The clip begins at the scene of an accident: flashing lights, a traffic jam, smoke rising into the air from an overturned car. In the highway-turned-parking lot, the driver’s door of a silver pickup swings open, as heat waves rise from asphalt and automobiles.
The camera zooms in to reveal that the driver of the pickup is wearing a roman collar. He hurriedly ducks back into the cab, rips open the glove box, and grabs a purple stole, a book, and a small silver cylinder. With haste, he bobs between the parked cars then stoops over a young man, who lay convulsing on the pavement, breathing shallowly as the light fades in his eyes. The priest touches his head with oil and traces the sign of the cross, then pronounces the full remission of his sins.
A voiceover erupts on the vocations film as the scene fades to black: “It is the priest who brings the soul home to God.”
***
The mid-October night breeze brushes the back of my neck in the shadow of the restaurant where I had just spoken to a group of young adults on family and fatherhood. It is my intern year of seminary formation. The parking lot conversation is suddenly interrupted with a loud squeal, followed by an explosion-like bang. I turn around and find a motorcycle on its side in the road, a deep gash in a parked suburban, and a man limp in the street.
“Call 911!” I shout, then rush over to the man. He is unconscious, and the trench above his eye bleeds like a sieve.
Another motorcycle races up to the scene. A woman dismounts.
“O my God, O my God, please, no, please, hang in there baby…”
I crouch and slightly raise the man’s dead-weight hand. I turn to his wife.
“I am going to pray for him.”
She nods, weeping.
I entrust him into the hands of the Father, and ask that any sins he has be forgiven, to receive this man as His son. But oh, how I wish I could put on a purple stole, so he would see Christ instead of me. How I wish I could oil his hand with forgiveness…instead of just gripping it in my own. Is this not, in fact, the power of the Sacraments? The power of the priesthood?
A chorus of Our Father’s and Hail Mary’s erupts until medics arrive to brace his neck and place him in an ambulance. The woman falls onto my shoulder, bathing it in her shock and sorrow.
***
My car pulls to a stop in the concrete parking lot in front of a building whose white pillars beam in the afternoon heat. I open the glove box of the car and step out to meet the director of the local hospice’s chaplaincy department.
“I knew we had to act while they gave me the green light. In these times, getting a visitor into the nursing home is like trying to enter Ft. Knox. They don’t just let anybody in here. Thank you for coming.”
I grip the stole in my hand. “It is my honor.”
I am lead through a series of checkpoints and military style tent divides until I arrive at Mr. Rodriguez’s room. A smile breaks across his face.
I grip his hand, and his eyes widen. I dip my thumb in the oil.
It is the priest who brings the soul home to God.
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