
The Church gives us beautiful words to prepare us for death, and to understand the reality of death, and to laugh a little bit at death. It’s a very normal passage to the end of our life, to go to that eternal life to which God has called us.
It’s for that that we have been created. The immortality of the soul has been created to give God glory forever and forever and forever.
And the Church encourages us then to live upright lives, so as to be in the hands of God. We know that in that situation, taking care of our soul, living in the state of grace, letting the Holy Spirit work through us, trying to struggle for holiness—“no torment can touch us; to the unenlightened, they appear to die.”
Someone has remarked that death is an uncomfortable reality for a materialistic world. To a culture and a world that tells us that all our treasure should be in this world, in material things, death is an uncomfortable reality.
These are the unenlightened. “They appear to die. Their departure was regarded as disaster. They’re leaving us like annihilation.”
A beautiful thing is a beautiful death. I’ve seen many people die very beautiful, very holy deaths: thoroughly prepared, looking forward to the next world, thanking God for all the beautiful things they experienced in this world. I’ve seen people with enormous peace.
One of the things we’re encouraged to pray for is a holy death. St. Joseph is the patron of a holy death, and we’re in the Year of St. Joseph [December 8, 2020 to December 8 2021].
Possibly we know people who are preparing for death, or death is coming closer, or knocking on their door. We are in a position to help these people to die well, perhaps to pray with them, or to spend time with them, or just to be there, give them company. Just that alone is a work of mercy.
Or try to get them a priest, or repair their soul in some way, get them to Confession. It’s an apostolate that Our Lord wants us to do in special ways at this particular moment in time.
“If, as it seemed to us,” we’re told, “they suffered punishment, their hope was rich with immortality” (Wisd. 3:4). Hope rich in immortality.
Hope is a very powerful virtue. At the end of our life, we have an awful lot to hope for, and to hope in. And God encourages that hope. That hope is rich with immortality.
The Preface I for the Dead talks about the bright “promise of immortality.” The bright promise—a wonderful thing to look forward to. Look forward to heaven.
Fr. Cormac Burke (March 21, 1927-November 22, 2011), at home, is 94 at the moment. He has not gone through very good health for many years, but in the last few months he’s managed to survive COVID and a few other things. He’s still going. But he wants to die.
Every day he says, “I want to die, I want to die.” But the Holy Spirit keeps saying to us, Not yet, not yet. He’s still there, hanging on.
We brought him to The Mater Hospital a few months ago, and he refused to eat and he refused to take his medicine.
I asked him, “What do you want, will you not eat and why will you not take your medicine?” “It’s the only weapon I have to get out of this place.”
And then the head nurse came to me and said, “He keeps saying he wants to die, he wants to die. But everyone in this hospital wants to live.”
They’re wondering if there’s something wrong. It’s a very positive thing when people come to the end of their life and they want to die, and they look forward to that bright “promise of immortality.”
We have an awful lot to look forward to and Our Lord wants us to infect many other people with that great promise, those beautiful things.
One time I was called to the bedside of a dying man, and in the prayer book that I had, there was a Commendation of the Dying. I was reading it, and I was reading it all the way around the bed, all very somber and sad.
As I was reading this Commendation of the Dying, I was thinking: this is full of beautiful ideas: abandonment, hope, joy, peace. I was thinking, ‘I hope somebody reads this to me when I’m dying.’
It’s a very good thing to look at so that we don’t hear it for the first time when somebody is reading it to us. But our Christian faith gives us beautiful things at that moment of our life.
The Book of Wisdom continues, “Slight was their correction, great will their blessings be. God was putting them to the test and has proved them worthy to be with him; he has tested them like gold in a furnace, and accepted them as a perfect burnt offering” (Wisd. 3:5-6).
“Great will their blessings be” for all the crosses or contradictions or difficulties that we may have gone through in our life, in our marriage, in our family, in our work.
We have great things to look forward to. “Great things will our blessings be.”
And we’re also told, and St. Josemaría liked to mention it in one of his writings: “Our guardian angel…will remember, has taken note of, all the little, good. kind acts” that we may have done in our life, all the things that maybe we forgot about years ago (cf. Josemaría Escrivá, Furrow, Point 693).
