Getting to the Point: death

Showing posts with label death. Show all posts

Saturday, May 14, 2016

A Psalm Against Euthanasia

In you, O Lord, I take refuge; let me never be put to shame.

In your righteousness deliver me and rescue me;

Incline your ear to me and save me…

For you, O Lord, are my hope, my trust, O Lord, from my youth.

Upon you I have leaned from my birth;

It was you who took me from my mother’s womb.

My praise is continually of you…

So even to old age and gray hairs, O God, do not forsake me,

until I proclaim your might to all the generations to come.

Your power and your righteousness, O God, reach the high heavens.

You who have done great things, O God, who is like you?

You who have made me see many troubles and calamities

will revive me again; from the depths of the earth you will bring me up again.

You will increase my honor, and comfort me once again.

I will also praise you with the harp for your faithfulness, O my God;

I will sing praises to you with the lyre, O Holy One of Israel…

Psalm 71

Reflection – This is really less than half of Psalm 71, as you can see from all the ellipses (…). The parts I omitted are beautiful, actually, but are typical psalm sentiments that we have covered in this series many times—cries for help in distress and acclamations of praise and trust in God.

What is unique in this psalm is the reference to old age and gray hairs, and it is this I would like to reflect on. In psalters and breviaries this psalm is often giving the title ‘a psalm for old age’, and so it is. It is a grand teaching on how to grow old and what spiritual attitudes to bring into the latter years of life.

The key attitude here is, simply, steadfastness. The psalmist has known and served the Lord since his youth; he intends to continue to serve the Lord until his death. God has been his sure help since birth; he trusts that this will be the case until the end.

And even beyond death. This reference to the depths of the earth and being brought up again is quite telling. It could be a metaphorical reference to being raised up from the lowest position possible—when we say we are down in the dumps we do not literally mean that we are hanging out at a landfill site, right?

But this ‘depths of the earth’ is, literally, a reference to Sheol, to the place of the dead. And this psalm could reflect an early dawning awareness in Judaism that even death is not the end of YHWH’s fidelity to them, nor to the power of his steadfast love, his hesed for his people.

At any rate, whether in its original Jewish context it was metaphorical or literal, Jesus Christ has taught us to pray this psalm literally, for He Himself came back from the depths of the earth and in Him we all have the hope of being raised up even from death.

And this is the core attitude that we are meant to carry into old age and the decline of the body, the gradual diminishing and ending of all our earthly hopes and dreams. As the curtain slowly comes down on all these things—hopes of health, well being, the vigor and energy of youth that at least seems to make all things possible—we are meant to have a flourishing of theological hope, hope in God, hope that even as our humanity is exhausted the divine is anything but.

In our current Canadian climate of euthanasia, where the best thing we can seemingly think to offer an elderly and sick person is a lethal injection, this psalm and the spiritual attitudes within it take on deeper importance yet. It is so crucial for the elderly that as they experience the breakdown of their bodies and all that goes with that—chronic pain, weakness, and the emotional distress that naturally accompanies all of this—that they do not allow our increasingly cold, utilitarian, heartless society to rob them of the faith, hope, and love that will carry them over the threshold of death into the arms of God where all are made new.

So let us pray this psalm, too, we who are not old yet, in solidarity with our elder brothers and sisters, and let us be vigilant that we do not let society’s ethos and norms poison our minds in this matter. God is faithful, and He desires us to walk faithfully with Him until the very end of our life, so that His steadfast love may raise us up in the next one.

Wednesday, May 11, 2016

Refreshment, Light, Peace

I am writing and posting my Thursday blog post the evening before, as I will be en route early tomorrow morning to the annual March for Life in Ottawa. I hope I see some of you there.

In our journey through the Mass we are coming to the end of the Eucharistic Prayer, and have reached the following:

Remember also, Lord, your servants N. and N., who have gone before us with the sign of faith and rest in the sleep of peace. Grant them, O Lord, we pray, and all who sleep in Christ, a place of refreshment, light, and peace.

