Preparations for Death

July 14, 1946prev home next
Jesus teaches us to die.

Jesus says:

“I dictated a Holy Hour for those who desired it.²⁵⁰ I revealed my Hour of Agony in Gethsemane²⁵¹ to give you a great reward, for there is no greater act of trust among friends than to reveal one’s pain to a friend. The supreme proof of love is not laughter and a kiss, but tears and sorrow made known to a friend. You, my friend, have known it. Through the time you spent in Gethsemane. You are now on the Cross. And you feel mortal afflictions. Lean on your Lord as He gives you an Hour of preparation for death.

I.

“ ‘My Father, if possible, remove this cup from Me.’

“It is not one of the seven expressions on the Cross. But it is already an expression of passion. It is the first act in the Passion which is beginning. It is the necessary preparation for the other phases of the holocaust. It is invocation of the Giver of life, resignation, and humility; it is prayer in which the will of the spirit and the frailty of the creature finding death repugnant are interwoven, as the flesh is ennobled and the soul is perfected.

“ ‘Father...!’ Oh, it is the hour when the world withdraws from the senses and thought while, like a descending meteor, thoughts of the other life, of the unknown, and of judgment approach. And man, always an infant, even if a hundred years old, like a fearful child remaining alone, seeks the breast of God.

“Husband, wife, brothers and sisters, children, parents, friends.... They were everything as long as life was far from death, as long as death was a thought hidden under distant clouds. But now that death emerges from underneath its veil and advances, by an overturning of the situation it is parents, children, friends, brothers and sisters, husband, and wife who now lose their clearlydefined outlines and grow dim in the face of the imminent advance of death. Like voices fading out in the distance, everything on earth loses strength, as what is beyond gains intensity, what seemed so far away until yesterday.... And a movement of fear strikes the creature.

“If it were not painful and fearful, death would not be the final punishment and the final means for expiation granted to man. Until Sin appeared, death was not death, but dormition. And where there was no sin, there was no death, as with Mary Most Holy. I died because all Sin was upon Me, and I experienced the horror of death.

“ ‘Father!’ Oh, this God so often not loved, or loved last of all, after the heart has loved relatives and friends, or has had more unworthy loves for creatures of vice, or has loved things as gods, this God so often forgotten, who has allowed Himself to be forgotten, who has left people free to forget Him, who has let them act, who has sometimes been mocked, sometimes cursed, sometimes negated, now rises again in human thought and takes up his rights once more. He thunders, ‘I am!’ And in order not to cause death from fear by the revelation of his power, He tempers that powerful ‘I am’ with a gentle word: ‘Father.’ ‘I am your Father.’ There is no longer terror. The sentiment prompted by this word is abandonment. I, I, who had to die, who understood what it is to die, after having taught men to live calling the Most High Yahweh ‘Father,’ thus taught you to die without terror, calling the God who amidst the pangs of agony rises again or becomes more present to the spirit of the dying ‘Father.’

“ ‘Father!’ Do not fear. Do not fear Him, you that are dying - this God who is the Father! He does not step forward as an executioner armed with account books and an ax. He does not step forward cynically, tearing you away from life and affections. But He comes opening his arms to you, saying, ‘Come back to your dwelling. Come to rest. I will compensate you with interest for what you are leaving. And, I swear to you, in my breast, you shall be more active for those you are leaving than by remaining here below in a hard and not always remunerated struggle.’

“But death is always pain. Pain from physical suffering, pain from moral suffering, pain from spiritual suffering. It must be pain to be a means of final expiation in time, I repeat. And in a flickering of mists which alternately dim and disclose what has been loved in life and what makes us fearful of the beyond, the soul, the mind, and the heart, like a ship caught up by a great storm, pass on - from calm zones already in the peace of the imminent port, now close by, visible, so serene that it is already communicating a blessed quietude and a sense of repose like that of someone who, having nearly finished a laborious task, gets a foretaste of the joy of the rest to come - into zones where the storm shakes them, strikes them, makes them suffer, get frightened, and moan. It is once again the world, the anxious world with all its tentacles: family, business affairs; it is the anguish of agony; it is fear of the final step.... And after? And after...? The darkness attacks, suffocates the light, and hisses its terrors.... Where has Heaven gone? Why should I die? Why do I have to die? And the howl is already gurgling in one’s throat: ‘I don’t want to die!’

