Your Death
Don't turn
the page.
Don't run
away because of those two words up there. You are only running into its arms.
We all are. There was one man who stayed and looked at death, listened to all
it had to say, and, for the rest of his life, he never feared it again. Would
you like that? Never to fear death again? Well, here is the way it happened for
him.
Once upon a
time, there was a beautiful queen. Her name was Isabella, and she was ever
surrounded by brave, adoring courtiers. Beloved above all to this Queen was a
handsome, young nobleman, whose name was Borgia. Francis Borgia. He loved his
queen purely and deeply. He had laid his sword at her feet, and he hoped for
long and happy years of honour and high position at her brilliant court.
But the queen
died, as queens will, and she died very young, as some queens won't. The sad
and broken Francis Borgia accompanied her funeral cortege in the long journey
across the hot Spanish countryside to the city of Granada. Finally, they
arrived at the palace, and a ponderous, legal-looking individual came out and
declared that the casket must be opened to make sure it was really the queen
inside.
Now, this was
all before the days of our modern, clever embalming. And so, when the casket
was opened, there was simply sheer horror. The stench, the pockmarked, decaying
face, the sight of the milling vermin, struck the young courtiers like a
nauseating flood. They groaned, they fled.
All except
one. Francis Borgia stayed. There were sudden tears in his eyes, but they were
not for the queen. They were the kind of tears that St. Paul must have shed as
he rode out to persecute the Christians, and being suddenly struck from his
horse by the Almighty, lay, crying there in the dust, a blinded man. But now,
Francis is speaking to his queen for the last time.
'Oh Lady, you can take every hope that I ever had for
honour and glory and put it beside you in that casket. I see now how death
hovers like a shadow over all earthly beauty, mocking it, waiting to turn it
into dust again. Farewell, my poor queen, I go to serve a Master Who can never
die!’
And he went
out to become one of the greatest Saints that God ever had. All because he had
the courage to stand and look death full in the face. Let us.
After all,
you know that the trees are already growing on the hillside, the trees that
will someday cradle you against eternity. That not too pleasant picture - your
own coffin. And yet, your pall-bearers are alive today, my friend. The
machinery to carry you out of the land of the living is already in motion. Your
own heartbeat of this very moment promises you there must be a last heartbeat
some day. It cannot just go on. Your dear heart is your guarantee of death.
Shall we grow
military for a moment, and plan our little campaign with death? Not against
death, for we can never be victors there. We shall die. The curse of death is
on us, and even the Son of God felt that curse of death on His cross. But plan
our campaign we will, and the first line across our blueprint is bold and
definite. It is this.
Death will come.
Look at your
watch for one minute. Do it. During that minute, about two thousand people
died. At each second, another one stood before his God to hear the eternal
decision, the final judgment on his life. All day, all night, they suddenly
appear before Him, like endless millions of leaves, slipping quietly to the
ground in the autumn of the year.
Up the
polished marble steps goes Death, past the armed guards goes Death, to lay its
cold irrevocable hand upon the most important shoulder in the world. And never
has it been known to ask, 'How ready, how rich, how old are you?’
We find
ourselves uncomfortably remembering the beautiful, glossy-leafed, fig tree that
our Lord one morning cursed until it shriveled before the eyes of the apostles.
Uncomfortable, not because He cursed it, but because He cursed it for its
barrenness, whereas no fig- tree in all Palestine was bearing fruit just then.
It was not the season for fruit. Why curse a tree for barrenness in the early
spring, when it was supposed to be barren? Why, except to warn us, who put off
our complete conversion to God until the autumn of our lives, until we think it
is time to turn to God. And find that our shriveled souls, cursed for
unproductiveness, cannot turn in their clay sockets.
So we shall
die. And the thought of it strikes us with the force of a feather landing on a
pink cloud.
We have seen
an hourglass. The glass with just enough opening for a grain of sand to pass
through at its waspwaist. The bottom and top are closed off, and exactly enough
sand is put into the top as will take an hour to pass through the opening. When
the hour is over, all the sand is on the bottom. It is no accident. That is all
the sand there was.