Our guardian angels remember them, small little things. And he will remember them on the last day when we go before the judgment.
The little acts of kindness and encouragement and good things that we did, possibly without thinking too much. Our Lord invites us to store up for ourselves “treasures in heaven” (Matt. 6:20).
The great encouragement to use every opportunity we have to store up those treasures in heaven. Every day, every hour is an opportunity.
“At their time of visitation, they will shine out; as sparks run through the stubble, so will they. They will judge nations, rule over peoples, and the Lord will be their king forever” (Wisd. 3:7-8).
We can’t quite grasp what eternity means, because we have been born in time. But occasionally we get little glimpses, an optical angle of eternity.
Josemaría in one of his writings says every day, for us we should have an “echo of eternity” (J. Escrivá, The Forge, Point 917), a certain sense that I’m building the future, those “treasures in heaven,” that has to last forever.
And the more I give, the more I will get, not just a personal, selfish point of view, but as an encouragement to use our time to build that treasure for the future, and also to help us to bring many peoples with us.
“Those who trust in him will understand the truth, those who are faithful will live with him in love; for grace and mercy await his holy ones, and he intervenes on behalf of his chosen” (Wisd. 3:9; 4:15).
“Grace and mercy await His holy ones.” Our Lord is waiting to say to us, “Well done, good and faithful servant. Because you have been faithful in little things, come and share the joy of your Lord” (cf. Matt. 25:21).
The Church doesn’t want us to worry about our death, or think too much about our death, or that we’re getting older. She just wants us to look to the wonderful things that come later.
In The Way St. Josemaría says, “Foster in your soul the glorious hope of heaven” (cf. J. Escrivá, The Way, Point 668).
It’s worth thinking about, it’s worth dreaming about. The manner in which we die doesn’t really matter.
St. Paul says, “We have been chosen out before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4). If we’ve been “chosen out before the foundation of the world” then God has chosen the moment and the manner of our death.
Therefore, it’s a moment of grace. We can leave it in His hands.
I read a rather beautiful story this week of a priest who died recently, who I knew in Ireland, who had a lot to do with my vocation. He spent a lot of his final years when he was mobile going around, helping people to die, hearing their Confessions.
He went to see a man a bit younger than him who had cancer, to see if he wanted to go to Confession.
The man told him that he was involved in repairing motorbikes, and he had left Ireland to go to England to set up some sort of repair shop for motorbikes. And he managed to have bought a motorbike, and this was his pride and joy, his motorbike.
Then there was a young lady on the boat over to England. And they were standing at the side of the boat. He got talking to her. And he began to tell her all about his wonderful motorbike and: would she like to see his motorbike as he was going to England to set up this thing.
And she said, “Well, really, I’m not very interested in motorbikes. I’m going to England for an abortion. And I’m feeling rather bad. No, I have no time for motorbikes.”
She said, “What I really want is a drink.” They went to the bar and they got a drink.
While they were sitting down over the drink in the bar, he said to her, “Look, why don’t you marry me? And you keep the baby, and then we’ll set up a business and we’ll carry on. We’ll see how we go.” That’s what they did. She kept the baby.
This priest said, “You know, when I was visiting this man, his children came to see him. And there were three or four children. I was very interested in the eldest, but I tried not to take too much notice of her to see what she was like. But they were all very united, beautiful family.”
And he was saying, “You know, the cancer disappeared later on.” He said, “God didn’t forget that thing.”
What a beautiful thing when we come to the end of our life. God remembers the good things that we’ve done.
And what beautiful stories that priests hear also about people’s lives. Imagine just proposing just like that! Maybe the girl had nowhere to turn to—any port in the storm. But it somehow worked out. There are beautiful stories that make up for all the bad things.
The Book of Wisdom continues, “The upright, though he die before his time, will find rest. Length of days is not what makes age honorable, nor number of years the true measure of life; understanding, this is grey hairs, untarnished life, this is ripe old age” (Wisd. 4:7-9).
Sometimes people die before their time, or what we think is before their time. But everybody gets their time.
Time is a gift of God. A gift to do something with it. But don’t just say, “I have time, I have time, I have time.” It’s like a flyer or a pencil. Nobody goes around saying, “I have a pencil, I have a pencil, I have a pencil.”
