Last Things

'Could you come and see my mother?' said the lady on the phone yesterday. 'She's dying and we think she would like to see a vicar.' So I pedalled down to the church, collected the Oil of the Sick and the Blessed Sacrament, and headed off to one of the local nursing homes where I met Ruth, unable to speak and possibly not hearing much either, drifting in and out of sleep. So I did as much of the standard Last Rites as made sense, assured Ruth had been a regular churchgoer in the past, and her daughters seemed to think that would have helped.

My experience of ministering to the dying has been unsatisfactory, really. I don't remember getting any preparation at theological college, and I think Il Rettore at Lambourne assumed I knew what to do, while I assumed I did as well until it became clear that there was an actual form to follow, at least in the old rites. In fact, I've only just become aware that there is a provision in Common Worship that covers the standard Last Rites of Confession, Absolution, Unction and Communion. The trouble is that none of the available rites seem completely satisfactory. The old 1662 Prayer Book order for the Visitation of the Sick has some beautifully moving prayers in it, but also suggests rather too strongly for modern tastes that any given sickness is a distinct expression of God's will. The traditional Roman Rite is better in tone and explicitly includes Unction, of course, but is massively lengthy and has a number of rather bizarre prayers. The Common Worship provision includes all four elements, which is a considerable triumph for Catholicism in the Anglican Church, but its prayers are comparatively watery. So, as so often, I've ended up cobbling together my own version, which is not what you're supposed to do.

Clergy are so rarely now called to somebody in the final stages of life, still less have a chance to minister to a person over the course of an illness, which is what the liturgies anticipate as the standard. This makes it all the more necessary to have some kind of coherent, standard pattern that at least satisfies you so that you can depart from it as circumstances dictate. As even the Rituale Romanum says:

The Church presupposes ideal circumstances, or at least normal ones, as witnessed by the Roman Ritual, for carrying out her many prescriptions with dignity, edification, and effectiveness. Take, for example, the rubrics for processions, for the burial service, for communion brought to the sick, and for the sacrament of anointing of the sick. Yet how often her wishes in these matters are interfered with by enfeebled faith, by adverse conditions of weather, by an urge to rush through everything, or by inadequacies as to place, appurtenances, and participants. This is especially true in the case of conferring the sacrament of Christian consolation to the sick or dying. How often in our day, when negligence or violence or accidents or sudden seizure with fatal illness are by no means the exception, it is impossible to give this sacrament at all, or it is administered only in greatest haste, with curtailment of all but the essential anointing, thereby losing for the recipient as well as the bystanders so much of its signification as the Christ-mystery which heals, soothes, strengthens, purifies, consecrates, and ushers the Christian's soul into the joys of everlasting beatitude.