A great urgency—even panic—is palpable in the voice of a loved one, or even a medical professional, when they call a priest to the bedside of a person who appears to be breathing their last days, hours or less, on earth. But their panic is not for what one might expect: that their loved one be rescued from death. Rather, it is often visceral anxiety that their dying loved one should be forgiven all their sins, and thereby delivered from
hell.
That God would withhold grace from a dying woman and banish her to hell because the priest didn’t arrive in time to hear her last confession, pour oil on her head and hands, and sprinkle holy water at her bedside, says more about the kind of God we believe in than who God is. We would do well to “think of the love that the Father has lavished on us, by letting us be called God’s children”, as the First Letter of John in Sunday’s second
reading invited us to do. Perhaps then we will be convinced that, as John assures us, “we are already the children of God.” And as St. Paul promises the Romans, “Nothing can ever separate us from the love of God.”
While our panic for the priest to arrive to confer the Sacrament of Anointing of the Sick may admit of a deficient understanding of God, it is also proof of an undeniable truth that is often acknowledged only in the final moments of a person’s life: that God is the most important reality and that we desire union with God at the end of our days. And what greater gift of peace can there be for us who remain than to know that our loved one is
united with God—it is a peace for which a minister will drop everything and rush to a dying woman’s bedside to concede.
But it is also good to remember this peace can be experienced by us all, even now, while living. Reflect on this letter St. Elizabeth of the Trinity wrote to a friend in 1902:
“We carry our haven within ourselves, because he who satisfies the saints with the light of vision gives himself to us in faith and in mystery. It’s the same thing. I feel I have found heaven on earth, because heaven is God and God is in my soul. ”
(Excerpt: Butler's Lives of the Saints: November, edited by Sarah Fawcett Thomas, Burns & Oates, 1997)
