A little more than six years ago, a book was published entitle: Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine, and What Matters in the End. It was named “Best Book of the Year” by The Washington Post, The New York Times Book Review, NPR, and the Chicago Tribune. The author, Atul Gawande, was booked for numerous radio and television interviews including a special on the PBS News Show Frontline. The simple purpose of the book was to help medical practitioners learn how to tell their patients that they were dying, something that did not appear on the syllabus of any of the many courses they had taken in medical school and nurses’ training.
In contrast to the people who do not know how to break the news to a dying person, we read of a widow who simply says to Elijah: Just now I was collecting a couple of sticks, to go in and prepare something for myself and my son; when we have eaten it, we shall die. The land of Israel was gripped by drought. Both, the widow and her son, were preparing and were ready to die as a result of the drought. No rain…no crops…no food! Enter Elijah, sent with a promise from God, telling her to use her last morsel of flour to feed them, with a guarantee the jar of oil would not go dry, nor the flour empty until the rains come. The outcome? They lived! They lived believing in something bigger than themselves.
Our mortality is something that we all have to come to grips with. Our nightly newscasts during this pandemic announce the number of people who have died as a result every night. We need to listen to the example of the widow in today’s first reading. She confronted the reality of death and prepared for it. Yet at the same time, she was able to share the little food she had with a man she did not know. Because of her generosity, God was able to show once again that we can place our faith in God’s promises. That promise is just as real for us as it was for her. It comes to us in the form of bread and wine that is blessed and distributed to us for the journey which we are all making, the journey home.
Fr. Lawrence Jagdfeld, O.F.M., Administrator