We pray for the dead in every Mass. Every time we come before the throne of God to lift up our hearts in worship, adoration, and intercession, we mention those who have died, that God may show them mercy. What is that about?

Well, we pray for the dead because they need our prayers. Not the deceased who have entered the realm of heaven—we need their prayers. Not the deceased (please God, in Your Mercy, be they few in number) who are in eternal damnation of Hell—our prayers are futile for them.

But for the dead who are undergoing their final purification, the last cleansing of God’s merciful love for them necessary before they can enter the kingdom of light and love. Anything in us—no matter how small and trivial—that partakes of darkness and selfishness must be purged from our souls. And so, Purgatory, the great gift of God’s mercy to humanity.

It is a work of mercy par excellence to pray for the souls of the faithful departed. And at every Mass we remember them in particular. In part this is because the Mass is the greatest offering of prayer there is, where the Church unites itself to Christ’s own intercession for humanity before the Father.

It is also because the Mass is, essentially, the worship of Heaven come down to earth. The saints in heaven—the Church Triumphant—are gathered around the Lamb as He offers to His Father the sacrifice He made (cf. Rev 5). We on earth—the Church Militant—are gathered around the altar of God as Christ in the person of the priest makes this same offering to God and extends to us its fruits in the gift of Holy Communion.

But there is a part of the Church who cannot participate in this Mass, this offering, this worship—the Church Suffering, the souls in Purgatory. Perhaps that alone is the great suffering of Purgatory—who knows? So we remember them in our prayers and ask God to quickly restore them to the fullness of communion that we enjoy at the liturgy.

At any rate, the simple fact that virtually every Mass includes prayers for these people should signal to us that the Church considers praying for them among the most important duties of love a person can do. And so let’s be careful not to forget this, not to fall into the easy attitude of assuming that everyone who dies slides right into Heaven with no problem—an odd idea that has no basis whatsoever in Catholic theology or doctrine.

No, the dead need our prayers. We will soon enough be among them ourselves and so we better promote praying for the dead for reasons of naked self-interest if no other. And above all, let us pray that every human being comes to death in a state of grace, with final perseverance and final repentance, so that all of us can happily gather around the banquet of the Lamb at last in a joyful feast that has no end.

Wednesday, January 6, 2016

Works of Mercy: Burying The Dead

I have been going through the corporal and spiritual works of mercy on this blog on Wednesdays, in light of the ongoing Year of Mercy in the Church. It is so crucial to remember that mercy is not, primarily, an emotion or a theory or something to do with Church policies or whatever. Mercy is a work, and if we do not engage in works of mercy we cannot really claim to be merciful.

So we come to the last of the corporal works of mercy, that of burying the dead. And this is indeed the 'last' of the corporal works, the last act of love we can show to a person, the last service we can render to the body of another human being. To bury them with honor and respect.

This is so very important. To go to the funeral, simply. To express one's respect for the person who has died, and sympathy and support for the grieving family members (although that is actually the spiritual work of mercy of comforting the afflicted). I recently had the great privilege of being one of the pall bearers for my brother priest Fr. Patrick McNulty, and there is some basic human reality of carrying the person's body on their last journey, their final corporeal movement (this side of the resurrection), that is very tender and loving and true.

Of course in our Christian tradition we understand that the body is to be treated with great respect. We are not dualists who have contempt or disregard for material reality. Some people believe that is the Catholic view of things, but it is not so. The human body is holy, sacred. All of the graces that come to our souls pass through the body first--the waters of baptism and oils of confirmation, the physical food of the Eucharist, the words of absolution coming to us through our ears. The whole sacramental life which delivers to us the Divine Life is physical, material.

The Church is so convinced that the life of the Spirit passes through and transforms the fleshly life of the body that it venerates relics, the physical remains of the saints. Even the bones of those who have given themselves over to God are infused with spiritual meaning and power.

And of course all of our bodies will be raised up in glory in the end, in a fashion we simply don't understand. So we show great reverence and care to the bodies of the faithful departed, and express our love for them by disposing of them rightly, respectfully.

