The Heart of the Matter

November reflections: dying in a state of grace

The month of November is a special time of the year to reflect on death, dying, and the end of the world.  The month gets this emphasis because the 2^nd of November is All Souls Day and because the readings at Sunday Mass would have us focus on “the last things.”  So, over the coming weeks I’ll address different aspects of death, dying, and how we Catholics go about these momentous events in a family’s life.

 

Let’s first look at the dying process. 

 

Sometimes families wait too long to call the priest in to give “the last rites.”  And sometimes family members of a devout Catholic are so far from the Church that they don’t even think to call a priest to attend to their dying loved one.  This is especially so if the dying person is being well cared for by loving family members and/or by some hospice outreach. 

 

What can be missing in the mix is the forgiveness of sins that comes with the sacraments of the Church.  The dying process is a powerful time to make things right between the dying person and God.  Acting as if there need be no reconciliation with our Maker is not helpful to the dying loved one.  Family members and hospice people can provide love, comfort, alleviation of pain, and the such.  What the sacraments do, however, is to provide forgiveness of sins and a powerful sense of the Lord’s presence -- in such a way as to help the dying person meet the Lord face to face with humility, honesty, and in a state of having been forgiven all sins of the past.

 

Later this month we’ll look at what to do when a death has happened.

A great weekend!

This weekend we have the conferral of two very special sacraments: First Holy Communion and Confirmation.  So, this is a great opportunity to reflect on own our own fidelity to these sacraments. 

Let’s look first at what Holy Communion means to us who approach the altar every Sunday.

            Did you notice that at every speech Pope Benedict gave, when he was in New York and Washington, he emphasized again and again the importance of our relationship with Christ and our need to nurture that relationship by daily prayer and by silence so as to give the Lord the time to speak to us.  When we listen to Him in silence He assures us that He has not left us alone, that we are not orphans, that we are his beloved ones.  St. Peter tells us in our second reading today: “Sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts.”  Do we realize that the term “altar call” refers most extraordinarily to our approaching the altar to receive our Lord in Holy Communion?  Is there a better way to sanctify Christ as Lord in our hearts? 

            Think of the exceptional union we have with the Lord in Holy Communion.  The Lord Himself comes to dwell within us so as to be the One with whom we share our confidences, our hopes, our disappointments, our fears, our joys and our reasons to be so very grateful.  The minutes after Holy Communion are the most important minutes in our lives.  This is the trysting moment between us the Beloved and the Lord who is the Lover of our souls.  This is the time, after having been incorporated into the sacrifice of the cross, when we can surrender into the arms of the Lord of Love who will fill us with gentleness and reverence, and enable us to have a clear conscience.  The minutes after receiving the Body and Blood of our Lord and Savior, are part of “that day” when as Jesus says, “you will realize that I am in the Father and you are in me and I in you.”

            And what about our Confirmation?  When the people of Samaria heard from Philip the message of the Gospel and were baptized, they still needed to have the apostles go down to them and lay hands upon them so that they might receive the Holy Spirit. 

That was Confirmation which will be conferred here today in Spanish and tomorrow in English.

In today’s Gospel the Holy Spirit is called “another Advocate” and “the Spirit of truth.”  What the sacrament of Confirmation enables us to do is to have the assurance that the Holy Spirit will be, as it were, our attorney before eternity, to guide us to keep our consciences clear, and to get us back on then right track when we have strayed.  This Advocate is interested in our welfare at all times and is invested in helping us abide in the truth, particularly the truth that we are sons and daughters of God.  It is when we forget our dignity as a son or daughter of god that we get caught into wrongdoing.  It is the Holy Spirit who enables us to see that Jesus Christ is the reason for our hope because He will never leave us as orphans.  And this Advocate will give us the wisdom and courage to endure being defamed or maligned for our concern for the sanctity of life at all stages of human existence, or for the insistence that we care about the poor and the hungry and the immigrant among us. 

            Both of these sacraments, the Eucharist and Confirmation, are God’s gifts to us to help us fall in love with the Lord; and if that love is to be real, we hear Jesus say in today’s Gospel, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”  A good examination of how we are doing with living out these sacraments would be to see how we are doing with abiding by the commandments.  In an age when the truth of the high moral ground of living by the commandments is debunked, we hear Jesus tell us, “Whoever has my commandments ad observes them is the one who loves me.  And whoever loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and reveal myself to him.”