“No, my sisters and brothers who are dying because it is right to die; it is holy to die, since it has been willed by God. No, do not cry out like that! That howl does not come from your soul. It is the Adversary who is influencing your weakness to make you say it. Turn the rebellious, vile howl into a cry of love and trust: ‘Father, if possible, remove this cup from me.’ Like the rainbow after the storm, that cry thus restores light and quietude. You see Heaven once more, the holy reasons for dying, the reward for dying - that is, to return to the Father - and then you comprehend that the spirit, too - or, rather - that the spirit has greater rights than the flesh because it is eternal and of a supernatural nature and thus holds precedence over the flesh, and then you say the words which are absolution of all your sins of rebellion: ‘But may your will, not mine, be done.’

“That is peace. That is victory. The angel of God embraces you and comforts you because you have won the preparatory battle to turn death into a victory.

II.

“ ‘Father, forgive them.’

“It is time to divest oneself of all that is a weight to fly more securely to God. You cannot take with you either affections or riches which are not spiritual and good. And there is no man who dies without having to forgive one or many of his fellows for something - and in many areas, for many reasons. What man reaches the point of dying without having suffered the harshness of betrayal, estrangement, deceit, usury, or any other form of harm from relatives, consorts, or friends? Well then, it is time to forgive in order to be forgiven. To forgive completely, leaving aside not only the rancor, the memory, but even the conviction that our reason for indignation was proper. It is the hour of death. Time, the world, business affairs, and affections come to an end and become ‘nothingness.’ Now only one truth exists: God. What good is it, then, to carry over the threshold what belongs to this side of the threshold?

“To forgive. And since reaching the perfection of love and forgiveness - which is not even to say, ‘And yet I was right’ any more - is very, too difficult for man, the task of forgiving on our behalf thus passes on to the Father. To give Him our forgiveness, Him, who is not a man, who is perfect, who is good, who is the Father, so that He will purify it in his Fire and give it, once it has been rendered perfect, to those deserving forgiveness.

“To forgive the living and the dead. Yes, the dead, too, who have been the cause of pain. Their death has removed many sharp edges from the indignation of the offended - it has sometimes removed all of them. But the memory still remains. They have caused suffering, and one remembers that they have caused suffering. This memory always sets a limit upon our forgiveness. No, not any more now. Now death is about to remove every limit from the spirit. One is entering the infinite. To remove, then, this memory, too, which limits forgiveness. To forgive, to forgive, so that the soul will have no weight and torment from memories and be at peace with all the brothers and sisters who are alive or are being purified, before encountering the Peaceful One.

“ ‘Father, forgive them.’ Holy humility, gentle love of the for- giveness granted, which entails forgiveness asked of God for the debts towards God and towards one’s neighbor of those requesting forgiveness for their sisters and brothers. An act of love. To die in an act of love is to receive the indulgence of love. Blessed are those who are able to forgive in expiation for all their hardness of heart and for their sins of wrath.

III.

“ ‘Here is your son.’

“Here is your son! To give up what is dear, with a far-sighted, holy thought. To give up affections and yield oneself to God with no resistance. Not to envy those possessing what we are leaving. In this expression you can entrust to God all that you care about and that you are abandoning, and all that occasions you anguish, including your own spirit.

“To remind the Father that He is the Father. To place in his hands the spirit returning to the Source. To say, ‘Now then, here I am. Take me with You because I give myself. I am not yielding out of necessity. I give myself because I love You as a son returning to his father.’ And to say, ‘Now, these are my dear ones. I give them to You. These are my worldly affairs, the affairs which on certain occasions prompted me to be unjust, envious of my neighbor, and to forget You because they seemed to me of capital importance - they were, but I thought they were more than they were - for the well-being of my family, for my honor, for the esteem they brought to me. I also thought only I was capable of safeguarding them. I thought I was necessary to carry them out. Now I see.... I was nothing but an infinitesimal tool in the perfect organism of your Providence, and often an imperfect tool ruining the work of the perfect organism. Now that the lights and voices of the world are ceasing and everything is drifting away, I see... and hear.... How insufficient, shabby, and incomplete my works were! How much they were out of tune with the Good! I took it for granted that I was a ‘big deal.’ You were... far-seeing, provident, and holy and corrected my works and made them still useful. I was presumptuous. Sometimes I even said that You did not love me because what I wanted did not turn out well, as with others whom I envied. Now I see. Have mercy on me!’

