![\"MD](\"https:\/\/www.mdanderson.org\/images\/facilities\/exteriors\/buildings\/MainBuilding\/MDA_At_Night_2020.jpg\")
<\/span><\/p>\nIn a way hard to convey with words, Father Mike\u00a0suffered<\/em>. He did so willingly, fully — even by demand. He was seventy-eight at the time and had severe neck and head cancer. He was even missing an eye from it.<\/p>\n Yet he would allow absolutely no<\/em> pain medications.<\/p>\n Once the president of a Catholic university, he was always in good spirits, recalled Dr. Lerma, despite the wrenching pain.<\/p>\n “Father Mike instructed me on Opus Dei’s beliefs<\/span> with regard to pain and suffering,” wrote Dr. Lerma, himself a Catholic (though one who currently accepts multiple beliefs). “He agreed that these acts of suffering would help countless souls around the world, including our hospice patients. He insisted that I trust the spiritual process.”<\/p>\n When they first met, said the physician, this unique patient “made it enormously clear that his desire was to feel his pain in its most raw form.<\/p>\n That was tough for a palliative-care physician to accept. As a pain specialist, it was an “inconceivable request.”<\/p>\n Yet the doctor honored it — and listened to the joy in the selfless priest’s wisdom.<\/p>\n Though he admitted that the pain was “unbearable” (or nearly), he insisted he felt nothing but adulation and joy for God.<\/p>\n His pain was converted to joy. Angels were visibly present, he related — bedecked in “fierce white.”<\/p>\n He also imparted that wisdom. For example, he warned that too much focus on the negative aspects of the world<\/em> and local news<\/em> affects the soul in a dark way and “puts us in a position to develop fear and judgment of others.”<\/p>\n This, admonished the priest, compounds the negativity of a circumstance and “deeply hurts God.”<\/p>\n The angels said they were working on many projects to increase optimism on earth.<\/p>\n But not obsess over it.<\/p>\n He also spoke, did Father Mike, of love, as so many dying do.<\/span><\/span> A particularly poignant comment: “Random acts of kindness,” said Father Mike, “can actually stop wars from occurring, and just one unconditional act of love can change the entire world.”<\/p>\n Have you ever considered doing that? Do you practice this at every opportunity?<\/p>\n It turns everyday life into that much more of a glorious adventure.<\/p>\n It’s a domino effect:<\/span> There’s that interconnectedness we don’t appreciate with the eyes of the earth.<\/p>\n He also told the doctor that technology without God could destroy us. Technology could be a great good, said Father Mike — if those in control of it were close to Jesus. (More on this in the future.)<\/p>\n Part of the priest’s suffering, he explained, was to prevent devastation.<\/p>\n The keys to life: prayer, knowledge, and self-sacrifice, along with collective love and joy.<\/p>\n If this dying man, this holy priest, could be joyful, cannot we?<\/p>\n He was suffering in a way that made those who saw him actually cringe, and yet what was the end?<\/p>\n After slipping into a coma, without the pain medication and severely short of breath, Father Mike nonetheless had what the doctor described as “an incredible glow and peace about him.” Despite a racing heart (more than a hundred thirty beats a minute!), the priest wore a large smile.<\/p>\n The day he died<\/span>, Dr. Lerma was at a clinic across the way when he noticed a pitch-black storm approaching and soon unleashing gale-force winds and hail. The darkest cloud was over the part of the hospital where Father Mike was.<\/p>\n As the storm grew worse, he received a page that the priest had died.<\/p>\n That was only the beginning of the end, so to speak.<\/p>\n For when the doctor got to the hospice unit, the lights were flickering on and off but there was “an incredible sense of peace in the midst of the chaos.”<\/p>\n The secretary and nurse had seen a “bright light” shining from the priest’s room, they told the physician — so bright they thought the lights were coming back on.<\/p>\n “They had rushed me there to experience an inconceivable event,”<\/span> he said. “Every time the lights turned on and off, little feathers fell from the ceiling, drifting down as if they were snowflakes. One fell in the hand of a nurse and disappeared. As soon as they fell, they disappeared. Father Mike’s call-light was going off and on. We all had goosebumps.”<\/p>\n The secretary and nurse also related that they had seen a bright sphere float out of his body, circle the bed, and then soar away.<\/p>\n Less than a minute later, the lights came back on.<\/p>\n When Dr. Lerma saw him, the priest still wore that striking smile, and his palms were open.<\/p>\n “Peaceful — blissful almost.”<\/p>\n Quite a way to go!<\/p>\n And to cap it off, when priests and nuns from his university arrived later, the dean said that something similar — an electrical disturbance — had occurred in their offices.<\/p>\n Father Mike’s punctuation marks. His goodbye.<\/p>\n The dean went on to say that a few feathers were found on the floor there, too, and that Father Mike had collected feathers his whole life, from around the world. He’d kept them in a jar.<\/p>\n After the incident, when the dean checked Father Mike’s office, he noticed that all the feathers from the jar were gone.<\/p>\n [resources:\u00a0 No Greater Love<\/a><\/span>, An Army In Heaven<\/a><\/span>, and other books of inspiration<\/a><\/span>]<\/em><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/spiritdaily.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/angelshospital.webp\")
<\/a>Yes, we must know where darkness is.<\/span> Yes, we must resist it. Yes, Christ Himself spoke about it and pointed it out. When we see it, we must pray about it.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n