“You are dust and to dust you shall return.”

“Repent and believe in the gospel”

Every year on a Wednesday, I hear one of these urgings spoken to me as a thumb print of black ash is swept across my forehead.

The words, the ashes, the altar stripped of decoration and cloaked in purple, the solemn readings- all of it is meant as an invitation to ponder my mortality in the light of God’s Divinity, to consider my life and the things in it and remember which are finite and which are infinite and to adjust my heart accordingly.

I think that for those of us, like me, who had only ever experienced death at a distance, the ask to remember our mortality and be moved by it can fall on somewhat deaf ears- hardened hearts, even.

Which is why I know it was God’s blessing upon me that I happened to be in Hawaii, on the U.S.S Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, no less, when the (accidental) ballistic missile threat occurred earlier this year. If I close my eyes, I can still smell the oil and see its glossy sheen floating atop the waters of the Pacific, only feet above one of the four U.S. ships sunk during the bombing at Pearl Harbor. I can still feel the adrenaline rush in my gut as I read the words eerily pulsing across my cell phone screen while I stand atop a sunken grave: “Alert: Ballistic Missile Bound from North Korea to Hawaii. Seek Shelter Immediately. This is not a drill.”
There was no immediate panic, thankfully. All around my husband and I, people began looking at the same alert as it flashed across their screens, whispering among themselves. It wasn’t until a second alert of the same urgency came, followed by the blaring of sirens as we were rushed from the Memorial back to the main ground of Pearl Harbor that I actually considered death and felt its potential immanency like a shudder down my spine. I inhaled deeply, my hand instinctively reaching for my husband’s. We began to pray a Divine Mercy Chaplet aloud together.

Hundreds of thoughts seemed to come simultaneously. I thought of my baby, Joseph, napping peacefully hundreds of thousands of miles away from us. I thought of the last kiss I had planted on his forehead the night before we left for our long awaited vacation. I thought of the years of his life I wouldn’t be present for, if I truly were to die that day. I thought of all my friends and loved ones. I wondered if death would hurt.

And then, I thought of Jesus.

I thought of Him as He is portrayed in the Divine Mercy Image, hand outstretched, mercy and life pouring out from His most sacred Heart.

As my lips formed over and over again around the prayer “Jesus I trust in you”, I realized that THIS is the moment I had lived my entire life for. The moment when I would greet that loving gaze, face to face….that all the moments preceding this one were steps to get to here. To death. To LIFE.

And for that single moment, my priorities aligned perfectly. Because suddenly, getting that perfect, poetic picture of myself walking on the beach didn’t matter. All of the responsibilities and distractions awaiting me back in ‘every day’ life didn’t matter. How I looked, or sounded like, what others thought of me, what I ate, my joys and sufferings- in that moment, NONE of it mattered as much as Jesus and none of it could distract from the intense, immediate, dawning reality that I NEED Him…and that to trust in Him is the most important thing I could ever do, in my life- and especially, in my death.

Shortly thereafter, the missile threat was dispelled as a mistake.

I watched as around me, relief settled onto a crowd of people who, moments before, had been crying, praying, clinging to one another. People began to laugh and chatter and joke. I realized in that moment how quick we are to cast our mortality to the side in a clever punch line…and how little we really consider the POINT of all this living that we’re doing.

So today, sisters, as we enter into the desert in the shadow of our Lord, I pray that He opens our eyes anew to our own littleness, that our need for Him is realized anew- that the hunger in our stomachs never surpasses the hunger in our hearts for the Heavenly homeland to which we journey and that the HOPE of each finite moment we are given in this life rests grounded in the infinite Eternity for which we were created.

Love+Blessings,

Faith