“Humble abandonment, grateful consideration of Providence in reparation for your acts of presumption, avidity, envy, and replacement of God with poor human elements, with greediness for various forms of wealth.

IV.

“ ‘Remember me.’

“You have accepted the chalice of death, you have forgiven, and you have given up what was yours, even yourselves. You greatly mortified the human self and greatly freed the soul from what is displeasing to God: from the spirit of rebelliousness, from the spirit of rancor, from the spirit of avidity. You have given up life, justice, property, poor life, the poorest justice, and thrice-poor human properties to the Lord. New Jobs, you are languishing and naked before God. You can then say, ‘Remember me.’

“You are no longer anything. No health, no haughtiness, no wealth. You no longer possess even yourselves. You are a caterpillar that can become a butterfly or rot in the jail of the body by a final extreme wound to the spirit. You are mire going back to being mire or mire turning into a star, depending on whether you prefer to go down into the Adversary’s sewer or rise into God’s whirlwind. The final hour determines eternal life. Remember this. And cry out, ‘Remember me!’

“God awaits that cry of poor Job to fill him with goods in his Kingdom. It is pleasing to a Father to forgive, intervene, and console. He awaits only this cry to say to you, ‘I am with you, son. Do not fear.’ Say these words to make reparation for all the times you forgot the Father or were proud.

V.

“ ‘My God, why have You abandoned me?’

“The Father sometimes seems to abandon. He is only hidden to increase expiation and grant greater forgiveness. Can man complain about this wrathfully - he who has abandoned God on numberless occasions? And should he despair because God is testing him?

“How many things you placed in your hearts that were not God! How often you were unresponsive to Him! With how many things you rejected Him and drove Him away. You filled your hearts with everything. You then set ironwork on your hearts and bolted them shut because you were afraid that God, on entering, might disturb your indolent quietism and purify his temple by throwing out the usurpers. As long as you were happy, what did you care about possessing God? You would say, ‘I already have everything because I deserved to.’ And when you were not happy, didn’t you ever flee from God by making Him the cause of all your misfortune?

“Oh, unjust children who drink poison and enter into labyrinths and plunge into precipices and lairs of serpents and other beasts and then say, ‘God is to blame,’ if God were not a Father, and a holy Father, what should He say in reply to your complaints about the painful hours when you forgot Him in the happy ones? Oh, unjust children filled with sins who would demand to be treated as the Son of God was not treated in the hour of the holocaust, tell Me: who was the most abandoned one? Isn’t it the Christ, the Innocent One, He who, to save, accepted utter abandonment by God after having loved Him actively at all times? And don’t you bear the name of ‘Christians’? And isn’t it your duty to save at least yourselves?

“In turbid, self-complacent indolence fearing disturbance from accepting the Active One, there is no salvation. Imitate Christ, then, by casting forth this cry at the time of most intense anguish. But make the note of the cry one of meekness and humility, not a tone of blasphemy and reproach. ‘Why have You abandoned me - You that know that without You I can do nothing? Come, O Father, come to save me, to give me strength to save myself because the grip of death is horrendous and the Adversary cunningly augments its power over me and hisses that You no longer love me. Make Yourself heard, O Father, not because of my merits, but precisely because I am a nonentity with no merits who is unable to overcome when alone and now understands that life was work for Heaven.’

“ ‘Woe to those who are alone,’ it was said.²⁵² Woe to those who are alone at the hour of death, alone with themselves against Satan and the flesh! But do not fear. If you call the Father, He will come. And this humble invocation of Him will make amends for your blameworthy indifference towards God, false worship, and disordered self-love, which make you indolent.

VI.

“ ‘I am thirsty.’

