Responding to Offers of Grace

In Scott Hahn’s classic work, Hope to Die: The Christian Meaning of Death and the Resurrection of the Body, he dedicates the entire first chapter to the distinction between physical life and spiritual life, physical death and spiritual death. A person can be physically alive and spiritually dead at the same time. In contrast, a saint is physically dead and spiritually alive. Hahn points out that our spiritual life is much more important than our physical life, yet we typically prioritize the latter over the former. 

I thought this truth was beautifully illustrated in the following story I recently heard a priest tell:

There was a priest who worked for many years in Lebanon and told me this true story. Lebanon, as you know, was a country that suffered a civil war for many years.

He was in his parish one day, and someone knocked on the door. He opened it, and there was a middle-aged woman. She handed him a piece of paper with an address on it, saying, “Father, please go to this house because someone there is dying and needs Last Rites!”

Since the priest sensed urgency in her voice, he jumped on his bicycle and rode to the address. It was an apartment building, and the unit number was also listed on the paper. He knocked on the door, and a young man in his late 20s opened up.

“Yes, Father, can I help you?”

“I heard that someone here is dying?”

The young man said, “No, sorry, I live alone, and there’s no one else here.”

The priest told him about the lady, and showed him the paper she had given to him.

The man said, “Well, maybe she got the apartment numbers mixed up. I’ll try to help you find this person.”

So they went and knocked on every door in the building, but they couldn’t find anyone who was dying.

The young man said, “Father, you must be tired. Why don’t you come in and have a cup of tea with me and rest a while? Obviously, the lady got more than just the apartment numbers mixed up, but if she wrote down the wrong building number, there are too many to go knocking on every door in the whole complex.”

The priest agreed, and they shared some tea and started talking.  Soon the young man began to tell him a little about his life:

“I’m Catholic. My mother was very pious and always took me to church, but she died several years ago, and I’ve sort of fallen away from the faith.”

The priest listened to him patiently, and when the young man had finished, said to him, “Look, you’ve told your story to me; why don’t you also tell it to God? Would you like to make a confession before I go?”

The man agreed. Confession. Absolution. A blessing.

As the priest was leaving, he encouraged the man to keep in touch, come to Mass, help out at the parish, and begin his Christian life again. He got back on his bicycle and started to ride home.

Suddenly, the sirens sounded to warn of an impending bombing raid, so the priest ducked into a nearby building for cover and went down into the basement. 

When the bombing concluded, he came out and saw that the apartment building to which he had been sent by the woman had been hit. He and others went inside to try and find survivors, and they found the body of the young man with whom he had just been. Around his neck was a chain with a locket. The priest opened it and saw written:

“My dearest mother” , along with a photo of the lady who had come to the parish and knocked on his door looking for a priest.

This loving mother – either from Purgatory or Heaven – had been praying for her son. God, knowing that his death was imminent, granted her the privilege of trying to help him so that he would have an opportunity to be reconciled with God before he died.

When I wake up each morning, I don’t expect to die that day. Yet, every year, 43,000 Americans are killed in automobile accidents and more than 850,000 die suddenly from a cardiovascular emergency.  Last October, I nearly lost my younger sister, Beth, to a blood vessel bleeding near her brain. She survived, thanks to modern medicine, but it was very scary. She also didn’t wake up that day expecting anything unusual to happen to her. 

Throughout our lives, God regularly offers us opportunities for grace to help with our sanctification. However, these graces are never forced upon us. The young man had the freedom to accept or reject the priest’s offer. He had to say yes and cooperate with the gift of grace that was presented to him, even though he was completely unaware of how close he was to physical (and spiritual) death.

The French novelist Léon Bloy wrote, “The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint.”  As the mother in the story conveyed, clearly this truth is very important to the physically dead. It should be even more important to me, a member of the physically alive, whose salvation and spiritual life remain a work in progress.

Lee Moraglio