Thinking Ahead and Preparing: Looking to ‘Ars Moriendi,’ the Art of Dying Well
Throughout the month of November, the Church ponders the last things, and on All Souls’ Day, the Church not only prays for the faithful departed but focuses on the reality of death as a part of everyone’s life.
Dying is our last moral action. Whether it takes place at the end of a long life or protracted illness, or whether it takes place suddenly, even in the springtime of life, it is meant to be a faith-filled entrustment and self-offering to the God who gave us life and whom we hope will mercifully grant us life to the full.
The Church’s devotional tradition has encouraged us to live every day as if it were our last so that when our last day comes, we will be ready. It has been called the ars moriendi, the art of dying well. Thomas à Kempis wrote in the spiritual classic Imitation of Christ:
“Happy is the man who has the hour of his death always before his eyes and daily prepares himself to die. … When it is morning, reflect that you shall not see the evening, and at eventide dare not to boast yourself of the morrow. Always be prepared and so live that death may never find you unprepared.”
When Christ comes for us, he wants us to embrace him with longing rather than find him as a “thief in the night” (Matthew 24:43). As Cardinal Justin Rigali wrote in 2011, rehearsing our death each day gives us the opportunity to say daily with Christ: “No one takes my life from me; I freely lay it down” (John 10:18), and “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46). If we do so, then our death, whenever it comes, will become the emphatic reiteration of the way we have lived.
To prepare well for a holy death should involve proper formation about the sacrament of the anointing the sick, the first purpose of which is to help us unite our sufferings and death to Christ’s passion, death and resurrection.
The sacrament of the anointing of the sick is the most misunderstood, underappreciated and neglected of the seven sacraments. While there is generally extensive preparation for adult and child baptism, first confession and first Holy Communion, confirmation, matrimony and holy orders, most receive little preparation for the sacrament of the anointing of the sick. As a result, even many practicing Catholics know little about it, and the little that they do know is often second-hand and erroneous. Very few Catholics, therefore, are prepared to receive it.
That’s why Roger W. Nutt’s new book, To Die Is Gain: A Theological (Re-)Introduction to the Sacrament of Anointing of the Sick for Clergy, Laity, Caregivers and Everyone Else, published earlier this year by Emmaus Academic, is a very timely and helpful resource.
Nutt, provost and theology professor at Ave Maria University, provides us with an easy-to-read, clear and theologically accurate primer on the sacrament of the anointing the sick, which contextualizes it not only in Church history but in contemporary questions, practices and misunderstandings. He helps us to see the crucial importance of the sacrament as part of life and as a Christian response to the modern phobia of suffering and death.
“Western culture,” Nutt writes, “is currently in a crisis about the meaning of life, suffering, and death. We live at a time in which the doctrinal message of the sacrament of the sick and the graces that it confers are needed — more than ever. We live in a time in which the loss of an awareness of the significance of this sacrament is catastrophic. “Anointing of the Sick is a proclamation and application to the dying of Christ’s victory over death. … This Sacrament should be at the forefront of thinking about the Gospel message for those facing death, and it should be something that we desire for ourselves and our loved ones as we contemplate mortality and are confronted by death.”