And down a
highway in Queensland, at seventy and eighty miles an hour, two automobiles are
recklessly closing up the distance between each other. Four young people in
each car, four young drunk people, and the sands of their lives are running out
fast. Their clothes and their consciences are badly dishevelled, and in three
minutes they will stand before their Creator and give an account of their
lives. Meanwhile, we shall be using acetylene torches to separate their poor
bodies from the tangle of steel and glass. Death must have seemed so far away
as they began that ride. The papers called it an accident. There was no
accident. That was all the life they had been given, and it ran out.
If we could
only get that picture clearly. The hourglass of our own lives. What is left in
the top? How much? Three hours? The papers may call it an accident, but that
was all the life that you had. Perhaps you will never get to a confessional
again. Never to be absolved again. A blood clot, a stroke, a speeding car- God
will get to you no matter where you are. Neither He nor you will add a grain of
life. It was all settled before you were born, and it has been running through
all these years. Have you an hour left?
How many people live in mortal sin?
No longer are
we drawing bold lines in our blueprint for the campaign with death. Very shaky
lines, for death has all the advantage here. It can strike from behind. Forty
thousand people will die tomorrow morning, and twenty-five thousand will not
even see death coming. They will be as young as you, younger; as healthy as
you, healthier; richer, poorer than you, and suddenly their brain will be
paralyzed in death and they will be dragged before the judgment seat of God to
answer for it all. What if you are standing there with them? You could be, you
know.
They are
sitting in their homes tonight, quite alive. By two oclock tomorrow afternoon,
their bodies will be waiting for identification at some morgue or other.
Tonight, they expect death exactly as much as you do. Death is for hospitals
and battlefields, and for the old.
Christ died
for us, loves us, and yet, because He must judge us, He was almost pleading
when He said, 'I will come to you like a thief in the night. As though: 'If
there is anyone you don't want Me to find you with, if there is any place, any
home, any car wherein you don't want me to discover you, stay out of it! I
promise you that I shall come as a thief! No sound, unexpected, unseen. When do
you least expect me, married man, when do you least want me? Single man? Woman?
I have warned you. Don't gamble that I lie!
If Adam and
Eve had not committed their sin, we would not be thinking of death this way.
There would be no death to think of. God never meant our souls and bodies to be
torn apart in a last agony. Soul and body were meant to be one, as they are in
you today. And so we are terrified at the thought of this unnatural separation.
No friends return to tell us about another life, all is surrounded with
mystery, darkness, fear.
And yet, our
own personal, eventual heaven or hell is not a thing suddenly thrust upon us
the day we die. There is really no mystery about it at all. If a man keeps
crying out to God throughout his life, 'I will not have you, then his fate will
have the simplicity of an echo on the day he dies. God crying back, 'And I will
not have you! Nobody builds for hell and
lives in heaven; no one builds for
heaven and finds himself in hell. On the very promise of the Almighty: 'Man
shall go into the house of his eternity. Just as you build it today. So the
sinner arranges two hells for himself. One on this earth, a mental hell, where
he lives without peace of mind; one in eternity, where he lives without peace
of mind or body. A two-time loser.
A priest
raced through Melbourne in his car, pulled up at a hospital, and rushed for the
bedside of his dying uncle. He was carrying the Blessed Sacrament, the holy
oils. He came into a little vestibule, next to his uncle's room, and then,
strangely enough, sat there for five hours until the man died. You see, his
uncle had been living with a divorced woman for twelve years, and the woman was
in the sickroom, and violently refused to let the priest enter. Long ago, that
man had made his choice, and on this day, he would have to stay with it. The
priest had brought his God as far as God would go, and now He waited, ten feet
away. Waited for the man to die.
There is a
line in the Scriptures, 'I swear, as I am your God, I am not mocked.
There is a
line in the Scriptures, 'It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the
living God!
We watch
human life, and it becomes a grim thought that these human beings shall die as
they have lived. The thought can take practically all the comfort out of lying
in bed on a Sunday morning, instead of going to Mass. And the bed can seem like
a veritable nest of spikes when we realize the compounded guilt of keeping the
children away from the altar, away from the railing. The brooding fear of what
it might be like this Sunday morning, to fall into the hands of the living God,
maliciously defied, deliberately angered.
