The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus ChristEmmerich, Anna Katharina
Religion
The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ
Emmerich, Anna Katharina
Jesus Christ -- Passion -- Devotional literature
The following days she was worse. On the 7th, in the evening, being
rather more calm, she said: 'Ah, my sweet Lord Jesus, thanks be to thee
again and again for every part of my life. Lord, thy will and not mine
be done.' On the 8th of February, in the evening, a priest was praying
near her bed, when she gratefully kissed his hand, begged him to assist
at her death and said, 'O Jesus, I live for thee, I die for thee. O Lord,
praise be to thy holy name, I no longer see or hear!' Her friends wished
to change her position, and thus ease her pain a little; but she said, 'I
am on the Cross, it will soon all be over, leave me in peace.' She had
received all the last Sacraments, but she wished to accuse herself once
more in confession of a slight fault which she had already many times
confessed; it was probably of the same nature as a sin which she had
committed in her childhood, of which she often accused herself, and
which consisted in having gone through a hedge into a neighbour's garden,
and coveted some apples which had fallen on the ground. She had only
looked at them; for, thank God, she said, she did not touch them, but
she thought that was a sin against the tenth commandment. The priest
gave her a general absolution; after which she stretched herself out,
and those around her thought that she was dying. A person who had often
given her pain now drew near her bed and asked her pardon. She looked
at him in surprise, and said with the most expressive accent of truth, 'I
have nothing to forgive any living creature.'
During the last days of her life, when her death was momentarily
expected, several of her friends remained constantly in the room
adjoining hers. They were speaking in a low tone, and so that she could
not hear them, of her patience, faith, and other virtues, when all on a
sudden they heard her dying voice saying: 'Ah, for the love of God, do
not praise me--that keeps me here, because I then have to suffer double. O
my God! how many fresh flowers are falling upon me!' She always saw
flowers as the forerunners and figures of sufferings. Then she rejected
all praises, with the most profound conviction of her own unworthiness,
saying: 'God alone is good: everything must be paid, down to the last
farthing. I am poor and loaded with sin, and I can only make up for
having been praised by sufferings united to those of Jesus Christ. Do
not praise me, but let me die in ignominy with Jesus on the cross.'
Boudon, in his life of Father Surin, relates a similar trait of a
dying man, who had been thought to have lost the sense of hearing, but
who energetically rejected a word of praise pronounced by those who
were surrounding his bed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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