Saint Francis in Meditation Francisco de ZURBARÁN c.1635-39 Copyright The National Gallery 2010

The soft chimes of the angelus bell mark the fall of evening. Another day is gone. Another precious day, our measurement of God’s most precious gift, time, has passed away and is swallowed up in the vast gulf of the irrevocable past. Another day has passed! Another stage of our journey towards our final end is traversed. Nearer still than yesterday to that solemn moment of our lives, its end; nearer still to heaven with its joys unknown, untasted; nearer still to Him for Whom we labour now and strive to serve. How many more days are left? Too few alas! for all we have to do, but not so few that we cannot heap them high with noble deeds and victories bravely won.

COMMENT: Each day brings us closer to our death, and to our judgement…

This is a deeply sobering thought. Once again, these sobering thoughts can tempt us to downplay them or to scrub them from our minds. But death is the ONE thing we cannot ultimately ignore. The fact of our death, and that each day brings us closer to it, is an incontrovertible truth. Our last day on earth will come, perhaps sooner than we would like. Ignoring this fact does not make it any less true.

It has traditionally been a common feature of Catholic spirituality to meditate on the Four Last Things: death, judgement, Heaven and Hell. Many holy people kept skulls with them in order to remind them of death, as we see depicted in the picture of St Francis above.

This focus on death need not make us morose, and in fact can encourage us to joyfully make the most of the time that we do have on earth. And, as Christians, we must also remember that death is not the end, but, if we die in a state of grace, is the start of a joyful eternity. Fr Doyle lived with death every day for two years in the trenches. At any moment he could have been killed; practically every day he anointed men in the last minutes of their lives. Despite this he retained his constant joy and cheerfulness.

Remembering the fact of our death allows us to make the most of our lives. We are alive for a purpose; our human life is vitally important as it is the training ground for eternity. How easy it could be to waste days listlessly if we ignored the shortness of our time on earth.

Time is a great gift, the existence of which allows us to change and to grow closer to God. When we consider the sins of our lives, we should, as Fr Doyle says, use the opportunities of each day “to heap them high with noble deeds and victories bravely won”. These deeds will normally be composed of the ordinary activities of the moment and hidden faithfulness to our duty that is hardly discerned by any passer-by. But this faithfulness day by day can allow us to face the prospect of death with the cheerfulness that characterised Fr Doyle’s apostolate in the killing fields of World War I.

Perhaps it is worth concluding today with two lines from The Imitation of Christ:

Always remember your end and do not forget that lost time never returns.

If you have spent the day profitably, you will always be happy at eventide.

"Another day has passed!" This is a summer sunset in Dun Laoghaire, very close to where Fr Doyle grew up.