And what of
the person who has surrendered to some secret sin? He has made a contract with
impurity, and death may break into the contract at any minute. All the while,
his hope for heaven is just a mockery, a vague waiting for a vague someone who
will decide for him whether he wants heaven or hell. In the heart of every sin
there is a dark core of unhappiness and its name is death. The soul, dead in
sin, and the body ever in jeopardy what if death had been waiting there, what
if the last grain of sand had run out, and he had died as he was living?
These are the
houses we build, and God has promised us that man shall go into the house of
his eternity. As he built it. And the poor soul, who lives down all the years
of her life with a concealed sin on her soul. (If only she knew the sheer
happiness, the sense of humility, the desire to help ever so kindly, that wells
up in the heart of any priest to whom she says, there in the confessional, 'Father, I held something back years ago.
Please help me.) Carrying the dead lumber in her heart, knowing only
unhappy years now, and an eternity of payment when death shall find her out.
Go, dear soul, go to any priest. By the grace of God, go today!
And
sometimes, in the abandon of his reaping, death strikes at those who choose to
ignore the responsibility that God has woven into the act of human love. They
choose to ignore the child, choose an engineered sterility, or when mechanisms
fail, choose murder.
The lady
stopped the missionary after the last Mass. He had never seen anyone so broken,
so despairing, so fearful.
'Oh, Father, what shall I do? My husband and I have
prevented children these twenty years. This morning, Father, he was dead.
Beside me. Dead. Oh, what can we do?’
Would it have
done her and her husband any good to have looked upon the decaying face of
Isabella, the queen? I doubt it. They would have simply come to know what death
looked like. The courtiers, who fled from the casket of their queen, knew what
death looked like. They knew, and they tore it out of their memories as they
stumbled back to a life of pleasure. Knowing is not enough, so God said,
'Remember, remember thy last end, and then, thou shalt never sin. That is why
you find a skull, a death's head, somewhere in the portrait of the old saints.
They were always remembering what death could do to them. They could not stop
its invasion of their body, but their whole life was geared to make sure that
death would never touch their soul.
Human love is
blind. (In much the same order, so is chemical attraction.) One man had about
five minutes to live, and the priest begged him to renounce the unlawful wife
who stood at his death-bed. But the gentleman rose up in his bed to cry out,
'I'll not tell her to go, I'll tell her that I love her and will love her in
hell. And the life blood came pouring out of his mouth. Dead.
In hell he
would love her! In hell he would hate and curse her for all eternity as the
cause of his own endless agony. There is no love in hell. The peace of mind
that you have never known in your bad marriage will not be waiting for you in
hell. Aren't you human enough to want happiness and peace somewhere along the
line? Dreamer, you haven't it today, and you have made sure you will never have
it throughout the eternities.
But perhaps
you have grown used to sin. Are you glad, at last? You may find another nugget
of comfort in knowing that, quite often, a bad conscience does not trouble
folks, even on their deathbed. You can kill off your conscience. One man did,
and as he was dying, Cardinal Bellarmine leaned over him to suggest an act of
contrition. The man looked up at him.
'Father, what
is contrition? He had five minutes in which to tell God that he was sorry for a
lifetime of sin, and he did not even remember what sorrow meant.
As a
missionary, one often enough meets people who are quite pleasant and blithe
about living in sin. It is the nearest, known thing to the peace and beauty of
a sepulchre. Christ acidly called it, 'clean without, whitewashed, and the
corruption of bones within. One, the prince of the fallen angels, hopes they
stay pleasant and blithe. He will never bother them, even on a deathbed. Why
should he? They are in his pocket, and there is no struggle. Why take the case
to court and argue further? He has the deed, signed, sealed, and delivered.
Don't envy them.
