"I bend for no king.
I bow to no crowd.
I am slow, yet inevitable.
Then strike without warning.
I balance the scale from which no soul can escape.
What am I?"
A sense of devotion we seldom consider, yet one that is vital to the Christian soul: remembering, honoring, and praying for the dead. Call it madness, perhaps but you are not the one offering Mass for them every midnight.
The Sound becomes prayer, and prayer becomes memory in this place .
"The Lord be with you," he says and though no voice replies, the air bends in answer. For here, even silence worships.
He walks to the altar, the only light coming from the crimson sanctuary lamp. As he begins the words of the Mass, the air grows heavy. He feels them gather the recently departed, the long-dead, the grateful, and the restless. A normal person would feel fear but nah he is older than that . paranoia? , has been there done that but humble. He raises his trembling hand and whispers,
"Et in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti"
(In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.)
The words ripple through the dark, stirring the unseen.
Every night, after each Mass, the exhaustion returns. His body grows heavy, his knees ache, and when his eyes finally close, he hears nothing but the echo of their screams a chorus of longing that follows him even into his dreams. Yet he rises again, because the dead do not rest until they rest in the Lord ... Or if it there choice to suffer for all eternity.
More. There is always more to save.
After a few hours of uneasy rest, dawn creeps through the shutters. The candle wax on his bedside table has hardened into pale, twisted shapes. He barely remembers falling asleep when the parish phone begins to ring.
"Father Bernard," a voice trembles on the other end it's David.
"Please… our mother just died. Do you have time to celebrate her Mass?"
He sits up slowly, rubbing the fatigue from his eyes. There's no hesitation in his voice, only the weight of quiet acceptance.
"I always have time," he says.
He stands at the altar in the dim morning light, the sanctuary lamp low in shadow. The people gather. A coffin draped with a white pall a symbol of baptism stands before him. He begins the Introductory Rites: greeting, sprinkling of holy water, the placing of the pall. Each gesture proclaims: You were baptized. You belong to Christ.
He intones the Opening Prayer, then the Liturgy of the Word readings that speak of death and resurrection, lament and hope. He listens as the lectors proclaim the Scriptures, each verse echoing in the hushed church. Silence follows the homily. Together, they pray.
Then comes the Liturgy of the Eucharist.
The gifts are brought: bread, wine, water.
He consecrates. The host is raised.
God is now in the appearance of bread and wine
He incenses the coffin smoke swirling upward, a fragrant sign of honor and respect for the body now at rest.
The Song of Farewell.
The Final Commendation.
The coffin is borne away in procession. The Mass concludes. Yet in the silence afterward, the weight of absence lingers even as the Church's hope remains.
Yes, it is sad. But his soul must remember that God is not a God of the dead, but of the living.
She is alive in Christ.
Another name enters his book one more soul for whom he must offer Mass every night.
And, as always, the exhaustion follows.
The rectory behind Saint Denis's was not a home, but a vigil. Its small windows looked out not upon a garden, but upon a field of silent, tilted stones. Father Bernard returned to it after the morning funeral, the taste of dust and formalin still on his tongue.
He slept as the sun bled away behind the yew trees a dreamless, heavy sleep and woke at 11:30 p.m., as if summoned by a bell only he could hear.
The night was a deep, stained blue windless and waiting. His knees cracked in protest as he rose. He dressed in the dark, the black wool of his cassock a familiar weight. He gathered the simple silver chalice, the worn missal, and a small, linen-covered host.
Stepping outside, the cold bit with a clean, honest pain. The iron cemetery gate groaned open under his hand a sound that had become the true beginning of his day.
Beyond, the only light was the faint, crimson glow of the sanctuary lamp burning inside the small family mausoleum he used as his tabernacle. It was his altar light a single, blood-red star in the land of the dead.
He set the portable altar a simple wooden table beside the oldest graves, where the limestone crucifix leaned as if weary from centuries of prayer. The names on the surrounding headstones were long since worn away by rain and indifference.
Here, he celebrated his Midnight Mass pro animabus oblivis for the forgotten souls.
"Introibo ad altare Dei…"
(I will go unto the altar of God…)
The ancient Latin left his lips as a plume of white vapour, hanging in the still air like frozen prayer.
It was during the Creed, his voice a steady murmur in the vast silence, that he first heard it. Not the wind. Not the settling of old stones. A soft, subterranean murmuring rising from the earth itself. It was not yet words, but the shape of words, the ghost of sound. First it was screaming in his dream the begging for the prayers of the faithful and now murmur from the earth.
He did not flinch. He had expected this.
He finished the Mass, his hands trembling not from fear, but from a profound and chilling certainty. When he raised the host—"Hoc est enim Corpus Meum" (For this is My Body) he thought he saw the very air at the edge of the lamplight bend and ripple, like heat haze over a summer road.
He ended with the final blessing "Ite, missa est" (Go, the Mass is ended) but the words seemed to echo back to him, slower, sadder, as if the silence itself had learned to speak.
"May the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace."
Amen.