Contemplation of death by William Emma

Author:William, Emma [William, Emma ]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Published: 2021-06-26T16:00:00+00:00

[65]

When I entered the small Dominican infirmary, at first glance I knew that the good man had already embraced our bodily death nun and was holding her sensibly against his chest. First, unseen, I saw him in a mirror. A woman, sweet and severe, who could have been Sant'Anna with her bunch of keys hanging on her side, had led me to the wooden balcony where the room of the sick man looked out; and she had withdrawn, to leave me alone with him, so as not to become an inopportune witness [66] of our disturbance. As I approached the threshold, I saw the mirror on the wall and inside it, inside that kind of inaccessible and enlightened horror, the old man who was sitting, very intent, holding both hands pressed to the atrocious carnal host who gnawed at his mouth. stomach. I paused, with a frightening trembling in my heart, because truly within that vain death was visible as in the Dances macabre, and the whole image was truly beyond the veil . He raised his eyelashes and winced, leaving his hands on his knees, because he too discovered me in the hope and saw me coming to him not from the daytime life, not from the air and the light, but from the bottom of that pale sepulcher. And, as I entered,

I do not know, in the history of holiness, a more beautiful preparation for transit than this. St. Francis, while conversing [67] with her infirm nun, she let the doctors try to fight her. He recognized that he had always treated his body too harshly and showed regret. «Rejoice, brother body, and give me forgiveness; that now it is better for me to satisfy your desires. " The pontifical doctors, at Fonte Colombo, drew blood from him, harassed and cauterized him. With red-hot iron they aroused his temples, while he prayed to "friar focu" that suffering would not do it beyond endurance. In Assisi, in the Bishop's house, the Arezzo doctor constantly treated him. From time to time he was seized by some strange desire and sent in search of his friars who sometimes, as in the night of parsley, got impatient. At the Porziuncola Giacomina Settesoli prepared him that favorite Roman vivanduzza, that almond change, which he had often wished for during his illness. Later, feeling that the end was near, he let himself undress [68] of every garment and hitting the earth naked.

My friend deduced this last example from the beginning, not for his body but for his soul. Stripped of everything he was as it seemed to me that a man could never undress. And he had nothing left but that "naked of love" beyond which, in comparison with purity, there is only the first light of the morning. I saw with him the volume of the Imitation Closed. That is certainly the treatise on total self-denial: it reduces the substance in which man is most pleased to a fistful of dust, and mercilessly separates man from every beloved thing that is not completed love.

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