He learned she was gone on his way to her room. At the Georgetown University Medical Center, he stopped at the ICU nurses station where the names of patients are written on a white board next to their room number. He had been used to seeing Scholz written next to Room 3011. But on that Wednesday morning 14 October, 1998, her name had been erased. He was staring at the place where her name had been when a nurse said, “She’s gone, Father.” The nurse’s name was Tina. She told him that Ruth had died earlier that morning. She was gone.

He did not know Ruth Scholz until the cancer that would finally take her life had made it impossible for her to speak. He knew her only as she lay dying. He held her hands and prayed for her. He could feel in her fingers the strong pulse of her heart, the hands that stroked the hair of her daughters Constanze and Charlotte, the hands that wiped the tears from their eyes. He never heard her voice. He imagined her singing to her girls wiegenlieder.

He had told her he was a priest and Constanze’s religion teacher. He sang “Jesus Loves Me” to her as she slept. He anointed her head with oil. And once, when he said to her, “Constanze ist eine besondere mädchen,” she smiled. Even with all the medicines and the morphine, despite the terrible affliction that ravaged her, she was made glad at the sound of Constanze’s name. She and Charlotte were a source of joy and comfort to her mother to the end of her days.

At her bedside a week before she died he asked her husband Wolfgang how the two of them met. He said that a mutual friend introduced them to each other at a feast in a castle in Germany. There was this feast, he said, his face lighting up at the memory of it, a great feast, and it was in this beautiful castle.

One of the last things Jesus said were the words he spoke to someone he did not know until the man was dying. “Today, thou shalt be with me in paradise.” If you stop to think of where Jesus says these words and to whom he says them, it’s no wonder that Sanhedrin piety and Roman politics wanted to kill him. Reduced to dying on a cross, he speaks as if he were a king, presuming that paradise of all places is where he’s going and promising a thief of all people that he’ll take him there. There was just the dying left to do.

Paradise. We left it, left it so far behind and so long ago that we’ve squandered all but our vaguest memory of it. If Jesus has in his death the power to save us, it’s not surprising that these would be among his last words.

In Room 3011 two days before Ruth died he prayed with Wolfgang this prayer from the Book of Common Prayer: “Depart, O Christian soul, out of this world; In the Name of God the Father Almighty who created you; In the Name of Jesus Christ who redeemed you; In the Name of the Holy Spirit who sanctifies you. May your rest be this day in peace, and your dwelling place in the Paradise of God.”

I know that my Redeemer liveth,
and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth;
and though this body be destroyed, yet shall I see God;
whom I shall see for myself and mine eyes shall behold,
and not as a stranger.

Four out of five books I read these days are books I’ve read before. I’m currently rereading A Prayer for Owen Meany, a novel cut to the measure of the Samuel Johnson maxim just posted and a story as involving on the fourth read as it was on the first some twenty years ago.

Why so much rereading, and all of it satisfying? For reasons having to do with the lyric power of that line from the epic of Job, that opening anthem of the Burial Office of the Book of Common Prayer. To read again words that fortify, words to live with is, as the poet L. E. Sissman said, to “return not as a pilgrim but as a familiar, almost a friend.” To put the same thing in a lapidary way and without being the least bit lugubrious about it, I reread books for the same reason I keep coming back to church; because I know I’m going to die. Sissman continues:

A list of books that you reread is like a clearing in the forest: a level, clean, well-lighted place where you set down your burdens and set up your home, your identity, your concerns, your continuity in a world that is at best indifferent, at worst malign. Since you, the reader, are that hero of modern literature, the existential loner, the smallest denominator of moral force, it behooves you to take counsel, sustenance, and solace from the writers who have been writing about you these hundred or five hundred years, to sequester yourself with their books and read and reread them to get a fix on yourself and a purchase on the world that will, with luck, like the house in the clearing, last you for life.

Today at Saint Francis I officiated the Burial Office for Barbara Reeder, the wife of Maurice Reeder. After the committal at Druid Ridge Cemetery in Baltimore, I told Dr. Reeder that one of the things we have in common is William Beaumont General Hospital in Fort Bliss, Texas. I’d read that he had interned there.

“When were you there?” I asked him. “1958 and 1959,” he said. “Ha. We were there at the same time. I was born in 1959.” “What month were you born?” “May.” “I was there from June of 1958 to June of 1959. At the end of my internship, I concentrated on obstetrics and delivered 150 to 200 babies,” he said. “There’s a good chance that I delivered you.”

So it may be that today I helped a man commend his wife out of this world who fifty years ago brought me into it.

When it was fashionable to decry Cranmer’s liturgical rhetoric as overblown and repetitive, people often held up as typical the echoing sequences of which he and his colleagues were so fond. ‘A full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction; ‘Have mercy upon us, miserable offenders; Spare thou them which confess their faults; Restore thou them that are penitent’; ‘succour, help and comfort all that are in danger, necessity and tribulation’; direct, sanctify and govern’; and of course, ‘earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust’. The liturgical puritan may well ask why it is not possible to say something once and for all, instead of circling back over what has been said, re-treading the ground. And in the same vein, many will remember the arguments of those who complained of the Communion Order in the Book of Common Prayer that it never allowed you to move forward from penitence to confidence and thanksgiving: you were constantly being recalled to your sinful state, even after you had been repeatedly assured of God’s abundant mercies.

Whether we have quite outgrown this reaction, I’m not sure. But we have at least begun to see that liturgy is not a matter of writing in straight lines. As the late Helen Gardner of this university long ago remarked, liturgy is epic as well as drama; its movement is not inexorably towards a single, all-determining climax, but also - precisely - a circling back, a recognition of things not yet said or finished with, a story with all kinds of hidden rhythms pulling in diverse directions. And a liturgical language like Cranmer’s hovers over meanings like a bird that never quite nests for good and all - or, to sharpen the image, like a bird of prey that never stoops for a kill.

The word of God is not bound. God speaks, and the world is made; God speaks and the world is remade by the Word Incarnate. And our human speaking struggles to keep up. We need, not human words that will decisively capture what the Word of God has done and is doing, but words that will show us how much time we have to take in fathoming this reality, helping us turn and move and see, from what may be infinitesimally different perspectives, the patterns of light and shadow in a world where the Word’s light has been made manifest. It is no accident that the Gospel which most unequivocally identifies Jesus as the Word made flesh is the Gospel most characterised by this same circling, hovering, recapitulatory style, as if nothing in human language could ever be a ‘last’ word. ‘The world itself could not contain the books that should be written’ says the Fourth Evangelist, resigning himself to finishing a Gospel that is in fact never finishable in human terms.

Rowan Williams, The Archbishop of Canterbury