T.S. Eliot in his poem ‘Little Gidding’, from The Four Quartets captured the cyclical nature of time:
“What we call the beginning is often the end and to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”
Such a means of imagining time contrasts with the practical way we so often measure it; as life progresses in a linear way minute by minute, through the hours, weeks, months and years.
For those who receive a diagnosis of a terminal illness, there is a heightened awareness of time and its intimate connection to life and being alive. We have been enriched by those walking this path who have captured their experiences through journal writing.
One such person is Richard Gaillardetz who was a distinguished theologian, lecturing at Boston University College. In 2022, while still lecturing and writing, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
As a man who embraced his Catholic faith tradition, Richard recognised that the veneration of the Holy Cross was not so much about his sinfulness, but a place where he experienced his own aching and infirmity being embraced and enfolded in Christ’s own suffering. He notes that in gazing on the crucified Jesus he “felt lifted up by an unseen force”. In this lifting up, his vision was transformed and in a new awakening came to see that “God does not explain the reason for the suffering of God’s creatures but instead takes the enormity of human suffering into God’s very being”.
Richard approaches the last year of his life with appreciation and the desire to deepen his understanding of the mystery of suffering. Knowing that he has very limited time, he moves into what could be called a transparent time. As he grows in acceptance and surrender, he comes to a way of seeing through to something deep inside time itself where the sacred becomes known in the ordinary.
The backdrop for many of Richard’s reflections is the Church’s liturgical year. Within the framework of his Christian faith, he notes that “no liturgical event can match the majestic, symbolic sweep of the Paschal Triduum”.
In the final year of his life, he came to realise that “the new way of life goes through and not around our debilities and fears”.
Experiencing the austerity of Good Friday in a heightened way, he noted that the bleak symbols of absence touched him with a “hard blessing on his own harrowing emptiness”. This movement enabled him to look death in the eye. However, Richard openly acknowledges that is not easy. He writes of the struggle with his own darkness and doubt.
There is acknowledgment of “the perpetual tussle of belief and unbelief” within himself. He describes the movement of his heart as being like the swing of a pendulum, “between grateful fullness and pained murmuring against the strangeness of God”.
He reminds us that we are neither to run from suffering or wallow in it. Instead, we need to draw it into the larger horizons of life.
This Richard does. In the last year of his life, he and his wife Diana, just months before his death, embark on a Caribbean Island cruise. Gazing out over the vast ocean, he experienced a sense of the mystery, realising that his own knowledge was only like a small island in a vast sea. Graced with a flash of spiritual insight, he experienced his spiritual vision being expanded from the “floating island of himself outward into the vast sea of infinite mystery”.
The final significant liturgical experience for Richard was the baptism of his grandson. As he gathered with his family and the People of God during Sunday Eucharist, they all participated in baby Elliot’s initiation into the Christian community. The sacramental signs of water, oil and light foreshadowed for Richard the ritual of Christian Burial. As his family witnessed the ceremony, he whispered to one of his sons, “Remember what we are doing here. All of this will be invoked one day at my funeral Mass”. Richard passed away on 7 November 2023.
The book concludes with an epilogue by his close friend, theologian and editor Grace Agolia. She noted that “dying is a little more bearable when we know of the accompaniment of our family and friends and the encouragement of our community of faith”.
Together, Grace and Richard often prayed the Prayer of the Church and found comfort especially in the closing lines of the Benedictus, “In the tender compassion of our God the dawn from on high shall break upon us to shine on those who dwell in darkness and in the shadow of death”.
Richard completed each reflective chapter of his book with the Latin phrase Dum spiro, spero. Translated into English, it became the book’s title While I Breathe, I Hope. Such a name reflects the origin of human life, where God infused life through sharing the divine breath (Genesis: 2.7). This image of the breath of God calling us into being, holding and sustaining us, is anchored deeply in our Christian faith tradition.
In our veneration of the Holy Cross, especially as the wounded and crucified Jesus becomes real in our present life and our suffering world, may we be strengthened and inspired, “to weave the fabric of eternal life from the uncertainty, the pain and the suffering”.
With our gaze fixed on the Holy Cross, may we experience the loss and endings of the pain and darkness of dying, transformed into new beginnings.
Sr Patty Andrew OSU is the Vicar for Consecrated Life in the Diocese of Parramatta.
Richard’s book, While I Breathe, I Hope, can be purchased from Garratt Publishing.
This article was originally published in the 2024 Season of Creation | Spring edition of the Catholic Outlook Magazine. You can read the digital version here or pick up a copy in your local parish.
