New Beginnings—Dying, August 14, 1817

The Story

Robert Fox, a New York Catholic whose children attended the Academy in Emmitsburg, volunteered to accompany the Sisters to New York. He met Cecilia and Felicity at Emmitsburg. Their first destination was Philadelphia. There they would meet Sister Rose White, director of the Philadelphia orphanage started by the Sisters in 1814. They would continue their journey together.

As the caravan made its way northward into Pennsylvania, they passed the small town of Gettysburg, which would become the site of the bloodiest battle of the Civil War, still some distance in the future. Before it ended
46,286 Union and Confederate soldiers would lose their lives.

When has death become real for us? We experience the deaths of family members and friends and this is always sad and difficult. There are other kinds of death as well: relationships that are marred by misunderstandings, or ministries or work that end through no fault of our own. In African-American culture when a person dies he or she is said to have “crossed over” or “passed.”

Recovering from grief is hard. How have you crossed over the “deaths” in your own life? We know we must die to ourselves and to all that separates us from the love our God wants us to have.

Scripture, Matthew 27: 45–47, 54

From noon onward, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. And about three o’clock Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

The centurion and the men with him who were keeping watch over Jesus feared greatly when they saw the earthquake and all that was happening, and they said, “Truly, this was the Son of God!”