In our world where there is such a loss of faith, it is more and more common that people either don't have funerals or that the services don't involve the body of the deceased and are merely 'celebrations of life'. I can understand why, if you don't really believe in very much, it would be weird and kind of creepy to have to deal with a dead body of a person. But we who are Christians really should not have this kind of squeamishness or discomfort around these things.

So... go to the funeral! Show some respect! It is a basic work of mercy, and no small one, either. And it is one that is well within the grasp of any one of us - both burying the dead and comforting the afflicted with our presence there. Let us not neglect this work in this year of mercy.

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Msgr Thomas Rowland - 1926-2015

Well, we are in a time of it in Madonna House, with yet another of our members going to meet Jesus last night. Msgr Thomas Rowland died last night around 9:30, after a long struggle with acute leukaemia.

This is our third funeral of the year (fourth if you count Fr. Jim Duffy who died at Christmas time late last year). So we are in a season of saying goodbye and giving thanks, really, for the beautiful men and women who God has allowed us to share life with in this community.

Fr. Tom was a great man in many respects. He was first and foremost a man of the liturgy, a pioneer in the liturgical renewal movement following Vatican II, and a strong advocate of the active participation that was and is at the heart of this movement.

I don't have facts and dates at my disposal as I write this, but he was very active throughout the American Southwest in promoting precisely the kind of liturgical education and sacramental theology that the Church mandated in its constitution Sacrosanctum Consilium. He was a pastor through and through and in his home diocese of El Paso, Texas did great work in building up parish life around the celebration of the Eucharist and the other sacraments.

His one book, God Acts, We React, contains his insights around these subjects, and has been well regarded in liturgical circles. His concern always was to not overly focus on the precise rubrics and texts (although he was a stickler for doing things correctly!), but to understand the mystery of faith being expressed within them - the reality of God acting in Jesus Christ and this action creating in us a 're-action' - an imitation of the action of Christ that is both worship returned to God and sacrificial love and service for the world.

I would simply say on a personal note that Fr. Tom was my great teacher on the liturgy, and my writings on that subject on this blog and elsewhere are simply my own regurgitation of his basic insights.

How did this man get to MH? He came quite early, actually, to visit his sister Mary Catherine who had joined the fledgling community. He himself joined it in the late 1950s for some years, but was recalled to his diocese by his bishop. He remained an associate priest in the subsequent decades. It was in the late 1980s that he was allowed, finally, to pursue his sense of call to be a full-time member of MH.

Here, he worked in a variety of jobs--he was the bee keeper for a while!--wrote his book and travelled extensively giving workshops on liturgical theology all over North America. He went to Ghana and taught in a minor seminary there, and later was assigned to our house in Edmonton. He had unflagging apostolic zeal, and in fact the one thing he could not do easily was sit still. He loved parish life and was always the first one to volunteer to go out and fill in whenever a local parish needed a substitute.

It was just about two years ago that he went down to the West Indian island of Carriacou, at age 87, to help out, since they had no priest on that small island. And he was quite ready to stay there as long as needed, and was unflagging in offering the sacraments, and bringing communion to 'the old people', most of whom were considerably younger than him. It was there that he began to feel tired and sick for the first time in his life. As he put it to me, he finally went for a blood test, since he had no energy, and found out that "I didn't have none!" Blood, that is. Upon returning to Combermere, he was quickly diagnosed with acute leukaemia and told he would live for a month or two more.

That was a year and a half ago. He was a strong man, and death did not come easily to him. But the last weeks his strong heart and iron constitution finally began to lose the battle, and he quietly slipped away last night into the arms of the Lord who he tried to serve all his life.

