Rev. Cwirla's Blogosphere

 Richard John Neuhaus fell asleep in Jesus today.  He was among America's most provocative thinkers, writers, theologians, and pastors.  If you haven't read The Naked Public Square:  Religion and Democracy in America (1984) or The Catholic Moment:  The Paradox of the Church in the Postmodern World (1987), then sit down, take, read, and have a good hard think in memory of one of our greatest Christian thinkers.

A friend directed me to a wonderful reflective piece published 8 years ago in First Things, which Fr. Neuhaus edited, called Born Toward Dying. In his usual articulate way, Ft. Neuhaus reflects on his own mortality after a near-death medical crisis:

We are born to die. Not that death is the purpose of our being born, but we are born toward death, and in each of our lives the work of dying is already underway. The work of dying well is, in largest part, the work of living well. Most of us are at ease in discussing what makes for a good life, but we typically become tongue-tied and nervous when the discussion turns to a good death. As children of a culture radically, even religiously, devoted to youth and health, many find it incomprehensible, indeed offensive, that the word "good" should in any way be associated with death. Death, it is thought, is an unmitigated evil, the very antithesis of all that is good.

Death is to be warded off by exercise, by healthy habits, by medical advances. What cannot be halted can be delayed, and what cannot forever be delayed can be denied. But all our progress and all our protest notwithstanding, the mortality rate holds steady at 100 percent.

Death is the most everyday of everyday things. It is not simply that thousands of people die every day, that thousands will die this day, although that too is true. Death is the warp and woof of existence in the ordinary, the quotidian, the way things are. It is the horizon against which we get up in the morning and go to bed at night, and the next morning we awake to find the horizon has drawn closer. From the twelfth-century Enchiridion Leonis comes the nighttime prayer of children of all ages: "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray thee Lord my soul to keep; if I should die before I wake, I pray thee Lord my soul to take."  Every going to sleep is a little death, a rehearsal for the real thing.   (First Things 100 (Feb. 2000):15-22)  

A personal favorite of mine is a little devotional book on the seven words of Christ from the cross entitled Death on a Friday Afternoon (2001).  I read it every Lent.  I offer this little excerpt and allow it speak for itself on behalf of its author who now rests from his labors:

“When I come before the judgment throne, I will plead the promise of God in the shed blood of Jesus Christ.  I will not plead any work that I have done, although I will thank God that he has enabled me to do some good.  I will plead no merits other than the merits of Christ, knowing that the merits of Mary and the saints are all from him; and for their company, their example, and their prayers throughout my earthly life I will give everlasting thanks.  I will not plead that I had faith, for sometimes I was unsure of my faith, and in any event that would be to turn faith into a meritorious work of my own.  I will not plead that I held the correct understanding of “justification by faith alone,” although I will thank God that he led me to know ever more fully the great truth that much misunderstood formulation was intended to protect.  Whatever little growth in holiness I have experienced, whatever strength I have received from the company of the saints, whatever understanding I have attained of God and his ways - these and all other gifts received I will bring gratefully to the throne.  But in seeking entry to that heavenly kingdom, I will...look to Christ and Christ alone.” 

(Richard John Neuhaus.  Death on a Friday Afternoon.  New York:  Basic Books, 2000)  p. 70)