A Busy Morning

We have a permanent deacon in the parish whom several of our parishioners jokingly call "Deacon Lazarus." Apparently a little over a year ago he was preaching at a penance service, and in the middle of his homily, he had a heart attack. He collapsed, he was taken by airplane to a distant hospital, and eventually recovered. After the initial shock and terror wore off, people got quite a kick out of the fact that the deacon had died (his heart stopped after all ) right in the middle of a ceremony.

Well, he did it again. It wasn't his heart this time. He is diabetic, and when he took his medication before the 7 am Mass, he failed to eat anything. His blood sugar began to drop, and just as he was finishing distributing the Eucharist, he collapsed. He couldn't have done it in a better place - there were two cardiologists and a handful of nurses present. They were feeding him sugar him while the pastor, the servers, and I processed out of the Church.

The ambulance came, tested his heart rate and those things that they do, and then sent him home to rest. I did his visits to the nursing homes for the day.

I suppose there is some deep lesson about the ephemeral nature of life, or the value of contemplating our own deaths to be found in this episode. However, when the deacon came to the sacristy before going home the only thing I could think to say was, "You've got to quit trying to die in the middle of communal celebrations."