Now and at the Hour of Our Death

We continue our deep dive into THE HEART OF CATHOLIC PRAYER.

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I once read an interview with Garrison Keillor in which he recounted going to a funeral. During the final prayers, the minister prayed for the deceased “and for the next person here who is going to die.” He said that most of the guests were outraged and offended, but that he was moved and appreciative. He liked the fact that the Christian tradition does not candy coat things with promises of perpetual youth and vitality. The fact is, nobody’s getting out of here alive. You are going to die and your body is going to rot and be eaten by worms. Face it.

The Hail Mary faces it. The last prayer we make to the glorious Virgin is eminently practical. It is entirely directed toward “getting our affairs in order.” Whether from germ, or steel, or bullet, or thirst, or drowning, or heat, or cold, or cancer, or chemo, or by the hand of man, this jolly round of days we have known since the insolence of our youth is going to be terminated and every Jack and Jill among us will be left cold and dead. You are dying. You were born that way. Like the vast majority of the human race, you will go down to the grave and vanish forever from the memory of mortal man, utterly forgotten by all mankind. If you don’t believe it, tell me one thing you know about your great-great-great-great-grandmother.

But you will not be forgotten by God. The promise of the gospel is that you are known by him utterly and that, through faith in his Son Jesus you will live in the next world so profoundly that your life on this earth will be a mere eye blink compared to the deeps of eternity that await you in the Blessed Trinity. Your death will, in this reckoning, be your birthday, the day you came Home to Heaven where you belong.

It is from this perspective that we pray the Hail Mary. We ask the first and most redeemed of Christ’s saints to help us enter into all the glory God desires for us in the Risen Christ. In doing so, we approach death pretty much the way Jesus tells us to do it: by not by looking to the future so much as by looking at the present in light of eternity where God is always alive and very present.

That’s why Paul tells us, “Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation” (2 Corinthians 6:2). It is also why Jesus says, “Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day” (Matthew 6:34). One of the corollaries of this is that we should, oddly, be aware of Judgment Day but not anxious about it. That’s because Judgment Day is happening right now. Oh sure, there will be a consummation of all things at the end of the time. Oh sure, the billions of souls who have died will stand before the All-Conquering and Glorious King and receive the mercy and justice of Almighty God and the whole created order will transmuted into the unthinkable glory of the New Heaven and the New Earth and the Lamb shall reign in the New Jerusalem forever and ever while the damned shall grind their teeth in the outer darkness and the blessed and glorified saints shall enjoy the radiant splendor of the living God for endless ages of ages. But in the meantime, the only way to Heaven is through the Sacrament of the Present Moment, presenting our lives to the judgment and guidance of the Holy Spirit on a moment-by-moment basis. Today, now, this very instant, Jesus calls you to receive and live his salvation. This is why the Hail Mary does not merely direct our prayer to the far-off someday. It directs it to this very second, which is the only moment we can do something about. The past is gone. The future is not ours to see, much less control. Only this moment—right now—is yours to choose God. So we ask our heavenly Mother to pray for us sinners now.

Indeed, in a certain sense, now is the hour of our death. The love of wisdom, said the Greeks, is the practice of death. Our lives are one long rehearsal for it, so that we won’t blow our lines and look like idiots before the heavenly audience when the curtain rises on eternity. The angels, saints, martyrs—the whole cloud of witnesses—are a very attentive and very supportive audience rooting for us all the way and, like our Lord, celebrating even our stumbles if we do them with a good will (cf. Hebrews 12:1-2)—and none of them more so than our Blessed Mother. Like our Lord, she knows that our death can come upon us suddenly and without warning. In the Hail Mary, God gives us the gracious gift of having said our prayers and made our peace with him beforehand should we not have the opportunity when we need to.

That’s the beauty of rote prayer: it makes us all eloquent far beyond our native ability. This is counter-intuitive in our informal age which imagines that only extemporaneous prayer is “from the heart” and which derides “parrot prayer” as inauthentic. But, in fact, when we store up the prayers of the Church in our souls, they become the prayer of the heart. We should know this, since it is precisely how our parents civilized us with the precious gifts of “Please” and “Thank you” and raised us up from being the uncouth grabby ingrates we were before we learned these magic incantations that opened the key to healthy adulthood. In the same way, having words like “Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death” squirreled away in the soul ensures that we will not have to suddenly think them up on our own when we are reeling with shock after the miscarriage, the auto accident, or the notice from the Defense Department regretting to inform us that our world has just been shattered.

For the first—and last—truth about prayer is, to repeat Fr. Tugwell’s profound insight, that we don’t know how to do it. As Paul says, “the Spirit helps us in our weakness” (Romans 8:26), particularly by giving us a rich tradition of prayers from the Church that we would never have thought of ourselves in a million years. Even on our good days, our prayers are often inept, but on our own, in crisis situations, we usually go numb or babble incoherently, or spout inanity or simply go to pieces. At such times we discover that the Cult of the Informal is desperately inadequate to help us find the deepest places of our heart and give them voice. What we need is liturgy, rote prayers, the Rosary, and the grief of God’s Son and Sorrowful Mother, crying our bitter tears in the Sorrowful Mysteries and reassuring us of the adamantine truth of the Glorious Mysteries.

Here we discover that where we find what is common to all men and women we also find what is most intensely personal—the joys, sorrows, and glories of human existence that are the common patrimony of us all. It is here, in the ordinary public prayers of the Church and not in some mystic cave of contemplation far from the madding crowd, where we meet again the profound consolation of the Mother of Sorrows who sits enthroned in Heaven, reminding us that she too has been through the Worst Thing in the World and that even that could not defeat the incredible hope of the Risen Christ. And we discover that she freely shares with us the astonishing promise that she shall indeed remember us to her Son at that most inevitable hour of our lives when we are born to eternal life.