You tell them, “What can you do with your pencil or your pen? Will you write a check? Will you sign a contract? Will you give your autograph?” That’s what’s important, what you’re going to do with it.
We have to try and examine our use of time, our schedule, our plans. What do I want to achieve? Be very dynamic. Because time is a gift of God, but it’s also limited. It’s something sacred. “Time…belongs to God” (cf. J. Escrivá, The Way, Point 14). They’re going to ask us to account for every bit of time.
The first priest of Opus Dei who went to Asia tells a story of how, in the 1960s and 1970s, he helped to start Opus Dei in the Philippines, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore.
Towards the end of his life, he was living in a flat in Hong Kong, the Center there, the small little rooms, and they had these beds that fold up into the wall, cabin bed cabinets.
One morning, this thing fell out on top of him and knocked him over. He was 75 years of age. It pinned him down. His arm got stuck under this bed. And he was trying to shift it, but he couldn’t shift it. It was too heavy.
He called out to people for some help, but maybe they were far away, or they were in the Oratory, or kitchen, or someplace; they couldn’t hear him. He was lying there on the floor, pinned down by this bed.
A thought came to him, “St. Josemaría always taught us to try and make good use of our time.” He was thinking, “Now how, at six in the morning, can I make good use of my time lying here on the floor in my room, pinned down by a bed?”
And he thought, “I could get my Rosary set for the day. Something productive in this unusual situation.”
He began to say his Rosary, and halfway through the first mystery, the thought occurred to him, “Maybe this is the moment of my death. Maybe in three months’ time, people will realize I am missing. And they’ll come to look for me and they’ll find my bones here in my bedroom.”
These were the thoughts that were going through his mind. All the things that people would say or discover.
The next thought was, “Oh, my goodness, they’ll say I was killed by a bed. First person in human history to be killed by a bed. Maybe they’ll put this on my tombstone: killed by a bed. I might even make the Guinness Book of Records, no?—the first person to be killed by a bed.”
Of course, the moral of the story is that it doesn’t really matter how we die. All the silly, stupid things that could happen. All the diseases, the accidents.
The important thing is to remember is that that’s the way that God would have wanted us to die. We’re in His hands. We can consecrate our death to God, even if it’s long in coming and we’re waiting for it.
There was a community of nuns up the road from us in Singapore, elderly Irish nuns who didn’t have a priest for Mass. Sometimes when there was an extra priest in town, I would go and say mass for them.
There was a 93-year-old and there was an 89-year-old, and a couple of others in their 80s. Everybody expected the 93-year-old to go first, but the 89-year-old went first.
I went to the wake and I met the 93-year-old, and I said, “How are you now?” And she said, “Well, I’m next. I missed the train this time, but I won’t miss it next time.”
Then she said, “But I’m waiting in joyful hope.” It’s a phrase that comes in the Mass just after the Our Father: We’re waiting in joyful hope (cf. Roman Missal, Communion Rite).
That was a beautiful phrase. What a wonderful thing to be able to tell people we’re “waiting in joyful hope.”
If we bump into somebody in the supermarket in the coming days and they ask us how we are, we can always tell them, “I’m waiting in joyful hope.” A rather Christian optimistic phrase to use.
“Having won God’s favor, he has been loved and, as he was living among sinners, has been taken away. He has been carried off so that evil may not warp his understanding or deceitfulness seduce his soul” (Wisd. 4:10-11).
We told the story in the last meditation about that six-year-old little girl who was killed in that accident. Maybe we look back on our life and we see all the years that God has given to us.
As I said, we have a 94-year-old and a 97-year-old in our house, and both survived COVID, and a 15-year-old kid in Strathmore School died of COVID a week or two ago.
We don’t know the ways of God. But we do know that God has given us days, hours, decades, the talent of time to do something with it, so that He can shape our soul in special ways.
“He has been carried off so that evil may not warp his understanding or deceitfulness seduce his soul. For the fascination of evil throws good things into the shade, and the whirlwind of desire corrupts a simple heart” (Wisd. 4:11-12).
We also know from experience, as we grow old, or grow older, we don’t necessarily grow any holier.
When we were young, perhaps we thought that holiness comes with old age. I remember there’s a point in The Way that I used to be fascinated [with] a little bit that old age doesn’t make you holy (cf. J. Escrivá, The Way, Point 870).
