Our Blessed Father expressed as follows his feelings of respect and honour towards a sick person to whom he was writing. "While I think of you sick and suffering in your bed, I regard you with special reverence, and as worthy of being singularly honoured as a creature visited by God, clothed in His apparel, His favoured spouse. When our Lord was on the Cross He was proclaimed King even by His enemies, and souls who are bearing the cross (of suffering) are declared to be queens. Do you know why the angels envy us? Assuredly, because we can suffer for our Lord, whilst they have never suffered anything for His sake. St. Paul, who had been raised to heaven and had tasted the joys of Paradise, considered himself happy only because of his infirmities, and of his bearing the Cross of our Lord."
Farther on he entreats her, as a person signed with the Cross, and a sharer in the sufferings of Jesus Christ, to commend to God, though in an agony of pain, an affair of much importance which concerned the glory of God. He held that in a condition such as hers was, prayer would be more readily heard, just as our Saviour, praying fervently on the Cross, was heard for His reverence. The Psalmist was of the same opinion, saying that God heard him willingly when he cried to Him in the midst of his tribulation, and that it was in his afflictions that God was nearest to him.
Our Blessed Father believed that prayers offered by those who are in suffering, though they be short, are more efficacious than any others. He says: "I entreat you to be so kind as to recommend to God a good work which I greatly desire to see accomplished, and especially to pray about it when you are suffering most acutely: for then it is that your prayers, however short, if they are heartfelt, will be infinitely well received. Ask God at that time also for the virtues which you need the most."
[Footnote 1: Matt. xxv. 36.]
[Footnote 2: Cor. xi. 29.]
UPON THE CARE OF THE SICK.
One day we went together to visit a very aged lady in her last illness. Her piety, which was of no ordinary kind, made her look forward calmly to the approach of death, for which she had prepared by the reception of the Sacraments of Penance and of the Blessed Eucharist. She only awaited the visit of her doctor before asking for that of Extreme Unction.
All her worldly affairs were in perfect order, and but one thing troubled her, namely, that her children who had all assembled round her, on hearing of her danger, were too indefatigable in their attendance upon her, and this, as she thought, to the detriment of their own health. Our Blessed Father wishing to comfort her, said tenderly: "Do you know that I, on the contrary, when I am ill, am never so happy as when I see my relatives and servants all busy about me, tiring themselves out on my behalf. You are astonished, and ask me why I feel like this. Well, it is because I know that God will repay them generously for all these services. For if a cup of cold water given to a poor man in the love and for the love of God receives such a reward as eternal life; if our least labours undertaken for the love of God work in us the weight of a supreme glory, why should we pity those whom we see thus occupied, since we are not ill-disposed towards them, nor envious of their advantages? For unto you it is given, said St. Paul to the christians of his day, not only to believe in Christ, but also to suffer for Him.
"The reapers and vintagers are never happier than when they are heavily laden, because that proves the harvest, or the vintage, to have been plentiful. In truth, if those who wait on us, whether in health or in sickness, are only considering us, and not God, and are only seeking to please us, they make so bad a use of their toil that it is right they should suffer for it. He who serves the prophet for the love of the prophet shall receive the reward of the prophet. But, if they serve us for the love of God they are more to be envied than pitied; for he who serves the prophet in consideration of Him who sends him shall receive the reward of God, a reward which passes all imagination, which is beyond price, and which no words can express."
In his visiting of the sick when on their death-bed our Blessed Father was truly an angel of peace and consolation. He treated the sick person with the utmost sweetness and gentleness, speaking from time to time a few words suited to his condition and frame of mind, sometimes uttering very short ejaculatory prayers, or aspirations for him, sometimes leading the sufferer to utter them himself, either audibly, or, if speech was painful to him, secretly in his heart; and then allowing him to struggle undisturbed with the mortal pains which were assailing him.
He could not bear to see the dying tormented with long exhortations. That was not the time, he would say, for preaching, or even for long prayers; all that was needed was to keep the soul sustained in the atmosphere of the divine will, which was to be its eternal element in heaven, to keep it up, I say, by short beatings of the wings, like birds, who in this way save themselves from falling to the earth.