The art of dying well, (or, How to be a saint, now and forever)

"The Art of Dying Well, by the wise and humble St. Robert Bellarmine, is like a message in a bottle, washed upon our shore from another world. Except that in our case, St. Robert is in the real world, with its real and inevitably effectual moral laws, and we are lost on an island in the misty seas of corrupted imagina- tion and self-deception. The message comes to us, then, with urgency. He says, "The world is not as you imagine it to be." He says, "You are on the way, whether you know it or not, whether it pleases you or not." We must all die. What are we doing right now to prepare for that moment, which, as St. Robert reminds us, will come upon us like a thief in the night? His initial recommendation is so simple, so clear, that it sur- prises us, and yet it is the wellspring of the rest of his work. We cannot die well, he says, unless we live well. Do not be fooled by the example of the Good Thief. That man did not live well, says St. Robert; but even if by an extraordinary grace of God, the thief turned away from sin at the latest moment, to presume that you can do so likewise is to be the fool in Jesus' parable who decided to live his last years in wealth and as he pleased, when that very night his life was required of him. And how are we to live well? Again and again, The Art of Dying Well turns our attention to the Scriptures: those words are so clear we must scuff them up to make them obscure, doing all we can so that we can pretend not to understand them. We are to live in this world as if it were not our home"--… (more)