All young people think, “I’ll wait to be old to be holy. I’ll enjoy life while I have it now.”
He encourages all young people to be holy now, while you have the chance. Don’t wait to be old to be holy (cf. ibid., Point 30; The Forge, Points 53,113). We know from experience that virtue doesn’t get any easier with the passage of time.
And the devil can get very active as well. We shouldn’t be scandalized by the things the devil may throw at us. The fascination of evil. And even in the eleventh hour, the devil can come knocking on our door.
It’s one of the reasons why the Church encourages people to prepare for a holy death and help other people to pray well. Not to take that time for granted.
The Church encourages people to get the sacraments, the last sacraments, and all these things, and to try and live each day as if it was our last, always in the state of grace. And there will be nothing to worry about.
“Having come to perfection so soon, he has lived long: his soul being pleasing to the Lord, he has hurried away from the wickedness around him” (Wisd. 4:13-14).
I heard of a priest once at a funeral of a young person saying that when you go into an orchard or a mango tree, you look for the ripest mango on the tree. Those are the ones that you pick. You feel it, you express it, you smell it, and that’s the one you pick.
When God goes into the orchard of souls, He picks the ripest souls. People die young because God has found them “ripe.”
One of the things that last year gives us the possibility of doing is to thank God with a greater sense of thanksgiving for the good things He’s given to us.
In the coming days I think we’re going to read the story of the leper who came back to say thank you (Luke 17:11-19). Our Lord got so much in mind out of that thank you.
There was a Jesuit priest in Singapore one time, 81 years of age, who told me that he had to have two cataract operations on his eyes. The doctor told him that he wouldn’t be able to see for three days.
He told me, “You know, after fifty years of being a priest, I suddenly realized how much we priests need our eyes. We need them to say Mass, we need them to say our Breviary, we need them to say a class. And I was thinking: What will I do for three days? I won’t be able to see.”
He said, “The Gospel the following morning was about the man born blind (John 9:1-7). I felt like Our Lord was hitting me in the teeth with a baseball bat, saying, ‘Wake up, I’ve given you 81 years of sight.’”
All the thanksgiving that we give to God with our Masses, with our acts of thanksgiving throughout the day—it’s not overdone; the great gifts He’s given to us that perhaps He hasn’t given to other people.
What a great account we’ll have to give to Him for the fact that we had eyes and we had ears, and we had legs and arms and so many other things.
“Yet people look on uncomprehending; and it does not enter their heads that grace and mercy await his chosen ones and that he intervenes on behalf of his holy ones” (Wisd. 4:14-15).
We have to try and help people to be aware of that eternal nature, the immortality of the soul, and to prepare their soul for that.
The Book of Ecclesiastes says, “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity” (Eccles. 1:2). Everything in this world is vanity; it’s passing, it’s disappearing.
“For everything there is a season, a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck what has been planted. … All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again” (Eccles. 3:1-2,20).
A man in Singapore told me once how his father had died fifty years previously, had been buried in the center of the city cemetery, and then that piece of land became very valuable, and so the government wanted to exhume all the bodies that were buried there and put the cemetery far out of the city.
Every family was contacted and asked to send a relative to be present at the moment of the exhumation fifty years later.
He said, “I went to be present at the exhumation of my father’s remains from that grave.”
And he said to me, “You know, there was nothing left after fifty years. This business of going back to being dust—it’s really true, you know.”
He hadn’t quite grasped it before. He said the only thing that was left after fifty years was a little piece of the lid of the coffin.
Here was this man with his own personal witness and testimony. Not too many people in the world possibly have the chance to be present at the exhumation of remains of relatives many years previously.
And here he was confirming all these truths that we are given. We really do go back to being dust.
The Church reminds us of this reality. We can’t put our heart and our treasure into the things of this world.
Pope Francis has spoken quite a bit recently about the spiritual emptiness of the world, the world that is so much immersed in material things (cf. Pope Francis, Apostolic Exhortation, Querida Amazonia, Point 108, February 2, 2020; Angelus, June 19, 2016).
“…death is a passage into a life that man has prepared here below and that God continues without end” (Robert Cardinal Sarah, Foreword to Nicolas Diat, A Time to Die).
