St. Augustine on Death

Extract

Throughout the country there are people mourning their loved ones, parents, sons and daughters killed fighting or helping behind the scenes; even babes in arms, children on the high seas, sent away for safety, have met a cruel death. In the streets, once so familiar, are unsightly ruins, houses crumbling, churches, convents, public buildings, the houses of the very poorest, all overwhelmed by the common wanton destruction wrought by an unseen hand. How trite and unconvincing seem our condolences with the afflicted! We hardly know what to say, our tongues stammer and falter, as indeed must always be the case when speaking of the mysteries of faith. For death is a mystery, though an inevitable fact: ‘Who is the man that shall not see death, that shall deliver his soul from the underworld?’ (Ps. lxxxviii, 49). The Saints of God made themselves familiar with the thought of death and the next world, and we may well turn for guidance to one who had lived with such thoughts always before him, to one who had seen Death with his scythe mowing down men, women and children, now by the sword, now by pestilence, now by the creeping onslaught of old age, to one who himself died amid the destruction of all he had loved, the overthrow of all he had so laboriously built up, to St. Augustine of Hippo.