Saunders - Rosaries, Death, & Lent

William Saunders writes at The Catholic Thing:

Catholicism, unlike gnostic forms of Christianity, is about realistic joy, and not the mindless or naïve joy that is being peddled in our popular culture. Catholic joy is rooted in reality. And the reality is that we all suffer and die – on the way, we pray, to eternal life.

When our loved ones die, we miss them, not only emotionally, but physically. That is, we long to hold their hands, to embrace them. It may seem there is no longer any way to fulfill that longing. After all, their physical presence is gone.

One of Catholicism’s gifts, however – at least to me – is a place where I can go to be with those whom I love but who have departed: the graveside. There, while the spirit has departed, the body remains, awaiting the resurrection. There I can be in a kind of physical proximity to the person who has died.

Two weeks ago, I visited the grave of my mother for the first time since her funeral. A friend and I prayed aloud a rosary for my lady and for the repose of her soul.

Standing in the dirt and grass over the grave, with the rosary in my hand, praying as Our Lady taught us, seemed truer to reality than any prayer had before. I felt consoled, yes, but more importantly, I felt connected to the ultimate realities – to God, to His mother, to mine, to the life beyond the grave, and to the incarnate life to come in the resurrection of the just.

I thank the Catholic Church for giving us a faith that touches – and transforms – physical reality. I thank the Church for a faith that, during Lent, leads us to deny our physical selves so we can more deeply connect to God, but a faith that then leads us, in the Triduum, to the very messy and unpleasant physical reality of pain and suffering and death, a reality that would be a horror but for the One Who redeemed it by dying for us, and for our beloved dead.

Read A Rosary for My Lady.