Fr. Tom was a unique character, an original. His other passion aside from the priesthood and the Mass was flying--he was a licensed pilot all his life. Coming to MH meant giving that up, so he become an avid hobbyist building remote controlled model airplanes which he flew all around the priest house on any fine day. He was famous for his prodigious appetite and could pack away ice cream (pralines and cream!) with the best of them. He was a lively conversationalist, a very funny man, a great story teller with an unbelievably detailed memory for past events. He was a Texan through and through, long and lanky and with a drawl that was undiminished no matter how much time he spent in lesser environs than the Lone Star state.

He was unlike anyone else in MH, really, and he will be missed. For those who might have known Fr. Rowland and who are in the area, I will be posting funeral information on my Facebook page when we have it. Pray for us as we say goodbye to another of our family, and pray for Fr. Tom that he quickly find his place at the banquet feast of heaven, the liturgy that knows no end.

Saturday, June 20, 2015

This Week in Madonna House - June 13-19

When I wrote this column last Saturday, Josephine Halfman had just died. So, of course, this week in Madonna House was first taken up with the corporal work of mercy of 'burying the dead'. Josephine's family coincidentally had come up to see her just as she took a turn for the worse, and so were already here when she died. We were thus able to have the funeral fairly quickly, receiving the body and waking her on Sunday, then having the funeral Monday morning.

It was a small funeral, by MH standards. Josephine had spent the last 24 years of her life in our house in Toronto, and so the members of that house along with some of its close friends came up for the day. I had the wake service and Fr. David May had the funeral; both of us spoke in different ways of the mysterious and hidden quality of Josephine's life, and her steady fidelity to what God asked of her through it all. Trudi Cortens, the director of our Toronto house, gave a beautiful eulogy at the wake testifying to Josephine's many gifts and her apostolic generosity.

It is our custom on the evening of the funeral, after a festive supper, to have a 'memory night' where people can share their stories about the person who died. And so we did that, and it was a great thing especially for the considerable number of MH staff who did not know Josephine too well, her having been away so much in our houses.

Josephine was a true servant of the apostolate. Joining in 1958, she spent most of her first decade in MH in Combermere working in the office and as Catherine's assistant. She was a woman of high intelligence, trained as a chemist, and steady good humour.

In 1968 she was sent to open a house in Lima, Peru, which operated for four years. We lived in a barriada, or shanty town on the outskirts of the city, living among the poorest of the poor and living pretty poorly ourselves. It is our custom opening a house to not rush in with a thousand apostolic ideas and agendae, but to simply live with the people and get to know them first and see what they actually need from us.

Circumstances beyond our control led to the house closing after only a short time, really. Meanwhile, it was an experience that marked those who were part of that house, a true immersion into living among the very poor and indeed feeling quite helpless and poor in that living situation. Josephine returned to Combermere and had various short assignments, eventually going to our house in Cleveland.

This house was also located among the very poor in the inner city, and closed in 1986 when a man broke in and brutally assaulted the two women who were assigned there at the time--Josephine and Mamie Legris, who just died two months ago. Both of them were undaunted by this and promptly went on to their next apostolic assignments; Josephine in short order was ensconced in MH Toronto where she would remain until old age and ill health required her return to Combermere a year ago.

In Toronto she was part of the (in MH) famed group who lived without a house for over a year, splitting up and staying with friends all over the city while searching for a permanent location and somehow keeping an apostolate and a community life going all the while. The house they eventually found was only affordable because it was about to be condemned and torn down, and so the whole place had to be rebuilt from the inside out. And Josephine was in the middle of all of that, a tireless worker who met every situation with a sharp intellect and good humor expressed with a ready wit.

The Toronto years were the best years of her life, as she was able to just pour herself out in a thriving bustling apostolate. She hated--absolutely hated--leaving Toronto even though by the end of her time there she was blind in one eye, deaf in one ear, could hardly walk and (unbeknownst to us) had a brain tumour that would eventually kill her. She was an apostolic servant all the way and would have liked to die with her boots on.