For, there is
a sentence in Holy Scripture that holds what is about the most dangerous,
final, shocking truth that has to do with us creatures of God. It is this:
'Seek the Lord, while He may yet be found. While He may yet be found. So there
can come a day when He can't be found. So there are people walking about the
streets of our cities, and they are already condemned to hell. They will step
from this life into hell forever. Their last chance, their last grace, was
turned down, and God will never bother them again. There is a peaceful death
for you.
Because you
have cared enough to follow these thoughts upon your death, this reading can be
all the grace you will ever need. It may be your last, but it is enough, if it
will lead you quickly to the confessional, or at least, for this moment, to
kneel and make a fervent act of contrition. Start the road back . . . . . . Do
that, remembering that on one of these todays, you will look for the first time
into the eyes of Jesus Christ.
Bravely look
now, and say your act of sorrow deeply, lovingly, to Him. Mercy is marvellous.
Perhaps, on
the other hand, you are the one who has made plans for your deathbed. You will
come back then. You will give up sin only when you no longer have the strength
to commit it. You will snap your fingers, and God will come running. And the
poor fool of a God, who demands that we intend to give up sin, will listen
anxiously while you admit your transgressions, while you throw him the dregs of
your life, and the sop of amendment forced on you by physical sickness.
Have you ever
been really ill? So in pain that you cried to die? There lies such a one now,
and his mind is growing dim. The pain quiets a bit, and a new anguish arises as
he wonders who will take care of his broken wife and children. He wants to rise
and protect them, but the sickness has taken the last ounce of his strength. He
has never tried to conquer his flesh, and now he has fallen again and again. He
is half crazed at the thought of the eternal hell before him. The terrible
thing called despair is rising in the depths of his being. He is sick,
heart-broken, his will weakened, and now- suddenly he is going to rise up and
make a good confession of his whole life, his every bad action all those years;
his strength will miraculously return, his mind will clear. . . . It won't. He
spent a lifetime putting a different kind of machinery into motion, and now it
moves heartlessly on to his destruction.
Mercy is
marvellous, and he made a mockery of it, and his fate already lies across the
Scriptures, 'I swear, as I am your God, I am not mocked! And this is mockery.
Oh, your
priest will run to the bedside with everything the Church has. And your priest
will come home to sit in his room, and stare awhile at the wall, and wonder-
what kind of sorrow was that- what kind of amendment was that what kind of
consciousness was that?
A few days
later, the priest will bury that man in consecrated ground, and perhaps wonder
where God has really buried his soul.
Too cruel? Oh
no. St. Jerome is there to remind us that in all the Scriptures, only one man
ever came back to God at the end of his life- the good thief. Just one. One, so
we would not despair. But only one, lest we are thinking of trying it
ourselves.
But ask the
One, Who hung next to the good thief, and poured out His mercy that afternoon.
'Yes, the
good thief. He came up out of a childhood of poverty and fear, he came to Me
out of his years of ignorance and oppression. He came to Me at the end of the
chase. I gave him one chance, and he took it.
'And you? So
many years, so many chances, so much mercy.
All the
Christian world turns to its God on the cross. Look up confidently, for This is
the One Who forgave His murderers. All of us.
Time Is for Eternity
THE YOUNG
virgins have formed a group, now, in the Roman arena. Except for their
clothing, they are very much like the senior high school girls, who are shining
up that graduation ring every conscious and every unconscious moment, with
happy eyes set on the great day in June. But there are no rings, and there will
not be any great day in June for the young virgins here in the arena. They were
quietly living along their Christian lives, when suddenly time ran out. Time
for living their Christian faith ran out. Now they have to die for it. Their
faith is no different than the faith of the young high school girls in your
parish, but now these young Roman girls must die for it.
Thousands of
eyes will watch them die. The people are already there, sitting forward rather
eagerly, actually human beings, who have come out to see other, cornered human
beings.
And the
animals, the other animals, the ones they keep in the cages around the arena
enclosure, are watching, too. Starved for two weeks now, but soon they can sink
their jaws into this delicate, living human flesh, and the little girls will be
quite defenceless against the tearing, drooling jaws. God help them quickly be
unconscious.
