Salesian Literature

Chapter 9  :  The crowning consequence of rapturous love – the death of the lovers; first, those who die in charity

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Not death itself is so strong as love (Cant. 8:6).  Death separates the soul of a dying person from the body, from all worldly things.  Charity also separates from the body, from all worldly things, the soul of the individual who possesses it. The only difference is that death always does this in very deed, while love usually does it only by desire.  Usually, I say, because charity is sometimes so intense as even to bring about actual separation of soul from body; for lovers, this is a blessed death, better than a hundred lives.

 

Just as it is in the nature of the damned to die in sin, so it is in the nature of God’s chosen ones to die in his love, his grace.  This happens, however, in different ways … The good never die unprepared, since the best preparation for death is to have persevered to the end in good Christian living; but certainly they sometimes die suddenly or unexpectedly.  That is why the Church, in all her wisdom, does not put on our lips in her litanies to the request to be delivered merely from sudden death, but from “sudden and unforeseen death”.  Death is none the worse for being sudden, provided one is ready for it.

 

In our own day, good well-instructed people have been found dead – some in the confessional, others listening to sermons; priests have been known to drop dead on leaving the pulpit after preaching with great fervour – very sudden deaths, but in no way unprepared.  How many good folk are known to die from apoplexy, or in a coma, and thousands of other sudden ways, or to die in delirium, in insanity, without the use of reason?  Yet they die, all of them, like baptized babies, in the grace (and, therefore, the love) of God.

 

Even though they were not thinking of God at the moment of death, still they died loving him.  Men of learning do not lose their knowledge during sleep, otherwise they would be ignorant when they woke up, and have to God back to school.  It is just the same with all the habits of prudence, temperance, faith, hope charity: they are part of a good man’s make-up, even though he is not always practising them.  If a man is sleeping, his habits appear to sleep too, awakening when he does; if, therefore, a good man dies suddenly, crushed by falling masonry, struck by lightning, suffocated by bronchial catarrh, or in the delirium of a raging fever – he is clearly not in the act of loving God at that moment, but he still retains the habit of it.

 

The wise man had this in mind, when he said: Not so the innocent; though he should die before his time, rest shall be his (Wis. 4:7).  All that is necessary to win eternal life is to die in the state, the habit of love, of charity.

 

Many of the saints, nevertheless, died not only in a state of habitual charity, but also in the active practice of it.  St. Augustine died making acts of contrition, and love plays a part in that; St. Jerome died in the act of urging his spiritual children to love God, their neighbour and the Christian virtues; St. Ambrose died in a rapture, while in gentle conversation with his Saviour, immediately after receiving the blessed sacrament; St. Anthony of Padua died after singing a hymn to the glorious Virgin Mother, and joyfully addressing his Saviour.  St. Thomas Aquinas died with his hands joined, his eyes raised towards heaven, ejaculating in a loud voice with great devotion those words of the Song of Songs, the subject of his final commentary: “Come with me, my true love; for us the country ways (Cant. 7:11), the fields of heaven.”

 

All the apostles, and most of the martyrs, died with a prayer on their lips.  Venerable Bede[1], forewarned of the hour of his passing, went to vespers (it was Ascension Day), and standing in choir, resting his elbows on the stall, without a trace of sickness, breathed his last with the last note of the vespers he was singing – as though to follow hard upon his Master going up into heaven, there to enjoy the blissful morn of an eternal day which knows no eventide.

 

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[1]  It is clear from St. Francis’ manuscripts (Oeuvres, vol.5, p. 548) that he took this account of Bede’s death from Marulus, a Dalmatian priest.  It is incorrect: Bede died on a piece of sacking, at the entrance to his cell, after several months of sickness.

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