ON THE BREATH OF A PRAYER, WE ENTER ETERNITY

Lift High the Cross

"I guess the family was all there, just visiting, and they were discussing nothing in particular when a chaplain came to ask if they wanted to pray.  They said yes, and right as the prayer started, her mother took one big breath...and was gone."

"Just like that?" I asked.

"Just like that."

"Wow," I sat, momentarily struck by the beauty of it all.

To imagine that on the breath of a prayer, you can cross unfathomable distance.  Your spirit and the doors of heaven meeting one another within the fraction of a whisper.  To inhale here, and then exhale in exhalation 10 million light years away. 

I don't remember who wrote this or where I found it, but I copied and framed it.  To me the words are true.  On the breath of a prayer, we do cross from life to eternity.  I've seen it happen.  

I didn't notice whether the breathing stopped after an inhale or an exhale, and I was sitting right there listening, right at the bedside.  We had been there since Wednesday and now it was Sunday morning, July 17, 2005.  We were watching and believing in God's promise of eternal life.  The room, a cold place where he lay sticky without speech or movement, was suffused with heartache and love.  Only we spoke and that not much.  We few, who loved him best, barely existing in the dim uncomfortable room where hope was for no more than another day of the same. 

Then came the silence of no longer breathing.  I heard it first.  The nurses had just come in to lift his head and smooth the covers.  

Witnessing death may be as universal as dying.  We want to be there for the passing of someone we love.  We put all our effort into reaching their bedside.      

No one knows which breath will be the last.  No matter how faithful the waiting, the cessation is startling; on that Sunday morning 18 years ago, it was louder than any other sound in the busy hospital.  Someone hears it every day.  A sound so clean it leaves no doubt.  This body will never breathe again. 

A life doesn't stop alone; it brings everything buckling inward with it, until later the survivors claw their way out, as we in our family have done and as you in yours no doubt have too.  

Then, maybe quickly or maybe more painfully, we understand.  This being is standing before God.  He does not see through a glass darkly, no; he sees face-to-face.  In the seconds it takes our tears to gather, this soul is already consoled by the arms of God, whose love is as great as ours, even though that we can't imagine.  But then, we can't imagine any of it.  We can only believe.  That we cross an unfathomable distance and arrive on our knees at the throne of God, where all is light transcendent.   It is 10 million light years away.  The meeting place for our souls.  A story, an event, that never ends.  Thanks be to God.  AMEN 

                        Nina Naomi