Dervilla writes: Dear Father, I’m writing to you in despair. My daughter died suddenly and unprepared about a year ago. She hadn’t been to confessions for years although in the period before her sudden death she visited churches and lit candles most days. The priest assured me that she had been duly anointed but I keep thinking that he was too late. I get so angry with God that he did not give her a chance to put things right before she died. Fr Bernard McGuckian SJ replies.
I wonder how you have come to the conclusion that ‘God did not give her a chance to put things right before she died’. At every single moment of her life God was giving your daughter a chance to put things right with him, if and wherever they were wrong. This is how He deals with all of us.
From the first moment of our conception, God is at work in all the situations and circumstances of our lives to bring us back to Himself. His great and perhaps only desire for every one of us is fullness of life with Him forever. He does this in mysterious ways that never deprive us of our freedom.
You are right in implying that the best and normal way for us Catholics to make our peace with God is a good sacramental confession. However, the heart of God is touched by even the slightest move in this direction.
Think about the Prodigal Son. How his father dealt with him tells us something about the way God our Father deals with us, His wayward children. The Prodigal Son started planning to confess his sins as soon as he made up his mind to leave the pigs, and make his way back to his father’s house.
St. Luke tells us that he was rehearsing to himself what he would say as he was going along. ‘I will go to my father and say: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you; I no longer deserve to be your son; treat me as one of your hired men.’
He needn’t have bothered himself. The father had been continually on the look-out for him from the day he left home, and identified him from ‘a long way off’. If he hadn’t, how could he have known that the indistinct figure on the horizon was his own son? Setting aside his patriarchal dignity, the father started running towards him.
It’s also clear from the story that the father was only half listening when the son was blurting out his confession and telling him how sorry he was for being such a bad boy. At that moment the only thing on the father’s mind was preparations for the mother of all homecoming parties as he had the servants scurry off in all directions.
In this parable, described by one author as the most ‘beautiful story ever told’, Jesus is trying to tell us what God is like, and how He does things. God is more solicitous for each one of us than our own mother or father. Unlike them, however, He is all-powerful. Nothing happens in this world that He doesn’t know about.
Any inspiration that moves us ‘to arise and go to my father’, like that young man, is always a gift of the Holy Spirit of God. Theologians call this grace. As we learn in the Litany of the Saints, God is the only source of `holy desires, wise decisions and good works’.
You tell me about your daughter’s visits to churches and all the candles she lit. If these were not steps in the right direction, I don’t know what are. She was probably acting on the good advice and example that you gave her during her life. Your motherly concern and prayers certainly helped too.
But there was much more going on. Her life was something between herself and her God who was always gently nudging her to do the right thing. He was always near her, and never more so than on that day when He came to call her to Himself.
You describe yourself as being ‘in despair’ and ‘very angry with God’. This is a lethal combination, guaranteed to discolour everything. Anger often makes us see red, and despair always paints things black. In this frame of mind we always envisage the worst possible scenario. This attitude seems to have led you to set aside the consoling words of the priest who anointed your daughter. He was in a better position to judge what happened than you or anyone else. There is no good reason to reject the truth of what he said, or to keep on ‘thinking that he was too late’.
We should avoid like the plague thoughts that lead to despair. They are at the other end of the spectrum from hope, and never come from God. Our God is a God of Hope. This is one of the three great theological virtues, along with faith and charity. St. Paul leaves us in no doubt that the greatest of these is charity. But St. Thomas Aquinas was equally convinced that the most important of the three is not to lose hope.
In this month of February, as we honour Our Lady of Lourdes, we call on her help as ‘our life, our sweetness and our hope’.
This article first appeared in The Messenger (February 2009), a publication of the Irish Jesuits.
