IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
There is such a thing as a good death, a clean one, a death that, however sad, leaves behind a sense of peace. I have been witness to it many times. Sometimes this is recognized explicitly when someone dies, sometimes unconsciously. It is known by its fruit.

I remember sitting with a man dying of cancer in his mid-fifties, leaving behind a young family, who said to me: “I don’t believe I have an enemy in the world, at least I don’t know if I do. I’ve no unfinished business.” I heard something similar from a young woman also dying of cancer and also leaving behind a young family. Her words: “I thought that I’d cried all the tears I had, but then yesterday when I saw my youngest daughter I found out that I had a lot more tears still to cry. But I’m at peace. It’s hard, but I’ve nothing left that I haven’t given.” And I’ve been at deathbeds other times when none of this was articulated in words, but all of it was clearly spoken in that loving awkwardness and silence you often witness around deathbeds. There is a way of dying that leaves peace behind.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus gives a long farewell speech at the Last Supper on the night before he dies. His disciples, understandably, are shaken, afraid, and not prepared to accept the brute reality of his impending death. He tries to calm them, reassure them, give them things to cling to, and he ends with these words: I am going away, but I will leave you a final gift, the gift of my peace.

I suspect that almost everyone reading this will have had an experience of grieving the death of a loved one, a parent, spouse, child, or friend, and finding, at least after a time, beneath the grief a warm sense of peace whenever the memory of the loved one surfaces or is evoked. I lost both of my parents when I was in my early twenties and, sad as were their farewells, every memory of them now evokes a warmth. Their farewell gift was the gift of peace.

In trying to understanding this, it is important to distinguish between being wanted and being needed. When I lost my parents at a young age, I still desperately wanted them (and believed that I still needed them), but I came to realize in the peace that eventually settled upon our family after their deaths that our pain was in still wanting them and not in any longer needing them. In their living and their dying they had already given us what we needed. There was nothing else we needed from them. Now we just missed them and, irrespective of the sadness of their departure, our relationship was complete. We were at peace.

The challenge for all of us now, of course, is on the other side of this equation, namely, the challenge to live in such a way that peace will be our final farewell gift to our families, our loved ones, our faith community, and our world. How do we do that? How do we leave the gift of peace to those we leave behind?

Peace, as we know, is a whole lot more than the simple absence of war and strife. Peace is constituted by two things: harmony and completeness. To be at peace something has to have an inner consistency so that all of its movements are in harmony with each other and it must also have a completeness so that it is not still aching for something it is missing. Peace is the opposite of internal discord or of longing for something we lack. When we are not at peace it is because we are experiencing chaos or sensing some unfinished business inside us.

Positively then, what constitutes peace? When Jesus promises peace as his farewell gift, he identifies it with the Holy Spirit; and, as we know, that is the spirit of charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, longsuffering, fidelity, mildness, and chastity.

How do we leave these behind when we leave? Well, death is no different than life. When some people leave anything, a job, a marriage, a family, or a community, they leave chaos behind, a legacy of disharmony, unfinished business, anger, bitterness, jealousy, and division. Their memory is felt always as a cold pain. They are not missed, even as their memory haunts. Some people on the other hand leave behind a legacy of harmony and completeness, a spirit of understanding, compassion, affirmation, and unity. These people are missed but the ache is a warm one, a nurturing one, one of happy memory.
Going away in death has exactly the same dynamic. By the way we live and die we will leave behind either a spirit that perennially haunts the peace of our loved ones, or we will leave behind a spirit that brings a warmth every time our memory is evoked.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com.)

From the hermitage
By Sister alies therese
I’ve never given plagues much thought. Stunned by AIDS (1980s) and hearing of various pestilence ‘over there’ in Africa or India … but not here! I was a polio pioneer but don’t remember if I got the real stuff or the placebo. Even the ‘white plague’ (TB) has largely been relegated to medication.
In Derbyshire, England, on the grounds of the Parish Church of St. Lawrence, stands a large 8th century stone cross looking out over Plague Village. What a name!
There are black plagues, bubonic plagues, leprosy, SARS, polio, AIDS, anthrax, H1N1, ebola, bird flu, dengue fever, Spanish flu, TB, and, of course, this horrid “19.” Consider these folks:
St. Louis died of plague in Tunisia during a crusade in 1270. St. Julian of Norwich, England, 1416, was an anchoress, lived through three plagues.
Martin Luther wrote Whether One May Flee From a Deadly Plague, where he discussed whether a pastor (or others) might ‘run away’ if their life was in danger. Germany, 1527.
In Mexico, Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared in 1531 between the European small pox invasion and later hemorrhagic fevers. St. Martin de Porres, OP of Peru, 1630’s, nursed the sick midst the plague.
Venerable Dorothy Day (Kings County Hospital, Brooklyn), 1918, nursed the epidemic sick and Sts. Francisco and Jacinta Portugal, 1919-20, both died of plague.
St. Julian was six when the black death hit Norwich in 1348 and resurged in 1362 and 1369. Clearly, for most of her life the terrors of plague and death surrounded her.
Author, Ritamary Bradley explores St. Julian’s writings in Julian’s Way:
“Julian insists this present situation requires the impossible to be well. God answers gently: ‘True, you cannot do the impossible. But, I can. Hence all things can be made well.’ (32)
St. Julian talking with the Lord: ‘Really what kind of a mother are you? All is not well: none of these things (ravaging disease, hunger, pain …) are being made right, are they?’
To us God sounds defensive: ‘I didn’t say that! I did not say you would not be tempted. Did I say you would not be travailed?’
‘Then what did You say?’
God answers this time ‘sharply:’ ‘What I said is that you will not be overcome.’ (68). In the end we will sing a mighty chorus: ‘Indeed, this is the way things are, and it is well.’ For we shall then see …’”(85).
I wonder if Julian’s religious sensibility of devotion to the Passion of Christ wasn‘t formed around the plague pains and anguish she heard at her window and saw in her prayer?
Venerable Dorothy Day (d. 1980), not unlike many of our first responders, was young and still trying to find her way to God and her way to serve. So, she went to nursing school, just in the nick of time.
“One afternoon when I had been cleaning up filth all day, and the perverse patient had again thrown her bedpan out on the floor dirtying my shoes and stockings, I left the ward in tears … this was the time of the ‘flu’ epidemic and the wards were filled and the halls too. Many of the nurses became ill and we were very short-handed. Every night before going off duty there were bodies to be wrapped in sheets and wheeled away to the morgue. When we returned in the morning, the night nurse was performing the same grim task. (D. Day, The Long Loneliness, HarperOne, 1952).
What would be well? All? Really?
I want to remember what Governor Cuomo said: “The cruelest irony is the poorest pay the highest price.” Just look around, not only Mississippi, but the world! Not only the dying patients but the frontline workers. Did you see the pic of the masked kneeling six-year-old, Alen Zelada at night prayer on Junin St., Guadalupe, NW Peru? When asked why he was there said he wanted to be sure God heard him. His house was noisy. He wanted an end to the sickness … people are dying.
Offer what kind of service you can and note that during this time of anguish we can either be lonely or alone. Community is formed in many different ways. Love is needed for all to be well!
“We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.” (D. Day)