“Yes, in all truth, when the real value of eternal life has been grasped over against the false coin of earthly life, when the purification of pain and death is accepted as holy obedience, when one has grown more in wisdom and grace before God in a few hours - sometimes in a few minutes - than in many years of life, a deep thirst arises for heavenly waters and heavenly realities. The lusts of all human thirsts are overcome. But the supernatural thirst to possess God arises. The thirst for love. The soul aspires to drink in love and be drunk by it. Like water which has rained down upon the ground and does not want to become mud, but go back to being a cloud, the soul is now thirsty to ascend to the place from which it has descended. With the walls of the flesh nearly broken, the prisoners feel the breezes of the Place of origin and long for it with their entire self.

“What exhausted pilgrims, on seeing their birthplace now close by after years, do not muster their strength and continue swiftly and tenaciously, unconcerned about anything but reaching the point from which they set forth one day, where they left behind all their real good, now sure that they will find it and enjoy it even more, because they have gained experience of the poor, unsatisfying good which they encountered in the place of exile?

“ ‘I am thirsty.’ Thirsty for You, my God. Thirsty to possess You. Thirsty to give You. For on the threshold between earth and Heaven one is already able to grasp love for one’s neighbor as it should be grasped, and there comes a desire to act to give God to the neighbor we are leaving - the holy industriousness of the saints, who, as dead seeds, become ears of grain and disseminate themselves in love to give love and make God be loved by those who are still in the struggles of the earth. ‘I am thirsty.’ There is no longer any water except one which can quench thirst, when the soul reaches the threshold of Life: the Living Water, God Himself.

“True Love: God Himself. Love set against selfishness. Selfishness has died before the flesh in its pleasures, and love reigns. And love cries out, ‘I am thirsty for You and for souls. To save. To love. To die in order to be free to love and save. To die in order to be born. To leave behind in order to possess. To refuse all sweetness, all comfort, for everything is vanity here below, and the soul wants only to plunge into the river, into the Ocean of the Divinity, drink from It, be in It, with no more thirst, for the Fount of the Water of Life will have received it.’

“To feel this thirst in order to make reparation for lovelessness and lust.’

VII.

“ ‘Everything is finished.’

“All the acts of renunciation, all the sufferings, all the trials, the struggles, the victories, the offerings - everything. There now remains nothing but to present oneself before God. The time granted to creatures to become gods and to Satan to tempt them is over. Pain ceases. The trial ceases. The struggle ceases. There remain only judgment and loving purification, or there comes the immediate, most blessed dwelling in Heaven. But what is earth and human will comes to an end.

“Everything is finished! The expression of complete resignation or joyful recognition of having concluded the trial and consummated the holocaust. I do not contemplate those dying in mortal sin, who do not say, ‘Everything is finished,’ but with a howl of victory and tears of pain, respectively, the victorious angel of darkness and the defeated guardian angel say so for them. I am speaking to repentant sinners, good Christians, or the heroes in virtue. These, increasingly alive in spirit as death seizes the flesh, murmur or cry out, resigned or joyful, ‘Everything is consummated. The sacrifice is ending. Take it as my expiation! Take it as my offering of love!’ This is what spirits say, as their next-to-last expression, depending on whether they are undergoing death through the common law or offering it through a voluntary sacrifice as victim souls. But both the former and the latter, when they have now reached liberation from matter, rest their spirits on God’s chest, saying, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’

“Maria, do you know what it means to die with this elevation coming alive in one’s heart? It is to die in God’s kiss. There are many preparations for death. But, on the basis of my words, believe that this one, in its simplicity, is the holiest.”

Jesus provided this dictation at twelve, when the vision received in the early hours of the morning had ended. I thought I had finished writing and had set about sewing - laboriously, but out of necessity - to prepare linen needed in the house. I tossed aside the thimble and needle and took up the pen again. And, extremely ill as I was, I received this preparation for death as a true, most precious gift.²⁵³

²⁵⁰ See the entry for July 14 in The Notebooks. 1944.

²⁵¹ A number of references to Gethsemane are to be found in The Notebooks. 1944. See, for example, the entries for May 6 and September 13. And, of course, the Agony in Gethsemane is fully described in the major work on the Gospel.

²⁵² Ecclesiastes 4:10

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