Of course,
they do not have to die. If they just take a bit of incense, and burn it before
that marble god, and deny the name of the Jesus who died fifteen years ago over
in Jerusalem, they will be as free as birds.
Rosalia is
among the virgins. Rosalia, so made for youth and life and love. Maybe God will
have some strong Roman soldier die for her. Or, maybe it is lawful to burn a
little incense, because her father just did. Her father has gone over to the
pagans. And see, the young girl on the edge of the group, she is leaving them,
she is accepting the incense . . . she is burning it before the god of marble.
Surely, now. Surely, now, it is all right to go along and burn a little
incense. Except . . . that this is HER eternal happiness waiting out there on
the arena sands, and there never can be anyone to walk out there and bring it
back to her. Eternal happiness is out THERE, Rosalia, so walk out . . . look up
at your Christ . . . He knows the fears, the human tears walking, walking. .,
youth and life and love are sweet, Rosalia, but just keep walking . . . Oh,
Christ, take her quickly. Eternal youth, eternal life, eternal love.
And so..We get to try it again.
Or did we try
it at all last year? What was it? Incense before which gods? Time ran out on
that one Friday, time for just passively being a Catholic ran out, and you had
to take a stand on denying yourself meat at that banquet. You ate the meat,
you, the strong man, and the little girls in the Roman arena turned themselves
into torn, bloody meat for Christ. We, the living, get to try it again. We get
a new year, in which to live our faith. The little girls had to die for it. It
is the same faith. We are the underlings.
Eastman, the
creator of the Kodak empire, sat in his penthouse, atop the Chicago skyscraper.
His left hand rested on a series of buttons, electrical buzzers that could
demand and produce from the outside world anything and everything to delight
the heart of man. But Eastman's left hand was very cold, and Eastman was very
dead, and Eastman's right hand held all the story, his own revolver. Before he
took his life, he wrote a little note, a curt little autobiography, a piteous
paraphrasing of something Christ had said. The note ran: 'I have had everything
that life has to offer. Life has no more to offer, so I want no more life.
Christ had
said, 'For what doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer
the loss of his own soul? Or what exchange shall a man give for his soul?
In the
twilight of the Old Year, we think of trying it again. And we gaze up from this
reading to find Christ there, in the shadows. Christ with His scales, to weigh
the conduct of our life against His indestructible words, 'What doth it profit?
Wherein is the profit, to lie awake at night, hoping not to die before dawn, to
die in one's sins? Wherein is the profit to have throttled off conscience, so
that, in a blind bravado, we do not care if we die before the dawn? How went
the exchange, when we traded out our peace of mind? How went the bargain, when
we traded out our soul? Who, then, owns that soul tonight? And would that one
take its place in hell? Who would? Who can?
If only you
could really die away into nothingness. Then, it might be a trifling thing to hide behind the veils of marriage
and turn love into a deliberately unfruitful lust. If only the children did not
have to go on forever, if only they were not immortal, then it might be a
trifling thing for triflers to deny them the poor, short span of human life. If
only it were a trifling thing to walk today without peace of mind, and to lie
down tonight, condemned forever. If only you did not have to go on forever. If
you did not have to be alive somewhere a million years from tonight, and still
go on paying, paying, paying. . . . .
For a sin
that could have been forgiven in two minutes in the quiet of a confessional and
a burst of burning sorrow. Here, in the last shadows of the Old Year's
twilight, let me study my profit.
So many
things seem profitable, so many promise happiness. Throughout the day, we seem
to drive on from one little gain to another. A bit more comfort realized. A
taste sated, a thirst. Some work passed off to another. A compliment attained
and laved in. A thousand little creature things, burning up our time and talent
and energy, promising us happiness. Taking up all our day, and all our days,
until they have all our life, and yet none of them seems to mention any
happiness for the day after we die. They never talk about that. Only God can.
Only God can dare mention the day after we die. Only God can talk about the
sheer profit of eternal happiness. All the way back to the catechism, then.
Know Me, love Me, and serve Me, and I shall so drown you in love and happiness
for all eternity that you shall forget the tiny inch of time, the tiny inch of
suffering on earth, when you won these endless centuries of bliss.