The eternal wedding feast. God wants to marry us. Marriage in this world, he said, is just a preparation for marriage in the next.
“Through Christ, eternal life becomes tangible. … Death is a passage towards Christ…and this [monastery] is an antechamber of a great happiness” (Nicolas Diat, A Time to Die). A wedding feast.
Everything in this valley of tears is gone. It’s told in the liturgy, “Every tear will be wiped away” (Roman Missal, Eucharistic Prayer III; Rev. 21:4). What a beautiful thing.
“If we live for Christ [in this world], we already have one foot in eternity” (Diat, ibid.).
We laugh a little bit at this world; we know about the passing nature. Or the world may consider failure, or disaster, or evil, or all sorts of things. For us, we know it’s just something with a greater potential. There’s a supernatural dimension. There’s a deeper meaning.
And in that school in Madrid where that six-year-old little girl was killed in the car park, the whole school is sort of getting a lesson in that at the moment, and learning that lesson.
There’s some great divine message here. God is at work. We can look to the future, we can be peaceful, happy.
“If we live for ourselves, we’re necessarily unhappy. [But] if we live for Christ,” we have every chance of being happy.
And this combat that we’re called to wage in this world—it only “ends with our last heartbeat. … It crossed the thresholds of eternity. … Death is entirely enlightened by the mystery of faith” (cf. Diat, ibid.).
Something we can look forward to, to keep our lamp burning brightly. Be prepared for the great things.
I think it’s Cardinal Sarah, in one of his recent books, a little bit about death, he [writes the Foreword and Dom Patrick] says, “If the end of our life stops in [a hole in] the ground, then life is not worth the trouble” (Dom Patrick Olive, quoted by Nicholas Dait, A Time to Die).
If all we live for in this world is to be buried in the ground and return to nothing, then what’s the point of living? It’s not worth the trouble. The only thing that makes life worthwhile.
John Paul II says, “In Christ we find the meaning and the purpose of our life” (cf. Pope John Paul II, Homily, World Youth Day, August 14, 1993). Without Christ, there’s no meaning, there’s no purpose. It’s just emptiness. There’s nothing.
We’re aware of the great Christian revolution, the great Christian truth, beautiful truths, with which God wants us to light up the world.
“Thinking about death is not morbid. It helps us to understand the meaning of life. It is necessary to learn to recognize the end of our road” (cf. Dom Philippe Dumont, quoted by Nicholas Diat, A Time to Die).
Billy Graham in the States used to say, “We can only appreciate the value of life when we realize that it can be taken away from us” (cf. Billy Graham, Facing Death and the Life After).
The Resurrection is the foundation of our faith (Catechism of the Catholic Church, Point 638; 1 Cor. 15:14). Death is not the end; it’s the beginning.
“Real life is not on earth. Every day we must prepare to die” (Dom Philippe Dupont, ibid.) a little bit, to die to ourselves.
“The strength of our prayer throughout our life will very much influence our approach to our old age and our death” (cf. Dom Damien Thevenin, ibid.).
I often say to people that the prayers that children learn at their first Holy Communion will be the prayers they’ll remember on their deathbed. Prayer to the Guardian Angel, simple little prayers that children say.
“The stronger the supernatural life, the greater the familiarity with the afterlife, and the simpler the death. Though a criminal who repents at the last minute can also depart in peace” (Dom Antoine Forgeot, quoted by Nicholas Diat, A Time to Die).
I was coming out from Togoni Study Center a few years ago, driving for Fr. Cormac at age 90, and a car happened to pull in behind a garbage truck. Old, battle-weary garbage truck, just about staying on the road; probably should have been retired from use years ago.
On the back of this garbage truck there was a slogan that said, “Every saint has a past, every sinner has a future” (Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance).
Amazing how the Holy Spirit can use a garbage truck to communicate all sorts of wonderful spiritual messages. There we were coming out from Togoni Study Center in all its power and glory, and the Holy Spirit uses a garbage truck to communicate these wonderful words. Well, God has a sense of humor.
We can turn to Our Lady and ask her to help us to be clearer about these great last things, these truths of our faith, which can fill our day and our life and the lives of so many other people with great peace and joy.
I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
MVF