So honouring this wonderful woman was 'the main event' of the week, of course. But come Tuesday life resumed with its increasing summer intensity. The farm is going great guns, and the food processors--the women who preserve the harvest for the winter--are already at work, putting up the rhubarb. Meanwhile, of course, the gardens are in full swing with most crops planted and a nice combination of warm days and rain making everything grow beautifully. The shops are picking up speed, as are the summer tourists. Besides growing and preserving the food we need, hospitality is the principal work of our summer season.

We have had a little influx of guests, with more on the way in weeks ahead, and that always brings a lovely energy of its own, of course. And... that's about it for us this week. Be assured of our prayers for all of you and for the world.

Saturday, June 13, 2015

This Week in Madonna House - June 7-13

Life, death, and everything in between—such was this week in Madonna House. I haven’t actually written this column for some weeks now. In recent weeks life in MH has been fine, but pretty basic and ordinary, and to be honest I just couldn’t think of anything to say about it. There are only so many times you can write ‘the-farm-is-busy-and-we-are-planting-our-crops’ in a row before it starts to sound a little monotonous, even if the work itself is absorbing.

Well, this week was filled with all sorts of things that are anything but basic and ordinary. Sunday last was Corpus Christi, and we had our annual Eucharistic procession from St. Mary’s chapel to Our Lady of the Woods. We have been doing this for years now—in fact it holds a special meaning for me since I arrived at MH to stay on that feast day and actually arrived during the procession. My life has been one long walk with Jesus ever since.

We are joined in this procession by our friends and neighbours in this Valley, and it seems to get bigger every year. We are surrounded by many young families, and some not so young, and so there is always a great aspect of community and joy in this event. Little girls carry baskets of flower petals that they scatter at the feet of the Lord as he passes in His Eucharistic body, while we pray the rosary and pause at Our Lady of Combermere mid-route for Benediction.

Of course it was even bigger than usual this year because the date was June 7, and the following day was our MH Promise Day, the anniversary of the dedication of the statue of Our Lady of Combermere. Many family and friends of the eight people making first and final promises had already arrived.

So we had a cookout supper that evening. This year many of our guests were from Nova Scotia, as two making first promises were from there. Where Maritimers are, there is always music, and so an impromptu ceilidh happened in the basement that evening.

The next day, of course, was Promises Day, and a beautiful day it was. Bishop Mulhall came to celebrate the Mass, and stayed around quite a while for the reception afterwards. There were a great many people with us to celebrate the day and witness four make their first promises in MH and receive the Pax-Caritas cross which is the symbol of our vocation, four make final promises for life, and three others make temporary renewals (another three renewed their promises in our mission houses).

What is there to say about such things? Nothing, and everything. Later we gathered at Our Lady of Combermere once again to pray the rosary there, followed by a festive, joyful supper.

So we received four new members on Monday… and bid farewell to one member on Friday. Josephine Halfman, one of our pioneer staff, had been quite sick for some time, and had been sinking in the past week or so. In the early hours of Friday, the feast of the Sacred Heart, she peacefully slipped away. So we are now preparing for the funeral rites—the wake on Sunday evening, the funeral on Monday.

It does all connect, of course. Final perseverance is the goal of our promises. We pledge our lives to God, and the Pax-Caritas cross we receive is the sign of that pledge; Josephine will be buried with her cross.

In the meantime, there is indeed much ordinary life going on in the midst of it all, and lots of hard work. It takes a lot of sweat and muscle to keep this place going. The farm is very busy, of course, with planting and field work at full steam. The carpenters are building an extension to the farm house, providing much needed extra living space for the farmers. We have a few more guests than we’ve had in recent months, but our dorms are far from full still (hey – any young people looking for an apostolic adventure? Come to MH this summer!).

And so life (our new vocations), death (RIP, Josephine) and everything in between (at the moment, a whole lotta work!) has been ours this week. There is great joy in it all, and great love. And great prayer, for all of you and for the whole world which stands in such need of it right now.

Wednesday, April 8, 2015

These Weeks in Madonna House - March 27-April 7

The blog is back, although I am out the door again tomorrow on one more mission trip, this time to Bruno Saskatchewan and this place, where I will be teaching this course. Meanwhile it has been a packed time in Madonna House, so much so that I think I may need to do this wrap up of our past couple of weeks in two posts, today and tomorrow.

