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| Death: Our Birth into Eternal life
Damian Lenshek |
The following article is the next installment in a series that will appear in the Catholic Herald to offer catechesis and formation concerning end of life decisions, dying, death, funerals, and burial of the dead from the Catholic perspective.
Before our current pandemic, I occasionally had the opportunity to spend time with some of my far-flung godchildren.
On my regrettably infrequent visits, reading good bedtime books and saying prayers with them is often the best I can do to fulfill my godfatherly responsibility.
‘Now I lay me down to sleep’
One godchild was in the habit of saying “Now I lay me down to sleep” at bedtime. I was expecting:
Now I lay me down to sleep / I pray the Lord my soul to keep / If I should die before I wake / I pray the Lord my soul to take.
We started out together but at the half-way point, with a jumble of words, I discovered that my godchild had learned the last two lines differently, something like “Guide me, Jesus, through the night and wake me with the morning light.”
This also is a fine ending to the prayer. But I was curious about the variation.
It turns out that it had been a deliberate choice of this child’s parents, who wished to shield their children from considering death.
I have also heard of parents making less drastic changes to the traditional words, along the lines of “should I pass before I wake.”
Now, I understand the discomfort we humans have at the thought of death. But I think editing death out of a children’s prayer misses an opportunity to help them participate in the hope we have as Catholics.
Not that I want to defend the original form of “Now I lay me down to sleep” in particular.
That prayer first appeared toward the end of the seventeenth century in a textbook by Benjamin Harris.
Notably, Harris had published fake news in England in 1678 about a Catholic plot to assassinate the king (the Popish Plot).
After stoking anti-Catholicism in London, he made his way to Boston.
Harris’ textbook happened to be the first reader produced in the American colonies. It went through many editions, and generations of children learned their ABC’s from it.
The New England Primer was so widely used for so long that the prayer became very traditional in the United States. And now some of my godchildren know versions of this prayer.
Despite its Puritan roots, “Now I lay me down to sleep” is not a bad way to introduce kids to the idea of death. It proposes the very real possibility of not waking up, and implicitly admitting our powerlessness to prevent our own deaths, asks confidently for the Lord’s help.
It gives voice to the hope that we have, that because we are baptized, we will rise from the sleep of death to life in Christ. So I recommend against editing death out of that prayer.
Death in Catholic prayers
Many Catholic prayers, of course, deal directly with death.
Perhaps the most frequently said Catholic prayer, the “Hail Mary,” seeks Our Lady’s prayers “now and at the hour of our death.” This is fitting, given the importance of the “hour of our death,” and the state of our souls at that moment, for our eternal destiny.
There is nothing in our power that can ensure that, at the moment of death, we will be ready to meet Jesus, the Just Judge. That is why we ask for prayers frequently for that moment.
The “Anima Christi” is another very traditional Catholic prayer — a favorite of St. Ignatius — which ends by asking the Lord, “at the hour of my death call me, and bid me come to Thee, that with Thy saints I may praise Thee forever and ever, Amen.”
This petition rests on the belief that death is the summons of Christ.
This hope tempers whatever fear a Christian may have at the prospect of his own death. And it provides the context of our grief upon the loss of a loved one.
Christians have always believed this.
St. Paul, considering whether it would be better for him to live or die, remarked to the Philippians that “My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better.” (Phil 1:23).
And St. Cyprian wrote in AD 252 (in the midst of a plague, no less), “it is for him to fear death who is unwilling to go to Christ.”
This attitude toward death is the background of the final petition of the “Anima Christi”.
Lex Orandi Lex Credendi
The truth is that the way we pray will form our beliefs.
“The law of prayer is the law of belief” is a traditional way of saying this.
Though this expression frequently refers to the liturgy, it applies also to our personal prayer, including the bedtime prayers we learn as children.
What better time is there to learn confidence in Our Lord, even in the face of death, than as children?
Damian Lenshek is the director of cemeteries for the Diocese of Madison.