“All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Death, from whose embrace no one living can escape!” With these words from the last verse of “The Canticle of the Creatures,” Saint Francis of Assisi presented his vision of death and dying to people living in the early Middle Ages. By means of these words, he showed his contemporaries that death was not something to be feared but rather a member of the family that embraces us during our final journey to God.
“And you yourself a sword will pierce so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” Luke 2:35
The Mexican-Catholic community has a tradition of offering condolences to the Sorrowful Mother after the celebration of the Lord’s passion on the night of Good Friday. This tradition can take different forms, but usually includes a procession, songs to the Blessed Mother, the rosary of the seven sorrows of Mary, and prayers. It is called a pésame, which means condolence, to the Virgin. More than just a quaint ritual, pésame offers valuable insights to better enter our celebration of the September 15 memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows as well as how to live as Christians.
Mary (or as we sometimes say in heedless prayer, MarytheMotherofGod) and I have long been awkward acquaintances. When I was nine years old my father indulged me with a statue of Mary that caught my fancy at the nursery. I was attracted by her Germanic good looks more than by any sense of my own spirituality. My father perhaps bought her to avoid sin, concerned that there might be a deep circle of hell for parents who refuse a child a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Each of our lives is filled with many people, all with unique person-alities, different backgrounds, diversity of wisdom, and stories to be told. On occasion we meet someone, if only for a brief moment, who impacts our lives forever. This is my story about a brief encounter and a person with a very different story.
It was a cold and somewhat cloudy day in October 1966. At the time I lived with my parents in Carmi, Illinois, and had just started my first semester of college. I was driving to class when I came upon a hitchhiker.
This was not your typical hitchhiker, even for 1966. She appeared to be in her early seventies. She stood erect and gave a slight wave instead of the usual thumb gesture. She was wearing a long woolen coat that sported a black fur collar. Her hair was braided in the form of a crown atop her head, and she wore eyeglasses. However, the thing I noticed most about her was her smile. I can still see that smile after all these years. Although I was running late for class, I stopped and picked her up.
Not long ago I read the story of Randy Pausch, the young college professor with terminal cancer who gave the inspiring graduation talk following the final term he taught. As I reflected on his words, I asked myself what my last sermon might sound like. I immediately realized, of course, that I could never plan such a talk, even though I had almost fifty years of priesthood and countless sermons and homilies to look back on.
Prayer is a thorny topic. We like to give God credit when things go well, but we hesitate to blame God—especially out loud—when things don’t make sense. Someone is cured of cancer?
God worked a miracle. Someone dies suddenly of an undiagnosed cancer? We can’t possibly understand God’s ways. We narrowly escape a head-on collision? God spared us; we must still have work to do. The collision occurs? Someone made a bad decision. Of course, there are those who take on God—Job, for instance, or David or Emily Dickinson. In most everyday Christian circles, however, we try to gloss over unexplained and unexplainable human suffering. We want Happy Faces.
Driving to the Sunday-night mission at her parish, Sara had high hopes for the Lent that had just begun. It was her sophomore year in college, and she had celebrated Ash Wednesday at her university’s Newman Center just days before spring break. Now she was home for a week, and as her car wound along the familiar roads from her parents’ house to church, Sara mused about her three Lenten resolutions.
“All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Death, from whose embrace no one living can escape!” With these words from the last verse of “The Canticle of the Creatures,” Saint Francis of Assisi presented his vision of death and dying to people living in the early Middle Ages. By means of these words, he showed his contemporaries that death was not something to be feared but rather a member of the family that embraces us during our final journey to God.
The Mexican-Catholic community has a tradition of offering condolences to the Sorrowful Mother after the celebration of the Lord’s passion on the night of Good Friday. This tradition can take different forms, but usually includes a procession, songs to the Blessed Mother, the rosary of the seven sorrows of Mary, and prayers. It is called a pésame, which means condolence, to the Virgin. More than just a quaint ritual, pésame offers valuable insights to better enter our celebration of the September 15 memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows as well as how to live as Christians.
Each of our lives is filled with many people, all with unique person-alities, different backgrounds, diversity of wisdom, and stories to be told. On occasion we meet someone, if only for a brief moment, who impacts our lives forever. This is my story about a brief encounter and a person with a very different story.
Not long ago I read the story of Randy Pausch, the young college professor with terminal cancer who gave the inspiring graduation talk following the final term he taught. As I reflected on his words, I asked myself what my last sermon might sound like. I immediately realized, of course, that I could never plan such a talk, even though I had almost fifty years of priesthood and countless sermons and homilies to look back on.
Prayer is a thorny topic. We like to give God credit when things go well, but we hesitate to blame God—especially out loud—when things don’t make sense. Someone is cured of cancer?
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