'What I say to you, I say to all: 'Watch!''

The past several months, I've been bringing Holy Communion to an elderly woman in a nursing home on First Fridays. This past Friday, I showed up at the nursing home, only to learn that she had been admitted to the hospital the previous evening after experiencing difficulty breathing-- the beginnings, I was later told, of congestive heart failure. So, after a quick mental note to inform our priest as soon as possible, I was off to the hospital in search of this dear woman, so that she could receive Jesus in the Eucharist if she was physically able to do so.



Soon enough, I was making my way through the labyrinthine hospital corridors to the proper room. There she was, dozing upright in a chair with oxygen tubes, a ventilator, and the flickering lights and regular blips that are part-and-parcel of a hospital room.

There was also the ubiquitous hospital television set blaring God-knows-what cable infomercial programming at a high volume.

To me, there was something so jarringly out of place in that flickering television screen and its perky, artificial liveliness. There was a relative in the room, and I was able give the elderly woman Holy Communion in a brief moment of wakefulness. To me, her folded hands and attempted sign of the cross made the visit infinitely worthwhile.

But as I drove back to the farm, empty pyx in the seat next to me, my mind kept wandering back to that television set and its banalities. Really, what goes through someone's mind as he or she sits there immobilized, helpless, knowing that their earthly sojourn is nearly at its end, listening to an anonymous suit-and-tie attempt to market the latest cosmetic cream, or blender, or vegetable parer?

Is it agonizing to observe the world passing one by with whatever modicum of conscious thought remains? Or is it, perhaps, the Devil's way of lulling a person into an eternal embrace, keeping his weakened cognitive processes occupied with whatever first reaches the senses, focused on unimportant trivialities until it is too late to think about what truly matters?

Before our Catholic culture collapsed, a dying person would be listening to the recitation of the rosary at times like this. But really, we fallen human beings are awfully adept at keeping busy, with avoiding life's big questions and the life-changes that acknowledging these questions would entail, whether we are in a hospital room or still in the full vibrancy of youth or middle age. I think that the Devil too often manages to keep us asleep and in thrall, lurching our way from day to day, from purchase to purchase, from entertainment to entertainment, until this world passes us by. Too often, we fail to wake up, to live intentionally the one life God has given us in which to know, to love, and to serve him, so that we can be happy with him forever in the next.

The antidote, from today's Gospel reading:

Watch, therefore; you do not know when the Lord of the house is coming, whether in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at morning. May he not come suddenly and find you sleeping. What I say to you, I say to all: "Watch!"