By Judie Brown
Yesterday was the eighty-eighth birthday of my dearly departed husband Paul, who died in his eighty-third year of his life. But our family chooses to celebrate the happy days of his life rather than dwell on the saddest day of my life, the day of his death.
You see, my husband was a living testimony to the patience, love, and mercy of God. While he spent a lot of time deriding my devotion to Christ in the Eucharist, he never missed a chance to sit down with dear friends such as Cardinal Raymond Burke, Saint John Paul II, and others. Paul was drawn to them, you might say, like a moth to a flame, as even though he claimed to have lost his faith, the ember was burning deeply in his heart, glowing ever so slightly and guiding him to that special moment when he would come home to Christ.
This is perhaps why I was deeply touched by the story of Jacques Fesch, a young man who traveled a similar though much more dramatic road. Fesch was a murderer who was sentenced to death in a French prison. He was only 27 years of age when he was executed, but his dramatic turn toward Christ gave me pause.
In a letter prior to his death, Jacques wrote, “In these last moments I can hardly help reviewing all the scenes of my past life in the radiance of the new light that is mine as I stand at the threshold of life. They are not sad, because they have led up to the love of Jesus, thus taking on a meaning I never suspected.”
He was about to be executed but had changed his life dramatically in prison; there he led such a different life from the one that took him to edge of death that he was able to reflect on how immensely valuable his love for Christ was as he faced the end.
Of course, not everyone experiences such a dramatic turn from worldliness, mayhem, and murder to total trust in the Lord, but there is a lesson in this young man’s life that I find inspiring for people of any age.
Like Paul, Fesch was perhaps viewed as hopeless to many. But a profound encounter with Christ changed Fesch’s life, brief though it was, in the same way that encountering the Lord changes anyone who recognizes the love that is beyond all understanding. As Father Denis O’Brien, MM, often said, “Nobody beats God.”
I often ponder the poem “The Hound of Heaven” when I think about Paul or learn about incredible conversions like that of Fesch. One writer explained that great poem quite simply:
In his poem, Thompson calls God “this tremendous Lover.” He is out to get us. He hounds our days and hounds our nights. He knows what we need even before we ask, and he knows that he alone is what each of us is searching for. This is the God Dorothy Day knew. This is the God revealed in the pages of the Scriptures.
The drama begins with God making the first man and woman in his own image to share his life. Quickly his children spurn his love. He pursues them, calls to them with words that will resound through the pages of biblical history, and in every human heart today “Where are you?”
For those of us who have encountered the Eucharistic Lord, we know where He is. And for those who are still seeking, we are His legates. We should be grateful for that, because men like Paul and Jacques sought and found Him because people like you and me prayed that they would.