Here in the
quiet, before the world gets at me again, and fools me again, let me plan my
happiness. I was born to be happy, and only sin can make me sad. Only sin is
sad. Sin is the only sorrow, because it, alone, cannot be turned into joy.
Poverty and sickness and heartbreak and bereavement and loneliness are sorrows,
but they all can be turned into joy. For Christ and Mary were all those things,
poor and lonely, heart-broken and bereaved, and I, so poor and sick and
ungifted upon the human scene, can have the quiet happiness of Christ and Mary,
if only I do not tear God and His peace out of my heart.
But how about
the time to come? Will I still feel this way? Will I still be working at this
kind of happiness? I work all year so I can take two weeks off for vacation,
and now I am asking myself if I will work at my faith a couple more years so I
can take eternity off.
Another thing
that worries me. Everybody in hell wanted to go to heaven. Nobody wants to go
to hell. Just what happened? Maybe they thought that some priest or nun or mother
or angel was standing behind them, and would take care of all that for them.
Nobody is worrying about me tonight. Nobody . . . Nobody. And the people in
hell wanted to go to heaven just as I do. They just didn't do anything about
it. They wanted something else more than heaven, and it turned out to be hell.
The train was
an hour out of Melbourne. The litter, human and otherwise, of long travel, lay
strewn about the lounge car. We had formed a little tete-a-tete group in one
corner of the car. To while away the time, we agreed that each should suggest
what he thought the best mental attitude for the next twenty-four hours, if we
knew that an atom bomb would destroy us all at the end of that time. Our
discussion never got beyond the young man who led off. With a self-assured,
sophisticated smile, he flattened us all by this solution:
'I'll worry
about tomorrow when it comes.’
At first
blush, and last blush, a quite insane answer. Here, we had agreed that we were
all to be bombed out of existence the next day, and still, our young hold-out
planned to play in the clay of this world till it blew up in his face.
But are we
less foolish? Who promised that poor sensual side of us even twenty-four hours,
and yet, perhaps we still put off the conquering of temptations till some
tomorrow. When will we face the fact that heaven is not a gift, but a reward
for DOING something? God had to test us some way, and He decided to leave it up
to our body, as to whether the soul would go to hell or not. Cry as we will
about being weak, that will not change the facts. There is a test going on. We
all want to go to heaven, but we will end up wherever the body drags us to, the
heights of heaven, or the rocks of hell.
And who
promised that selfish side of us twenty-four hours in which to grow unselfish?
Nobody will ever need a prayer more than the selfish. Nobody. Their design for
living is 'me first.' The grammar is bad, but the tragedy is fatally worse.
Their Poisonous attitude reaches out into every action, every decision. Always
planning ahead to have everything come out their way. Always wringing out the
last drop of satisfaction from every situation. Their lives are a living denial
of, a perpetual challenge to the most basic platform of Christ's doctrine,
Christ's blueprint for ever getting to heaven, namely, taking up the cross and
denying oneself. How well and how long such a one had better sit in the Old
Year twilight, and swear to himself that he shall become selfish for his soul,
even as he had been selfish for his body, for his will, for his way. It is a
task for giants, or for a weakling with God at his arm.
Of course,
there is no tomorrow. There is just a series of todays. On one of those todays,
you die.
It is late
now. The new day will soon break from out the shadows. The young virgins, the
millionaire Eastman, the lad on the train, have all told their stories. And
someday your story will be told. In a few years, death will have claimed most
of us who read these lines, and people will begin to forget how we looked, how we
talked, how we laughed. The inevitable wall will rise up between the living and
the dead, between the living and you, the dead. Your wife, your husband, your
children must begin calculating how to live without you. They loved you,
indeed, but you are out of their plans now. The story never changes. Your own
last will, the laws of your state, will take away every penny you had. And you
worked all your life for that. Just what did you save for yourself? For YOU?
