Noted convert to Catholicism from his Lutheran priestly life, Fr. Neuhaus is a recognized scholar, preacher, teacher and TV commentator (John Paul II's funeral and the election and installation of Benedict XVI) died yesterday, January 8th, after a relatively short illness with cancer. Not know for any liberal thinking, Fr. Neuhaus was also the founding editor of First Things, vehicle for his conservative thinking but also a magazine with other excellent articles about the faith.Not too long ago Fr. Neuhaus wrote two paragraphs about dying that anyone of us would well remember, especially if death is imminent for oneself or a loved one or if one has recently died. his words are meaningful, comforting and offer an insight into what dying means.
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 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. But if I should die before I wake, I pray they Lord my soul to take." Every going to sleep is a little death, a rehearsal for the real thing.
Eternal rest grant unto your servant, Lord.