Today I want to talk about the great events that we just wrapped up yesterday, namely the death and burial of Mamie Legris, pioneer member of our apostolate. Mamie died on March 27, four days shy of her 99^th birthday, after a long period of illness and infirmity.

Mamie Legris, 1916-2015

She was a giant of a woman, a truly great soul. Mamie was one of the first group who came to MH to stay in the early 1950s. She and three others (one of whom, Marite Langlois, is the now the last one left) were the first to make promises in 1952—not of poverty, chastity, and obedience as we do now, but of stablility. She was a local girl, from nearby Dacre, a school teacher looking for her vocation who found her way to this tiny house on the shores of the Madawaska.

The MH she joined was, basically, Catherine and Eddie living in a six room house with one or two outbuildings. There were people coming and going, and a number of them would indeed become the core members of this virtually embryonic community that was forming. But there was practically nothing here, nothing except the vision of apostolic Gospel life presented by this wild Russian woman and her passionate love of God.

So, Mamie came, and Mamie stayed. Years later her primary advice to struggling young members of the community would be, “Stay put! Stay on the block! Let God act!” In 1954 (just two years after her first promises) Catherine sent her and two others to open our first MH mission house in Whitehorse, Yukon, driving there across Canada in a pick-up truck that was increasingly loaded down with donations as they begged their way across the continent. In the Yukon, they braved the cold and the primitive living conditions, and all the difficulties of starting an apostolate from the ground up. Maryhouse still thrives in that city, 60 years later and counting.

As the years went by, Mamie would become Catherine’s right-hand woman, working closely with her in the training of new members. Catherine trusted Mamie, and would send her to scope out possible new foundations, particularly in far distant countries. And so the country school teacher from Dacre ON ended up travelling the world extensively, from Peru and Brazil to Pakistan and Israel, from the West Indies to the Arctic Ocean and extensively throughout North America. For a time in the 1970s, she was the director general of women, Catherine retiring from the position temporarily.

All the while, Mamie was a simple, plain spoken, down to earth and very loving woman, capable of forming deep friendships anywhere, with anyone, even without speaking the language (as was the case in our houses in Peru and Brazil, which she helped found). All the while as well, and this was highlighted quite a bit in her funeral services, she lived (and was quite open about it) in a profound spiritual darkness, a true dark night where she had little or no sense of God’s love, presence, care for her. She walked by faith and not by sight, to a degree that few of us are asked to do. And in that dark night, she loved and served, served and loved, prayed and listened and loved some more.

So on March 27, after many years of serious illness and much suffering, Mamie finally died. She had had so many near brushes with death and then recovered that it seemed hard to take in that she was actually gone. The decision was made to wait until after Easter for the funeral, as it would be too much to fit it in with everything else that was going on (see tomorrow’s post…).

It was a big funeral. Mamie had all her wits about her to the end, and had kept up close relationships with her whole extended family. Being one of eleven children, this meant lots of nieces and nephews, unto the third generation. And many of them came to celebrate their beloved Aunt Mame, as they called her. Many of our local friends and neighbours also came, as she was a well known and highly respected figure in the area.

Fr. Pat McNulty had the wake service, and Fr. David May the funeral. Bishop Mulhall, our local ordinary, came for the latter. We buried her in the parish cemetery as she had requested, rather than our own MH cemetery. The day concluded yesterday with a memory night—an informal time when people could share their stories about this great woman who was such a pivotal figure in our apostolate.

Fr. Pat ended the wake service with a quote from Catherine’s diary that seemed to be a good ‘last word’ for Mamie, and so I will end this blog post with it as well. After Mamie had first visited MH for a short stay in 1951, Catherine wrote “Mamie Legris left today. She is as nice as girl as ever could be! I am so glad she came!” So are we all, Catherine, so are we all. Goodbye, Mamie, and see you on the other side.