Stella and I subbed in the vigil Mass choir yesterday, and everything was perfectly normal at first. Familiar readings, minor musical glitches, a slightly scattered homily -- normal normal normal. And then in the middle of the Eucharistic Prayer there was an awful noise.
I can't really describe it to you. It was like a retch but it went on longer than any retch should go. It was a sound full of distress and agony. It was a wrong sound, a terrible sound, an uncontrollable emanation from a body in desperate need of help.
"That doesn't sound good," murmured the nurse who sings in the choir, as she slipped over to the person in the pew. She was joined there by two other nurses and an EMT. I learned later that he had a pulse and was breathing, but his open eyes stared unseeing out of a gray face. "Can someone call 911?" Father asked from the altar in the calmest of calm voices. One of the nurses nodded vigorously, her phone already held to her ear.
"Okay," said Father, in a voice that sent calm rippling through the whole tense place, "while we wait for help to come, I'm going to keep doing what I do up here. Can someone bring me the oil from the sacristy so I can anoint him?"
He finished the Eucharistic Prayer with some very minor modifications -- "please be seated," he said when we got to the Our Father, perhaps to cut down on gawking -- and when he elevated the Host I thought about the evanescence and fragility of our lives, their inevitable end, and the hidden Presence among us.
Agnus Dei, we chanted together, and the truth rang out from the words: our God who has redeemed us through suffering abides with us in our suffering, makes a path to eternal life through suffering. Dona nobis pacem, we implored: grant us peace.
At the end of the Eucharistic Prayer Father walked down the aisle and anointed the man. "Through this holy anointing may the Lord in his love and mercy help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit."
Clearly we needed to wait before we filled the aisle with communicants. "Ed," said Father to a church employee sitting near the ambo, "lead us in a decade of the rosary." Stella was crying quietly as we said the words together: pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. We heard the welcome sound of sirens, and the ambulance crew strode in. They clustered around him, working briskly against the backdrop of the rosary. They loaded him onto the gurney, his face pinker now but still a deeply wrong color, and sped back down the aisle.
We always say the St. Michael prayer after communion, and Father invited us to pray it specifically for the man and his family: be our protection, we prayed together for them, as we thought collectively about that ambulance speeding toward the hospital. After Mass my friend Veronica stepped up to the microphone and invited us all to stay and pray the Divine Mercy chaplet for them. The church was more than half-full at that point, and almost everyone stuck around.
Stella was crying in the car afterward. "I'm not sure why I'm crying," she said, "I don't even know them." "Oh, sweetheart," I told her, "it's normal to be distressed about distressing things. The world needs people who feel sad about sad things. Death is so sad and ugly that even Jesus cried about it."
I thought about Jesus before the tomb of Lazarus. "There will be a stink," Martha cautioned him, but Jesus was undeterred. He is willing to be in the middle of messy painful stuff with us, I am reminding myself, if we only invite him. "It's so strange that it happened in the middle of Mass," Stella observed pensively, and I said, "You know, if you're going to experience a serious medical event, there are worse places for it to happen. Because (a) Real Presence, right there with you, (b) medical personnel rushing to your side, (c) fire station down the block sending an ambulance immediately. What if he'd been at home, alone in his recliner?"
I don't know this family but they are weighing on my heart today, the words of the chaplet still echoing in my mind:
Holy God,
Holy mighty one,
Holy immortal one,
Have mercy on us and on the whole world.
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