When it is
all over, and the seasons have laughed and wept and sported about the fields
above your grave for many a year, what if someone could come upon that last
cradle of your body, find that casket, and reach in to take up the handful of
dust that was you? Will you care? Will you laugh, as you look over God's
shoulder, and then be swept away into the delightful social calendar of the
courts of heaven? Will you care about dust when you have God? Or shall it be a
cruelly valuable handful of dust? And will you look up a moment from the
infinite torture of hell, to know that a flurry of wind has just caught up and
spun to the four corners of the earth the priceless handful of dust, once your
body? Gone, into nothingness, and you must go on, paying for that, for all
eternity. How was the gain? How the profit?
Oh man, look
long into the twilight shadows, until you see gazing back at you the burnt,
shocked, hopeless eyes of someone who once lived exactly as you are living
tonight, of someone in hell, who gambled on a tomorrow, and lost. Ask him what
he would give for five minutes back on earth. Ask him what he would do. You
have the five minutes. Remember, you could have spent them on your knees. You
could have thanked God for letting you live long enough to be making the
greatest act of sorrow in your life. It could mean eternal happiness, no matter
what has happened in the past. Five minutes. Remember, you are responsible for
them. You will know it eternally.
If, tonight,
with all authority, you could find your way into hell, and tell some poor
damned soul that he is to be freed in fifty years, he might well cry out:
'Fifty years! If your message is true, I don't care if it is fifty-million
years. So long as this will end. Do you know the very hell of hell? It is to be
without a reason for counting the days and years. There is no calendar in hell.
It just goes on. But now I shall count again! Fifty years, and then eternity
will be just beginning!
But no such
messenger will ever find his way into hell. They can all forget how to count.
No wonder that the terrible word ''eternity'' has sent legions of the most
brilliant, gifted minds and personalities into monastic cells, despising as
dirt whatever the world had to offer, and fearfully readying their souls and
accounts for the crack of doom.
And now the
New Year is trembling at the threshold. Fifty years! Will you count them as a
Catholic, walking out in the New Year to your obligations, to your duties, to
your prayer and kindness and love? Will you take your place with the
lion-hearted young girls, those other Christians in the Roman arena, who
believed as you do tonight, and went out to die for it? And at the end,
eternity will just be beginning!
You have the
greatest gift in the world tonight- you are alive. Perhaps you can write
'failure’ behind everything you ever tried. Perhaps you are alone in some
rented room and nobody knows or cares whether you go on living or not. Maybe
the Catholic solution to some problem in your single or married life seems to
have beaten you down into the dust, and you crawl and choke and weep and hate
the falseness of your position. Or maybe, from your sickbed, life seems a foul,
obscene, pitiless joke.
But you are
alive tonight, and you can still have it all! Eternal youth,
eternal life, eternal love! God made you for it. Reach for it. It is all that
anyone will ever need, and you can still have it all. Walk out and clasp it
with fingers of steel, and never
let it go!
St. Joseph, Patron of a Happy Death, Pray for us.
Nihil Obstat:
V. Rev. J. CULLEN C.SS.R.,
Prov. Sup.
Imprimatur: NORMAN T. GILROY, D.D., Archbishop of Sydney.
Slightly
adapted for space and distributed by https://traditionalcatholicresistance.blogspot.com/
-228x228.jpg "Breaking the Chains of Mediocrity: Carol Robinson's Collected Works (Marianist Articles)")
IT IS HARDER TO CONVERT CATHOLICS than it is to
convert other people, but it is very rewarding. As a Catholic Action lecturer
once said to me: "Don’t worry about the Protestants; if we could only get the
Catholics to be Catholic, the protestants would fall over themselves in their
haste to join the Church." I have myself observed the truth of his
statement. People are not attracted to the Catholic Church on the basis of average
virtue. They do not reckon: "Let's see, taken as an average, ninety per
cent of the Catholics I have met have practiced forty per cent more virtue than
the Lutherans and eighty percent less adultery than the Unitarians; so I guess
I'll join the Catholic Church." No, that's like figuring that if there
were 1o,ooo missionaries in China, and if each converted 100 Chinese per year,
etc. The truth is, of course, that the job could conceivably be done by one St.
Francis Xavier, and might very well fail of accomplishment with 100,000 missionaries.