(Sister alies therese is a vowed catholic solitary who lives an eremitical life.)

ON ORDINARY TIMES
By Lucia A. Silecchia

Had this May unfolded differently, I planned to be in Rome to celebrate the 100th anniversary of St. John Paul II’s birth in the jubilant grandeur of St. Peter’s Square. I was eager to celebrate because he was the first pope I really remember and the one who shaped my youth and young adulthood as part of the “John Paul II generation.” I remember the way he confronted a broken world in the vigor of his youth and how he faced his very public suffering and death with the strong serenity of his age.

Since the extraordinary celebration is no longer on my calendar, my thoughts turn instead to more ordinary times and some days I spent in St. John Paul II’s Polish hometown of Wadowice. There, I saw the places sacred to his youth that may have seemed ordinary at the time, as so many of our own hometowns seem ordinary simply because they are so familiar. But, it was this small town that shaped the life of an extraordinary man.

I saw the parish church where St. John Paul II was baptized and the baptismal font where, in his words, “it all began.” I saw the town square where he played with his friends — many of whom would soon have their lives stolen from them in Nazi death camps or on the bloody battlefields that engulfed their young lives. I saw the programs from his high school drama productions, and thought about how different the world would be if he had followed his early ambitions to be a poet or an actor.

I saw the photographs of the whole Wojtyla family he loved and lost — a sister, Olga, whom he never knew; a beloved mother, Emilia, who died when he was only eight; a brother, Edmund, who died as a physician caring for his patients; and his devoted father, Karol Sr., who died suddenly when young Karol was merely twenty. Years before Karol Wojtyla was ever ordained a priest, his entire family had already passed from this life.

I saw the dining hall where his father took him to eat when the two lived alone. I saw the orphanage run by religious sisters who cared for him as a boy during the times when his father was traveling. In the interest of serious historic inquiry, I ate at more than one bakery that claimed to sell the very crème cakes the future pope enjoyed as a boy. In the interest of curiosity, I visited the museum devoted to his life.
Most poignant to me, I visited his very ordinary childhood home. In a small flat on the second floor of a modest building, was a simple bedroom he shared with his father, a tiny kitchen and a neat sitting room. The sitting room was the nicest – and it went unused after the shadow of Emilia’s death. In those few rooms, he grew up and came to know the God who would sustain him in the many sufferings of his youth, the blessed Mother who would comfort him in the trials of his life, and the understanding of what it is to live with fear and hope, with joy and sorrow, with great love and great loss.

This home was located just across an alley from the parish church where Karol and his father would go to Mass each morning. What caught my eye was a large sundial mounted on the side of the church — a sundial now permanently marked with the precise time of Saint John Paul II’s death. Over the sundial was, and is, a Polish inscription that read, “Czas Ucieka Wiecznosc Czeka” or “Time Flies, Eternity Waits.”

These were words that young Karol Wojtyla would have seen out of his window every day. In those words, lies an important truth by which to live. It is a reminder to do what is urgent, pressing and necessary — but not at the expense of those things and people who are truly important because they point the way toward eternity.

For me, it is so easy to get caught up in the things of this world that keep life busy and make time fly. But, perhaps what gave St. John Paul II the serenity, courage, and fortitude to live the life he did was knowing that, in spite of all that makes time fly here on earth, it is eternity that waits — patiently and peacefully. It was a truth learned in his own hometown.

I would like to think that, in the joy of eternity, St. John Paul II prays for those of us still occupied with the busy-ness of life that makes time fly. I hope too, that the same eternity waits for us when we, cross the “threshold of hope” and leave behind our ordinary times.

(Lucia A. Silecchia is a Professor of Law at the Catholic University of America.)