Peace is My Last Gift to You

I read Tuesdays with Morrie when it first came out, but I have not been sufficiently inspired to pick up The Last Lecture or Teddy Kennedy's dying memoirs. When I heard that President Obama had delivered a letter from Senator Kennedy to the Pope I had a feeling I knew what it was, what it turned out to be, a request for his intercession. Please pray for me. It brought to mind a book I have on the shelf for later in my life, for the time when I shall need it more than now. The book is The Gift of Peace by the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin.

I had the great good fortune to spend some of my more active years in the peace movement inspired to action by Cardinal Bernardin, first as bishop and then as archbishop. Here was one who was unafraid to testify within the church and to the church at the same time. Here was one who remained within the catholic tradition and still managed to speak truth to power as simply as a lifelong Quaker might. That's what I first thought this book might be about, a Catholic in the peace movement.

Not so. This is a book about a Catholic at peace. Cardinal Bernardin's cancer diagnosis occasioned his own peace movement, from external labors to a remarkable inner peace I so hope I may find for myself when the time comes. When it became known that the Cardinal was dying people from all over sent him letters: not letters of their prayers for him, but letters like Ted Kennedy's asking his prayers for themselves. Here is his response:

"What people have seen in the papers or on television has not been a man who wants to look brave or courageous. What they see is a man who believes in God and whose faith informs everything he does. Suffering and pain make little sense to me without God, and my heart goes out to people who feel abandoned or alone in their greatest times of need."

I pray God that I may increase every day in compassion like that, that I may like my old friend live the life God has given me here so that people will want to ask my prayers as I go, so that I can join my own life to Christ's great offering of love.