Prayer, the Church’s banquet, Angels’ age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth;

Engine against th’ Almighty, sinner’s tower,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days’-world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;

Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted Manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well dressed,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,

Church bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices, something understood.

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.”